Here and there in the grains of the photos that remain from that time you can see the blurred outline of a person, sometimes with a child or even two, walking where the way was once familiar, but that now was the floor of an incinerator the size of their city, that still burned through them even as they walked, perhaps to escape the heat of all the nothing that remained...
At other places in the mass of the ashes of a hundred thousand lives turned into wind and rain you can make out the speck of another one still living, bent over searching, sifting through blackened flakes of what once was life, once a place of daily living, where now nothing stood intact, where all was flat and dark, death in dust and fragments...
After the fires died, first the living came seeking their loved ones, one mother searching for her daughter who that morning had gone into town early so she could pay the rent on her way to work, but the mother never found her daughter...
That mother and all the others - fathers, sisters, sons, daughters and brothers, wandered for days, weeks, the rest of their lives, searching in those ashes of families, passing by those trolley riders who were charcoal statues in their seats, or those still just alive who wandered also, in search of death that waited just days away, unlike the lucky ones who had left those instant pale shadows on the darkened stone of the bridge or building where they'd joined the unseeable light...
All of it on that August morning-- every ash of bone, every unheard scream, every sear of pain or cry for love, every tear of life, every atom of vapor that had been a person, is in our voices now...
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