A mother and child in Hiroshima, four months after the atomic bombing. 1945
The air is cool, the kind that seeps into your bones, but it’s not the weather that makes her hold him so tightly. Her arms are wrapped around the boy in a way that’s half-embrace, half-shield — though against what’s already happened, no shield could have mattered.
Four months earlier, at precisely 8:15 a.m., the sky over Hiroshima tore open. In a fraction of a second, a flash hot enough to fuse metal and bone erased the morning as if someone had ripped the page from time itself. The blast wave flattened everything within miles. The firestorm that followed roared through what was left. And the radiation — invisible, silent — began rewriting the cells of every living thing it touched.
