Invisible Wounds

Prologue: The Unseen Storm

The town of Pripyat had always been a paradox, a place where the hum of nuclear reactors harmonized with the whispers of pine forests. But on April 26, 1986, the harmony shattered. The sky burned with an unnatural light, and the air tasted metallic, like licking a battery. For Anatoly Volkov, a 32-year-old engineer at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the disaster was more than an explosion. It was the day his mind became a prison.

Chapter 1: The Ghosts We Carry Present Day

Berlin, Germany – 2023

Anatoly Volkov stared at his reflection in the train window, his gaunt face fragmented by the flickering lights of the underground tunnel. The nightmares had returned. Not of fire or radiation, but of silence, the kind that gnawed at his bones. His therapist called it PTSD. Anatoly called it his shadow.

He adjusted the collar of his coat, its fabric scratching like the starch-stiff uniforms he’d worn during the cleanup. Liquidators they’d been called. A heroic title for men sent to shovel radioactive debris with bare hands.

Next stop: Alexanderplatz the automated voice announced. Anatoly flinched. The accent was wrong. Too crisp, too German. He missed the gravelly Ukrainian tones of his childhood, now buried under concrete sarcophagi.

A notification buzzed on his phone a message from his daughter, Mila

Papa, did you take your pills?

He didn’t reply. The pills fogged his mind, blurring the line between memory and hallucination. Without them, at least the ghosts felt real.

Chapter 2: The Symphony of Decay (Flashback: 1986)

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone – Two Weeks After the Explosion

The Geiger counter’s screech was a relentless aria. Anatoly stood in Reactor 4’s control room, his hazmat suit slick with sweat. The walls were streaked with a black, tar-like substance—radioactive lava, the scientists called it.

Volkov! The roof needs clearing!” barked Lieutenant Borodin, his voice muffled through the respirator.

Anatoly’s team climbed the reactor’s carcass. The graphite chunks scattered like charred bones. He paused to wipe his visor, his glove smearing ash. For a split second, he swore he saw a figure in the smoke—a boy, translucent, reaching out.

You seeing this? he rasped to Grigory, his friend and fellow liquidator.

Grigory laughed, the sound hollow. Radiation plays tricks, Tolya. Keep shoveling.

But the boy lingered in Anatoly’s dreams. Silent. Always silent.

Chapter 3: The Fractured Lens (Present Day)

Berlin Art Gallery – Opening Night

Mila Volkov adjusted her black-rimmed glasses, her curator’s badge glinting under the gallery lights. The exhibit Echoes of Absencefeatured art inspired by nuclear disasters. Her father’s portrait hung in the corner: a haunting oil painting of a man half-submerged in shadow, his eyes twin voids.

Your work is extraordinary, a voice said.

Mila turned. The speaker was Dr. Elsa Hartmann, a historian specializing in collective trauma. Her silver hair was cropped sharply, her gaze dissecting.

Thank you, Mila said. It’s about the wounds we inherit. My father was a liquidator.

Elsa’s expression softened. I’ve interviewed survivors. Their stories are... fractal. The disaster, the guilt, the silence.

Guilt? Mila frowned.

Survivor’s guilt. Why them? Why not me? Elsa paused. Does your father ever speak of it

Mila glanced at the portrait. He doesn’t speak at all.

Chapter 4: The Unquiet Earth (Flashback: 1987)

Kiev Hospital – One Year Later

Anatoly’s hands trembled as he cradled his newborn daughter. Mila’s cries were shrill, urgent, a sound that pierced the numbness he’d worn like armor.

She’s healthy, the nurse assured. No defects.

Defects. The word slithered into his mind. He’d seen the babies born in Pripyat after the disaster, limbs twisted, hearts malformed. The government called them statistical anomalies.

What if she’s not? he whispered to his wife, Irina, her face pale against the hospital sheets.

Irina gripped his wrist, her nails drawing blood. Don’t you dare curse her.

That night, he dreamt of the boy again. This time, the child held a wilted sunflower.

Chapter 5: The Language of Scars (Present Day)

Anatoly’s Apartment – 3:00 AM

Anatoly traced the scars on his forearm raised, wormlike lines from a childhood accident. They itched incessantly now, as though his body remembered what his mind tried to forget.

He opened the dusty box beneath his bed. Inside: a Soviet-era medal (“For Courage in the Aftermath of Chernobyl”), a photo of Grigory, and a child’s mitten. The mitten was tiny, cobalt blue. He’d found it near Reactor 4.

Whose was it?

The question had haunted him for decades. He’d asked Grigory once, during a vodka-fueled night in ‘89.

You think too much, Grigory had slurred. We’re all ghosts here.

Grigory died six months later. Leukemia.

Chapter 6: The Exhibition of Shadows

Berlin Art Gallery – Later That Week

Mila stood before her father’s portrait, now vandalized. Someone had slashed the canvas, the gash slicing through the shadowed half of Anatoly’s face. A note lay at her feet:

STOP DIGGING UP THE PAST.

Her hands shook as she called security. But as they reviewed footage, she noticed something odd: the vandal wore a faded Soviet jacket.

When she told Anatoly, he froze. “Blue?” he rasped. “Was the jacket blue?”

How did you know

He didn’t answer. That night, he dreamt of the boy again. The child pointed to the mitten in Anatoly’s box and smiled.

Chapter 7: The Reconciliation of Dust (Flashback: 1991)

Pripyat – Five Years After the Disaster

Anatoly returned to the Exclusion Zone, unauthorized. The city was a graveyard of peeling murals and rusted Ferris wheels. He knelt by the reactor, the Geiger counter’s clicks a morbid lullaby.

In his pocket: the blue mitten. He’d come to bury it, a ritual to exorcise the boy from his dreams.

But as he dug, his shovel struck something hard—a child’s skeleton, curled beneath the soil. The skull grinned up at him, a sunflower seed lodged in its teeth.

Anatoly vomited. When he looked again, the skeleton was gone.

Hallucination, he told himself.

But the mitten was gone too.

Chapter 8: The Anatomy of Silence (Present Day)

Dr. Hartmann’s Office

Elsa played the tape recorder. A woman’s voice, cracked with age, filled the room:

My son vanished after the explosion. The soldiers said he’d been evacuated. But his mitten was left behind... blue, like his eyes.

Mila’s breath hitched. That’s the mitten from my father’s box.

Elsa nodded. Her name was Valentina. She spent years searching for answers. Died in 99.

Why show me this?

Because your father isn’t haunted by Chernobyl , Elsa said. He’s haunted by her,

Chapter 9: The Unraveling

Anatoly’s Apartment Dawn

Anatoly stared at the vandalized portrait Mila had brought him. The slashed canvas mirrored the fissures in his mind.

Who was the boy Mila asked gently.

He closed his eyes. I thought he was a ghost. But he was... a memory. Valentina’s son. He followed me from Pripyat.

You didn’t imagine him, Mila said. His mother left this.

She placed Valentina’s photo on the table. The woman’s eyes were Anatoly’s shadow.

Epilogue: The Symphony of Light

Berlin Art Gallery – One Month Later

Mila’s new exhibit opened at dawn. The centerpiece: Anatoly’s repaired portrait, now interwoven with golden thread the cracks transformed into veins of light.

Anatoly stood beside her, his hand steady for the first time in years.

You okay, Papa Mila whispered.

He nodded. The boy’s face flickered in the crowd a fleeting smile, then gone.

In the end, Anatoly realized ghosts weren’t shackles. They were bridges. Between the living and the dead. Between memory and mercy.

As the visitors murmured praise, Mila squeezed his hand. The invisible wounds remained, but now, they breathed.

This story intertwines historical trauma (Chernobyl) with psychological resilience, using symbols like the blue mitten and sunflowers (which famously grew in the reactor’s aftermath). The nonlinear structure mirrors memory’s fragmented nature.