The Shadow of a Thousand Suns

**The Shadow of a Thousand Suns**

Kenji's sandals slapped against the warm pavement as he darted through Hiroshima's morning bustle. The humid August air clung to his skin like a second shirt. "Hurry up, Ami!" he called over his shoulder, watching his little sister struggle to keep pace with her shorter legs. Her braids bounced as she ran, her lunchbox swinging wildly from its strap.

At the corner, their mother stood framed in the doorway of their wooden house, the morning sun turning her cotton yukata golden. "Don't forget your hats!" she called, holding out two straw kasa. Kenji groaned but doubled back, knowing the scorching sun would punish them otherwise.

The walk to school felt ordinary in every way that mattered. Shopkeepers swept their stoops. A fishmonger arranged his glistening catch. Old man Tanaka nodded from his bicycle, his basket full of fresh bread. Kenji inhaled the familiar scents of miso soup and diesel fumes, completely unaware these sensations were about to become memories.

The air raid siren wailed just as Kenji took his seat. His classmates groaned - another false alarm. Sensei barely paused in her lesson about the seasons. "Autumn brings persimmons," she recited, while outside the window, a single silver speck drifted lazily toward the city center.

Then the world turned white.

Kenji would never recall the sound. Only the sensation of being lifted, weightless, as if the gods had plucked him from his desk. When consciousness returned, he found himself sprawled in a field of broken glass, his uniform shredded, his skin bubbling in patches. The school was gone. Where his classmates had been sitting now stood twisted metal skeletons, their wooden flesh vaporized.

He stumbled outside to a nightmare. The blue sky had been replaced by a churning blackness, lit from below by hundreds of fires. People moved like sleepwalkers, their skin hanging in ribbons. A woman passed clutching a charred bundle to her chest, her mouth open in a silent scream. Somewhere a child wailed for water, the sound cutting through the eerie quiet between collapsing buildings.

"Mother!" Kenji's voice tore from his raw throat. "Ami!" Only the crackling flames answered.

He ran toward where his neighborhood should have been, but the landmarks had vanished. The bakery, the shrine, the big maple tree where he'd carved his initials - all reduced to smoldering rubble. His lungs burned with each breath of ash-filled air.

Then he heard it - a faint coughing. Beneath a collapsed roof beam, a familiar blue hair ribbon fluttered.

"Ami!" Kenji scrambled over broken tiles, his hands bleeding as he dug. His sister lay trapped, her leg pinned under debris, her face streaked with soot and blood. When she saw him, her cracked lips formed his name without sound.

The fire was coming. Kenji could feel its heat licking at his back as he strained against the beam. It wouldn't budge. Ami's eyes locked onto his, filled with a terror no child should ever know.

"I'm coming back," he promised, squeezing her hand. "I'll find help."

The lie tasted like ash on his tongue.

Kenji ran through the dying city, past scenes that would haunt him forever - a soldier begging for death, a dog howling over its dead owner, a clock tower frozen at 8:15. At what remained of his street, he found only devastation. Where his house once stood, only a single clay cup remained intact, still warm from his mother's morning tea.

When he returned to Ami, the fire had reached her.

Years later, an old man would trace his fingers over a name carved in black granite at the Peace Memorial. The scars on his back would still ache when it rained. But in his dreams, he was always ten years old again, running through endless ruins, calling names that would never answer.

The shadow of that day stretched long across decades, dark as the mushroom cloud that birthed it, permanent as the absence it left behind. Some things, Kenji understood, could never be outrun.