After the Bomb Fell

by submission
August 5th, 2006

Author : Adam Zabell

In one of those rare moments of unity, the nation sits in stunned silence at the scene laid out before them. A few short seconds from now three different wild howls of exclamation will be broadcast from two billion different voices.

A third of those voices will be shrill with anger, proclaiming to their chosen Gods how vile that scene was, how crude, wrong and immoral. In time, prayers will be spoken and letters written to politicians and newsfeeds about how Something Must Be Done. Some of these folk will demand retribution; a pound of flesh that must be extracted from those who brought this terror to their homes, their families and their children.

Another third will be aghast with despair, certain that yet another pointless and fruitless war is about to be waged. A war filled with violent rhetoric that will prove nothing and divide the people ever further into the camps of the extremists. Most of these folk will hunker down in their shelters, intellectualizing what they saw and afraid to act for what they see as the path towards a greater good.

The final third, the youngest third, are probably the most profoundly affected. They know what is supposed to happen, and where, and know what they saw today totally flies in the face of those rules. Deep in their souls they know that what they saw today has changed, will change their life forever. And they will be the ones who cry out the loudest, their voices from chuckle and chortle to bray and bellow. And all the inevitable conversations on their electronic chatspaces and in their personal stomping grounds will boil down to a single, visceral sentence.

“Dude, can you even say ‘fuck’ on hypercast?!”