PodCastle

* Author : Teresa Milbrodt
* Narrator : Alexis Goble
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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Previously published in Guernica in 2015


Bombings, and the offscreen death of children.


Rated PG-13.
In the Dim Below
by Teresa Milbrodt
This had been the routine since I was born, bombs coming every few years, or every few months, whenever there was another reason for everyone on one side of the river to get mad at everyone on other other side of the river, or vice versa. The sirens blew and we had to go inside, or down below, until the blasts stopped, the smoke mostly cleared, and we could come up and see what was left of the world.
It was bad when you were a kid. Bombs had no eyes to make decisions, couldn’t tell soldiers from children. Each of us had seen at least one friend’s body carried from a pile of stone that had once been a house. Our parents told us not to worry because they were shooting bombs back across the river to keep us safe. We didn’t know how that was supposed to stop the other bombs, or why faceless enemies imagined us as soldiers instead of friends. Didn’t they have kids on the other side of the river, kids who looked something like us? But we couldn’t ask questions, we just had to find a tiny space where bombs could not find us.
That’s what we were trying to do on the day a hole appeared in Amina’s front yard. It was not smoking. It was not smelly. It was five feet wide and a perfect circle, with grass growing down, down, down into the dark. It didn’t make sense, how the grass could be so lush in a hole so deep. We took turns poking our heads inside, sitting in the hole like it was a huge slide we were afraid to go down. What could be waiting at the end? A burrow of bunnies, or rabid badgers, or something else entirely? No one wanted to guess.
The next round of bombs came before dinner and everyone went to their basements again, ready for the world to rumble and break off in pieces. We were ready for more children wrapped in white cloth, ready for parades through the streets with bodies borne on tears. We were not ready for the wail of Amina’s mother. Where had her daughter gone?
But we found her ten minutes after the bombing, standing in her yard. She had crawled into the hole, slid to a space where there was no rumbling, where the world was dark and safe.
Amina’s mother hugged her. She didn’t notice what I saw, how a small thing was missing, the index finger on Amina’s left hand. Amina only showed us, her friends, when her mother had gone back inside and I grabbed her arm.
“I’ll be fine,” Amina told us with a strange calm. “I lost my finger in the hole, but I don’t remember how… It didn’t hurt.” There was no blood, no nub, just three fingers, smooth skin, and a thumb.
“How do you know you’ll be okay?” I asked.
“I just do,” she said with a shrug.
The next time bombs came Amina was not in the basement, she was in her house. The blast blew a hole through her concrete living room wall, but we found Amina sitting in the clearing smoke cloud without a scratch. She wasn’t even coughing.
“My miracle girl,” her mother wailed, hugging Amina close. “Never do that again! You must have been protected by angels.”
Amina smiled at us from her mother’s embrace,