Chernobyl

flash fiction

“I want to be a doctor”, says Shona. It is raining outside the cabin, a sleeting rain that bows under the wind and skitters down the cracks of the walls, slow, then fast. From the corner of the room I watch a snail crawl up against the water, inching forward, unperturbed of anything that is happening behind its shell. The snail is brown and the walls are white and wet with rain and condensation.

 

“Come here Shona. Help your mother”. Mother is laying down the clothes by the open woodstove. In the half-light of the cabin they are grey and ugly looking. “Shhhhhhh Alexander” she says to me. The noise she makes sounds like the static from a TV set, only here there is no TV set.

Shona walks over. “I want to be a doctor mother. I want to save people’s lives. I want to cure cancer and I want them to smile at me”.

She walks to the table by mother’s head and kneads the dough which pours out of her tiny hands. It is slimy like mud and held together like elastic.  

Mother says nothing. I can’t see her face from here behind the cross of her arms. She is folding the sheets. Her arms are skinny and pale, and dance with the sheets until they are folded and put away. “Quiet Alex” she says to me.

“Mama”. “Mama”.

“What is it Shona? And fold the dough. You need more flour.”

“I want to be a doctor. I want to save people’s lives”.

 

Mama knows that Shona can’t be a doctor. I know because when she had the conversation with the man I was there, and not asleep like she thought. The man wore glasses and he had a white coat. He took off his glasses for a short time while he spoke, then put them back on afterwards. Mama rubbed her eyes when he left, then she went to bed. Shona was in hospital then, in a coma for six days and nights. She had an irregular heart beat, and a rare blood disease. She was 17 then.

 

“Please Shona. We have plenty to do before supper. Put the dough in the oven now, and be more careful with it this time.”

There is a bang as the oven door shuts. Mama talks to me sometimes, when Shona is asleep. She knows I can’t reply, though I cry sometimes. She tells me about that day, and the night, when all the cars passed down the road with their dimmed headlights. She speaks to me in hushed tones under the light of the fire’s dying embers.

 

“How they hurried that day Alexander. You thought you could never see a bureaucrat move that fast, straight out down the eastern road and out of Pripyat. Comrades they called us. Rubbish. It is just a word, as worthless as the forgotten ones before it”.

She was stroking my head with her fingers as she spoke. It felt nice. “There was a brilliant flame as it happened, people said. It was ethereal in the dawn, intense and shiny as oil slick, if you can imagine such a thing”.

 

Shona is nineteen now. Her immune system allows her to help mama out indoors but not to go outside. She sits quietly in the corner mostly. I watch her. Her hair weaves around pale skin and large vacant eyes. There are never tears hiding in the eyes, but she always looks sad. There is something mama said to me once. It comes back to me now as I see Shona sitting there and remember the man with the camera who visited one time. We rarely get any visitors any more. She watched him go, from the porch, and after the evening had got cold she came inside and sat down beside me.

“He was from a magazine” she said. “They are afraid, of this, of us. It would be easier for them if we were not here”. She stroked my head. “Shhhhh” she said. “They can capture us with their pictures, but all of us, we are forgotten in this place and lepers outside of it”.

 

That was a long time ago though. Now I watch the snail crawl along the white window ledge and listen to the rain hitting the tin roof. Shona is sitting in her corner, while mama cuts the fresh bread on the wooden top. I must be crying because mama looks up.

“Quiet Alex” she says.