Nuclear Girl

Thoughts | Amelia Wu

I've always hated the colour green.

But now, I find it in excessive abundance around me, ever present, ever vibrant. There's a lot more green than there used to be–bursts of foliage pushing through slates of splintering concrete, gnarled tree branches ensnaring long abandoned buildings. It's the colour of the hazy fog permeating every breath I take, it's the startlingly acidic hue of the toxic waste trickling down what we used to call streets. It's everywhere, all at once, a constant reminder of a time long gone.

Sometimes, when the light hits my palms, my breath will catch at the sudden sight of my veins, pulsing with that very green--a sight always too sudden. I always instinctively hold my hand up to the beating sun, hoping for the warm, iridescent, orange glow of sunlight passing through natural flesh. And every time, when all I get in return is green, that undeniable, unescapable green, I feel a little less like myself.

This is how I spend my days now--slowly, but surely chipping away at whatever remains of the person I used to be. Green flows in me now, where red once did.

It's everywhere all at once, stifling and dominating every corner, every inch of a world I knew once. Of a body I knew once.

I don't do much these days, except wander. I wander, absent-minded, from each corner of the world to the next. The worst days are when I'm passing through the desert--heat, sand, grime, and an endless expanse with nothing to accompany me but my own thoughts. I prefer spending my time in the cities instead, marvelling at the crumbling stretches of abandoned infrastructure. I roam the streets, taking in panes of shattered glass and rusted pipes, exploding with leaves and vines, free at last. Sometimes I’ll take off my gas mask and examine myself in the splintering shop windows. My face is far too pale for my liking these days, gaunt and taut, skin stretched over bone like a canvas.

Every now and then, I'll find a relatively intact apartment complex. I'll look at cracked family photos, rummage through a fridge, maybe heftily sit in a dusty recliner or two. I’ll hum, fidgeting with arbitrary knickknacks lying overturned on a once immaculate family mantle.

I like looking at these places and people, piecing together who they might have been. A fourth grade soccer trophy here, a set of a meticulous businessman’s shoes there. I honestly can’t tell how many lives I’ve vicariously lived now, passing silently from apartment to apartment.

Something inside me always twists when I see the belongings of what must have been a girl my age. A thin dress, inviting, primed for exposure to the night. A notebook filled with incoherent class notes. A childhood diary locked away far beneath a bed, now strewn with shattered glass and metal. I think about them and myself, far too similar and yet different for my liking.

Whenever I climb out of those particular apartments, I always make sure to leave something behind. A napkin tied to an upright stick. A particularly nice flower I stumbled upon earlier in the day. A cluster of pebbles arranged in the shape of a cross. Something to show that they’re remembered, even though I know they’ll slip my mind in a few days.

Surprisingly, I spend most of my time at the library now, pouring over books and archives. I never used to do things like that. But now, long after the destruction of civilization, I find myself attempting to escape the inescapable boredom and solitude that comes with it.

I read about chemicals, radiation, and the basic workings of my human anatomy, trying to piece together a solution to all that I am, to no avail. Books don’t tell you how to fix green blood. How to un-mutate yourself. How to stop the pure, destructive waves of radiation you release into the world.

My mom used to tell me to not stand near microwaves, because apparently the radiation would “give you cancer, and mutate you, and one day you’ll wake up with six fingers on each hand”, or something like that. When everything, and I mean everything, came raining down, she and the others had chosen to flee, while I had stayed in the bunker. Waiting for months on end, buried miles under the ground, unknowingly soaking in gallons of nuclear waste seeping in from the above. I remember the nights of nonstop trembling, feeling each and every atom of my body spark and split erratically, unnatural bouts of heat shuddering through my limbs. Trapped in a microwave of my own making.

All the self-help cancer books I’ve skimmed say that tumours are created when there’s been a mutation in the cell, one that causes it to become something harmful. Suddenly, even the most natural and passive cell evolves, becoming a destructive leech that soaks up the rest of the body’s nutrients. It multiplies rapidly, feeding and fattening itself up until it becomes a hulking amalgamation of disfigured flesh, thriving off the slow but inevitable destruction of its environment.

Gradually, over the years, I’ve come to realise that I now am exactly that--my whole body is a cancer, a tumorous growth, trapped in a visceral cycle of simultaneously consuming and rebuilding itself. A while ago, I stopped eating, because I realised I didn’t have to anymore.

Funnily enough, I probably exist as the ideal human body--at least, what might have used to be the ideal. Entirely and eternally self-sustaining, impervious to hunger, exhaustion, and destruction. But these days, in the context of the world I live in, mind-bendingly expansive and oppressively silent, it’s more of a curse than anything else.

I used to know girls that joked about being “toxic”. “Did you hear what so and so said? Oh, she’s so toxic.” I used to say things like that, but funnily enough, I’m the one who’s toxic now. Inside and out.

My mom used to tell me I had a penchant for driving people away from me, that if I “kept that angry face on all the time, I’d end up all alone”. I used to be a person who had the luxury of being dissatisfied with the world--with people, with the way things were, maybe even a little with myself. I found myself housing a cesspool of unfounded anger, churning and bubbling within me. Occasionally, when everything became too much to bear, it would rise up and up in my throat, angry and hot, until I had no choice but to let it spill into the world. Onto the people around me. Friends, family--I had a way of eating right through them, like acid corroding metal. Exhausting them, stripping them down until they were nothing but bone and stringy muscle, all weary and but a shell of what they once were. Dooming everyone I touched, anyone who dared to come in contact with me. And I liked it. This is who you are, I would tell myself. It’s just in your nature.

Now that I have all the time in the world, I find myself thinking about who I used to be. I’ll play a game where I try to list reasons behind my twistedness, and the raw, hateful, acid I used to hold within myself--an acid that’s now dried up with time, compounded with an excess of solitude. Maybe I’m being punished somehow, left with nothing and no one to torment. A world too late for ruining.

Some time after I became this, I had a habit of camping out in forests, in comfortable patches of grass I’d come across. Like clockwork, I’d fall asleep in stalks of healthy green grass, only to be met the next morning with withering, browned clumps of unintelligible vegetation in the exact shape of my sleeping position. Whatever remains that were left were mutated beyond belief, spotted and splitting, subtly disfigured so that they didn’t look as if they belonged to this world. And everywhere I went, I would unwillingly leave these imprints and scorch marks upon the earth in my own shape. Needless to say, I sleep in buildings now, among the concrete and steel.

I honestly don’t know if there are people anymore. I don’t seek them out. If there were any left, I’d have to keep my distance regardless, with the way that I am--but I don’t complain.

Part of me likes the solitude, anyway.

I met a dog once, all dopey looking and blind in one eye. He had a jaunty limp, the infuriatingly cheerful kind, and matted fur, coarse and closely shorn, close enough so that patches of baby-pink tender skin would peek through his coat. He was razor thin, ribs showing, and littered with a collection of wounds, scruff matted with caked blood and pus. Despite it all, he had these rich brown eyes, deep and glassy like an inset marble and crinkled at the edges, as if he was perpetually caught mid-smile.

I recall him vividly, all scraped-up, with tongue-a-wagging, planted smack dab in the midst of a particular alleyway I had planned to call home for the night.

“Shoo.” I had said, kicking a piece of piping at him, my voice cracking with disuse.

He didn’t budge, tongue lolling out, tail thumping against the concrete with apparent excitement. I remember pushing past him, kicking his side, and the squeaky wheeze that left his small body with the impact.

“Leave me alone,” I had croaked, picking up a crushed can lying among the rubble and lobbing it vaguely at him. “Go.”

I remember blinking awake a few seconds later, curled up for the night in a pile of particularly soft trash bags, to the sound of paws padding over and the clinking of a can being dropped from a mouth onto the tarmac. I remember looking up, meeting warm brown eyes, expectant and wanting for approval.

I threw the can at him again, and he fetched it back. I threw it twice, then three times, then four, and every time, I snarled at him to leave, but every time he returned with it in his mouth I’d feel my heart leap with an uncontrollable joy.

Despite how hard I tried to shake him, he followed me for months on end, ever so loyally tailing my feet, despite whatever ground I walked on. Sometimes, I’d deliberately go down the alleyways littered with shards of glass, or down a particularly jagged and cutting mountain edge, hoping to drive him away. When he continued by me regardless, small chest wheezing with effort, I’d feel something twist within me, something deep and inaccessible, some part of the person I used to be, resurfacing.

“You shouldn’t be around me,” I used to tell him all the time, when he’d affectionately nudge up against my legs at the library, when he’d lay down by my feet for the night, or in the midst of smiling, watching him stupidly chase his own tail.

I selfishly allowed him to continue treading steadily at my feet, on and on, despite knowing better. Maybe it was because he reminded me of a time and person I thought was long gone. Maybe I didn’t want to believe that I had to barricade myself from the world anymore. Maybe I had enough of being lonely.

I woke up one day, years later, to his body laying at my feet, unrecognisable. Teeth jutting out of cheeks, feet branching out into unnatural toes, ears splitting into petals of unfolding skin. Boils and bulbous growths of flesh littering his torso, leaking fluorescent green fluid that dribbled down his fur, matted with cold sweat. He was disfigured beyond belief, the picture-perfect image of mutation. He was less of a dog, less of a body, more of just an amalgamation of cells, lying on a slab of cold concrete, all jumbled up in the most gut-wrenching ways. Utter chemical, anatomical, cellular chaos.

“You’ve done it again,” I remember telling myself.

I ate him that night, even though my body didn’t require such things at that point. I sat in a nice clearing, one that he would have liked, struck up a fire, and cooked his body in silence, watching flames lap up against his disfigured sides. I watched, smoke and heat stinging my face, as his meat slowly graduated from a sickly green to a natural, homely, brown, teeth and overgrown bones slipping into the coals below.

I forced myself to chew and swallow through the tough, lean, meat. It tasted horrid and I begged myself to stop, but I ate and I ate until there was nothing left of him. Nothing left to torment me. I ate the memory of him, and the memory of myself--I ate until I had finally taught myself to never dare to dream of anything else ever again. Until I had convinced myself that this was what I was now.

I remember crying for the first time in a while when I finished him, tears falling one by one from my eyes, acidic and burning. I remember wailing for a nondescript amount of time, beating my fists against the dirt like a child throwing a tantrum. I remember lying on the forest floor, chest heaving, watching the night sky glide on and on regardless of me. I remember finally mustering the will to get up and wash my face in a nearby creek. And I remember looking into my rippling reflection, and seeing bright, unmistakable, green tear stains on my cheeks.

Sometimes, in the peak of the night, in the hours when I feel more awake than I’ve ever been, I’ll let myself think.

I’ll think about nuclear bombs, streaking elegant plumes of smoke across a brilliant red sky, I’ll think about my mom, scolding me to not stand too close, I’ll think about space inhabiting an apartment where a girl once did. I’ll close my eyes and imagine a different world--one where I wake up the next morning to a certain brown-eyed dog by my feet, one where I bleed red again, one where my mom is still nagging me about microwaves, one where I wake up for once in grass--whole, green, healthy, grass. I’ll let my mind dance with these delights and fall asleep to the feeling of the atoms of my body splitting and sparking--hoping I’ll somehow mutate overnight and wake up the next day as something entirely new.

But chemicals are chemicals and I am me--and when I hold my hand up to the first rays of sun the next morning, filtering in through cracks in the concrete barrage I’ve encased myself in, it’ll thrum with a bright, undeniable green. And when it does, I’ll allow myself a sigh, then I’ll get up, and ready myself for another day of wandering.

The Howl MagDecember 20, 2022Comment