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be forced to look away first.
“Let me pay for this”, he said, his voice only a fraction above a whisper. “After all, I am in your debt”.
Thunder came rolling like black candyfloss wrapped round a stick of lightning. But it was not thunder. The car bomb stripped away the entire front of the school building, leaving a vacuum of power in the country’s next generation of educated people. The shops and cafes opposite were reduced to some manic child’s failed cake mix of oily smoke, rubble and flame. I stared, unbelieving. The cafe, the cafe I had been standing in, was somewhere under a geyser of flame where a gas main had burst and then been ignited.
I didn’t know that a grown man could cry so suddenly, could simply burst out sobbing in an instant. But that’s what happened, before I choked and looked round. I stopped breathing, thought,“So this is death.”
There were screams in the distance. Faint sirens. Blood on my hands. Sheet lightning still playing madly across the sky but the thunder was retreating.
“Blood?” I thought, “Blood? How can there be blood when the cafe has been totally destroyed? When every building has been demolished. Do the dead still bleed?”
I gasped and started sucking in great gulps of air.
Apart from damage to the front window of the cafe, it seemed to have escaped lightly. I turned in a slow circle. Of course the cafe wouldn’t have been damaged. It was a different cafe. It wasn’t the one I had been standing in. It was two blocks away from the bomb blast. I turned through another circle. The room was empty. Completely empty. But there, on the counter before me, was a cup of fresh, steaming coffee.
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“Let me pay for this”, he said, his voice only a fraction above a whisper. “After all, I am in your debt”.
Thunder came rolling like black candyfloss wrapped round a stick of lightning. But it was not thunder. The car bomb stripped away the entire front of the school building, leaving a vacuum of power in the country’s next generation of educated people. The shops and cafes opposite were reduced to some manic child’s failed cake mix of oily smoke, rubble and flame. I stared, unbelieving. The cafe, the cafe I had been standing in, was somewhere under a geyser of flame where a gas main had burst and then been ignited.
I didn’t know that a grown man could cry so suddenly, could simply burst out sobbing in an instant. But that’s what happened, before I choked and looked round. I stopped breathing, thought,“So this is death.”
There were screams in the distance. Faint sirens. Blood on my hands. Sheet lightning still playing madly across the sky but the thunder was retreating.
“Blood?” I thought, “Blood? How can there be blood when the cafe has been totally destroyed? When every building has been demolished. Do the dead still bleed?”
I gasped and started sucking in great gulps of air.
Apart from damage to the front window of the cafe, it seemed to have escaped lightly. I turned in a slow circle. Of course the cafe wouldn’t have been damaged. It was a different cafe. It wasn’t the one I had been standing in. It was two blocks away from the bomb blast. I turned through another circle. The room was empty. Completely empty. But there, on the counter before me, was a cup of fresh, steaming coffee.
Imprint
Publication Date: 06-17-2011
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