WITNESS

By: AMITA BASU

The news networks had become a tangle of rumours, conspiracy theories, and deepfakes impossible to tell from reality. Our pendulum swung from scepticism to panic and we wondered whether we’d waited too long. We awoke the children in the dead of night. Down the street, the gas-masked vigilantes hammered on doors, smashed through windows, and dragged those suspected of harbouring the plague out into the street. They opened the firehose and held their victims in place, fire-retardant gloves clutching fistfuls of singeing hair. Deep into the children’s ears we drove silicone earplugs. These screams were not theirs to witness.

He still had his badge, so nobody stopped him as he drove the speeding schoolbus full of our children out the city. I stayed back with our goats and turkeys, squirrels and dogs. Lamed and blinded, abused and abandoned, the animals in our sanctuary had kept their hearts and had helped our orphans find theirs again. Maybe in the morning I could load them all into the truck.

I awoke to find the coops torn up, the kennels smashed to matchsticks, and the door to the pen swinging on its hinges. I felt guilty for feeling grateful that they’d been taken away before they were killed, that I hadn’t had to bear witness.

Then the news channels united to flash one image: the bomb, which we’d been waiting for, had dropped at last. In a way, I thought, when I could think again, it was a relief. It was over. Now surely, like in the movies, like in history, the nations would unite to sign a new peace treaty. Then I saw where the bomb had fallen: on the city to which he was driving our children.

I jumped into our sedan with its hacking-cough engine and jammed-shut backdoors and sped down the interstate, up the mountainside. On the mountain pass I saw our schoolbus. I jumped out the car with streaming eyes. Thank God: they’d stopped just outside the ten-mile blast radius. They must’ve abandoned the bus and left a note telling me which way to walk.

A chill fell over me. My feet began to drag. Heart racing, eyes lowered from the windows, I climbed into the bus. The engine was still on, groaning amiably. The spring air, sunwarmed, kissed my neck as it ran in the door.

Facing the city he’d been driving towards, the city that had become ashes, he sat. The wrinkles in his skin had become the grooves in bark. His toes, sheathed in wood, grew down through the busfloor branching into intricate roots. His arms, raised forwards to the city, pointing, raised upwards to God, beseeching, were almondbranches flowering white-and-pink through the roofhatch.

Wood, too, were all our children. Their mouths were sealed in bark. Their butts, jumping off their seats at the moment of impact, were rounded humps in treetrunks. Their pointing fingers sprouted tender green. Only their eyes were still human, open and lidless, frozen from the horror of bearing witness.

END