Happy International Left-Handed Awareness Day!
Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. This week’s snippet comes right after last week’s, when 20-year-old Darya Koneva’s trip to an ice-cream parlor with her best friend’s younger sisters and godbrother became anything but routine. The other patrons told them Hiroshima was just bombed.
“This might mean the war will finally end,” a girl nursing a banana split says. “Your leave might be permanent, and you won’t have to go back into combat.”
Dmitriy gives a faint smile and nods, preferring to let her think he’s been in combat and isn’t just in the Navy College Training Program.
“I wish I could’ve dropped the bomb myself,” a boy in a corner booth says. “Serves them right for Pearl Harbor.”
“What’s an atomic bomb?” Darya asks. “Is it much different from an ordinary bomb?”
“You’d better believe it is,” the soda jerk says. “President Truman said it was more powerful than twenty thousand tons of TNT, and more than two thousand times powerful than the biggest bomb ever.”
“So that means it must’ve killed lots of civilians.”
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Darya and her friends’ concerns for the civilian victims don’t exactly go over well with the other people inside the ice-cream parlor. Darya herself survived a bombing raid in Germany towards the end of the war, when she and her friends were being evacuated from a rocket-making factory to which the front had become too close.
Welcome to My Magick Theatre 
A horrible moment to be alive — but I wonder how many people really knew its significance, other than shortening the war.
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It’s always the civilians that have the largest number of casualties, people not involved in the conflict. Such a shame this keeps repeating itself.
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This snippet really drives home that few Westerners really understood the gravity of what would happen when those bombs were dropped. Great job!
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How little the ordinary citizen knew of the enormity of that act. Sure they all hoped to see the end of the war. They wanted retribution for the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a more simplistic time. I’d hoped we’d gotten beyond that. That we understand individuals bombed the Twin Towers, not a nation. That it means we don’t blame an entire religious group for what a few extremists do. Yet that’s what I read in this snippet. As I said, it was simpler in those days to blame all Japanese.
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A timely excerpt for sure. As always, you bring the past to us in such a clear and understandable way. Great snippet.
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Amazing what a difference perspective makes. So many different but real responses.
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Revenge is such a human emotion, yet so very destructive. Your snippet really drives that point home!
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So many civilian casualties… Was anyone aware at the time of the dangers of fallout and radiation and the full extent of what those bombs would do?
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The full truth didn’t come out for a long time. Journalists weren’t allowed to write about it honestly, and any stories reporting on the health problems weren’t taken seriously by most people.
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