The first rays of the morning sun hit the flat grey surface of the monolith, on a cold winter morning, like the gentle touch of a goddess, like child's play, like a dying man's last breath. The rectangular shape twists and bends at the corners, trying to escape itself. The rough concrete and steel holds it together in a timeless embrace. Below it the ground is littered with broken glass and pieces of tin and paper, the dark earth shows through patches of wilted grass, shrubs and trees, the iron bars of the playground are rusting and the paint is peeling off like a disease, in pre-mortal apogee. The long shadows take every crease and abberation, they wrap around it and behind it and reach out towards the South-West. Specs of dust in the glass windows, in the space between the panes and the thick curtains make their presence within beams of fragile light for a few seconds, then drift off in the gust of warming air, and vanish once again beyond sight.

In the front passenger seat of the steel grey Citroen, the boy's looking out the window, at the irregular and hypnotising shapes of the city going by, the old brick houses, among newly laid steel and concrete office buildings, the highway that leads to the West, a number indicates the distance, another sign shows the maximum allowed driving speed, the traffic lights flashing yellow, then red, then yellow and green again. Then the car swerves into one of the housing districts, the cold pale monoliths of the panel flat blocks open up to reveal streets punctuated by trash bins and dusty trees, like a curse from a cloudless sky, both nature and humanity humbled by the high dome of the Earth.

Towards the East, where the morning sun casts every shape and form of the cityscape into a gleaming halo of light, the nuclear arrow pointed towards the ground is slowly descending on all of us, its cloudy tail, an arc lost in the expanse above us.

Today, I'm going to see the arrow for myself, as the vehicle approaches an opening, between the monoliths, I step out and walk towards it, I reach up, and I can almost touch the bare tip of the huge cone-shaped object, somewhere above in the sky the last stage of the rocket is floating towards the Earth. I'm on my toes stretching up, and almost now it reaches out towards me and covers the distance of a tenth of an inch. Then inside of it something snaps, and I can feel the heat emanating from it, as the catalyst hits the core, like a blooming flower, the alluminum shell opens up at the edges, and light pours out thick and heavy, like molten lead. I look around me in every window, in every flat surface a reflection, a ghostly image of the light looks back at me, blinding and a hundred different little atomic flowers finally open up to reveal the glistening white core and the heat now even a thousand yards away is melting the window panes and stripping the last bits of paint from everything, all the cars tires burst out simultaneously, and their windows blow up like soap bubbles, the fuel inside them explodes, and the first wave of the nuclear blast picks up the pieces in mid air and spills them into dust.

Within the ball of light now as it expands outwards I'm walking in a sea of blinding white and yellow, I'm walking in a foot of burning coal, for as far as I can see, as I near a smoking shell of an appartment building, five stories tall, its empty eyes look back at me, unseeing, on the sides of it and from the top, the smoke comes out in bursts, like locks of dark hair, strewn across a pillow, like the whole world is at rest, finally.