The alarm clock let out a horrific wail, interrupting me from my spirit induced slumber. I swung my hand over to the table to hit the beast, commanding its silence for the third time in the last fifteen minutes. The sun tapped at the window, glazing my eyes with a soft ache so far from both pain and comfort. The night before we celebrated the end of the war, and now I sit here in my own squalor, unsure what to do with myself. For six long years, my country had been at war, and for six long years, we civilians have lived under pseudo-martial law, which our leaders have shown no interest in dismantling.

War is never about front lines and young men dying for honour. It is about keeping a steady supply of bodies and bullets from your home country long enough that the enemy gives up. Between civil disorder, black markets, soldiers returning with PTSD, and the countless fields of graves, we had all but given up. We celebrated the death of our glory last night, and now we wait to see what the enemy does with the sniveling corpse.

I walked to the window and looked at the street below, and saw people going about their daily life. There were no children; they were yet to be returned to the city. There were no men… they were all dead or being ferried back. Our daily life was a liminal space between purgatory and hell, never slipping fully into either one. Too surreal to be at ease, too calm to be panicked. We worked, ate, rested, and repeated - all in aid of the Varkovian war machine.

I looked down on the street and saw shops opening their shutters, their keepers unsure whether to take ration cards or legal tender at this point. Sounds of shouting as two women fought over bread, with a gentle symphony of birds chirping in between. This is what we had to rebuild from - physical buildings containing broken people.

The light came first.

White.

Not bright.

White.

Heat followed… not warmth… heat.

The kind of heat that strips through from your head before you even fully appreciate what you are seeing. Like opening an oven and that fast flush of air hits you like a million freight trains, but rather than dissipating, it gets worse. Growing, bubbling, boiling, throbbing, swelling - an acidic concoction like the venom of a thousand stars emanating from a white so blank, so empty, it was as if the sun had dropped onto our very existence.

I felt my flesh bubble and boil as I collapsed behind the wall to shield myself, screaming in agony as my flesh began to blister instantly. My epidermis sloughed from the tissue beneath, fusing with my clothes. The building was shaking violently, the very ground I was securely standing on just moments ago, giving way to the shop below. The light is getting brighter, the heat growing more intense, rubble piling onto me as I fall.

I ripped myself out of the rubble before I became more trapped. The sounds of shouting and birds had been replaced by a ringing deep in my ears. I rolled onto the street, blisters bursting beneath the clothes that had fused with my skin, and I saw nothing. Panic set in as I thought I was blind, until I saw the shopkeeper across the road, red and swollen, dragging herself across the street, wailing in agony. My sight had not been taken away; the sun had been blocked out by dust.

My body convulsed as I looked around, looking but not seeing. My breath rattled as I inhaled warm air and dust, whipping my head across what was in front of me. As far as I could see, I saw flame and rubble, as far as I could hear, I heard screams and cries, and as far as I could feel, I felt pain and anguish. This street that moments ago held such false hope now held nothing - it had been unmade.

I wretched as a cough spewed up red bile into my hand, and I stared at it through burned retinas. Colours so grey before hand felt vivid now, as if i was watching the world through static. My rattling lungs, retching and breaking with every inhale, I began to notice the rebar sticking through my ribs. A loud crash diverted my attention away, as I saw the shop collapse onto the owner, who was still dragging herself out.

The buildings across the street had not simply collapsed - they had folded in on themselves, as if the city had suddenly grown tired of standing. Where windows once reflected the morning sun, there were now only jagged mouths of stone and dust. People stumbled through the wreckage like ghosts. Some screamed. Some simply walked, arms hanging loose at their sides, their faces blank and grey beneath the soot.

The fires grew as I knelt there, propped up by the metal appendages my flesh had warped around. They only licked the broken wood and paper at first, but soon enough, they engulfed everything. My hearing and sight had been neutered, but I could still smell. The burning wood, cloth and flesh perfumed the air. Each inhale carried the ash of a fallen neighbour.

Perhaps we were naïve to think the war was over. Perhaps our hopeless resignation was to blame for this. Perhaps if we had fought harder and maintained our resolve as the posters had urged us to, I might still be hungover in bed. Instead, we grovelled at the feet of an enemy that saw us as animals, praying they could see us as humans. Wars do not end when the fighting stops. They end when someone decides that nothing remains worth destroying. Today, it seemed someone had decided otherwise.

Six years of war had hollowed the city and its people.

It took less than a second to erase it.

Somewhere far away, the clocks continued ticking.

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