First thing's first: my name is Becquer Bradley. Rebecca to my mother who named me, Becca to my father who raised me, and Becquer to My Uncle Randy who never did quite shake his Brooklyn accent, the kind where "Soda" inexplicably rhymes with "Boater." Everybody else in the world Calls me Beaker which, at the moment, isn't exactly a whole lot of people.
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I guess some explanations are in order.
I spent two months alone in a bomb shelter when I was six years old; two months scooping peanut butter out of jars with my fingers. Two months trying to learn how to work a can opener. Two months in the dark because I couldn't reach the light switch. I wish I didn't remember any of it, but it was a hard thing to forget.
The scariest part of all that was, the shelter had a skylight built into the roof, six inches thick and scratched to hell. There wasn't much to see, but the light that I got when I got any at all was maddening. I would've preferred the dark - dark's a blanket; the kind of redness that pulsed on the other side of that window felt like something not found anywhere in nature, at least not in anything alive.
Have you seen pictures of the firebombing of Dresden? I hadn't, but I went digging through what was left of the library when I was a teenager. I guess I was looking for a sense of community, a holocaust survivor in a very real sense. The first thing that struck me was, the colors were all wrong. I wanted to take a crayon to the books to show people that black and white photographs are funny, desperately so, when compared to the redness of the real thing.
I wasn't rescued so much as I was stumbled upon - scavengers eventually broke down the door looking for supplies. They found them, and with a sigh and a "well, shit. What d'you reckon we do with her?" I was reintroduced to society; what was left of it anyway.
My new friends were a sorry bunch. Daddy would've called them 'characters;' my Uncle Randy would've called them 'fucking lowlifes.' I'll tell you about them later; all you need to know for now is that, lowlifes or not, these people are my family. My real family was incinerated fifteen years ago by a series of explosions that killed twenty-five thousand people in three-and-a-half seconds. I don't know how it happened, nobody does, but I'm going to try to find out because I've the time, and because I think I'm the smartest person here who's still breathing.
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