After Chernobyl

Adrienne Bernhard

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Its muted light fell on lowland glades and acacia forests; on vegetal growth that had overtaken a concrete metropolis, as if the whole city had been turned inside out to reveal leafy innards. There was a badly damaged Ferris wheel, whose rusted carriages creaked if a wind blew through them. There were books and papers scattered in a schoolroom, its windows blown out and the doors still open in perpetual exit.

This was the nothing new as it had been for thirty silent years inside the exclusion zone, and only omniscience was there to record it. The tree rings had changed color swiftly after the fallout, from brown to a lighter shade, clear biomarkers of background radiation. Even the mushrooms were hot. Spiders wove lopsided webs that broke with millennia of evolutionary adaptation: they no longer had a clean blueprint for their latticework and, pushed to the boundaries of their collective understanding, worked against an unnatural force to keep pace. Below the tree line, pools of contaminated water stagnated, swallowing aphids and frogs and birds in their turbidity, then spitting them out with two beaks or a missing leg.

Any device in the vicinity would have registered upward of 50 microsieverts (prolonged exposure could eventually destroy vital organs), but humans had been restricted to a radius of 1,000 miles since the explosion; the only other trace of man in any direction was his crumbled reactor, which still towered over the city like a conductor, hunched and powerful. His orchestra was that sprawling botanical collection of instruments, doomed to play ghostly renditions of a Bach fugue or Saint-Saëns’s Le carnaval des animaux. The carnival was here, the ground was dead, but all around was heard the sound of living things.