The Bomb Circle

My brother Paul was five when I killed him. It wasn't that I bore him any ill will, I just knew he couldn't stay. I would never be free of the dog until he was gone.

Paul and I had gone for a walk along the sand, the morning after a ferocious storm, and the beach had been transformed by massive movements of sand and rock. In fact, the sand had all but disappeared. Paul was happily holding me by the hand, and asking why the birds didn't get blown away in the storm, and why the sea didn't fill up with so much water coming down.

Suddenly we came upon a large, rusted piece of metal, sticking up out of the sand. I touched the side of the tapered cylinder wonderingly, feeling something very calm and strong about it. Then I stepped back and looked at it again. It was a bomb, stood on its tail.

I went back to it carefully, stroking it gently, making shushing noises with my mouth. It was rust-red and black, with its rotund decay, smelling dank and casting a shellshadow. I found myself looking at Paul, slapping the water with this great flat piece of wood, almost as big as he was. I smiled.

[Frank & Paul]
"See this? This is a bell."
"Wha's a bell?"
"That noise we hear on Sunday."
"After breakfast?"
"That's right, that's what this is."
"A breakfast?"
"No, a bell."
"B is for Bell."
"I know what we'll do. I'll go up on the dunes, and you'll hit the bell with your piece of wood, and I'll see if I can hear it. Shall we do that? It might be very loud. Will you be frightened?"
"No, not frightened."
"Wait. Don't hit it yet. Wait 'til I'm far away. It might have only one ring in it, and we don't want to waste it."
"Alright, but can I hit it really, really hard?"
"Wait 'til I wave from the dune."
"Can I practise?"
"Practise hitting the water. Wait 'til I get to the dune."
"Promise."

Paul was a distant puppet, jerking and leaping and whacking the bomb repeatedly on the side.
"Shit, I forgot to tell him where to hit it."

...That's what a five-hundred kilo German bomb does.

The tips of some of these splinters of igneous rock still stick out above the sand, forming the Bomb Circle, poor dead Paul's most fitting monument: a blasphemous stone circle where the shadows play.