The Age of the Bomb

What comfort there is in knowing everything could end

I was maybe four the first time I understood that everyone dies.
Not in a story. Not someday. But everyone.
Even me. Even now.
It landed like a piano dropped from the roof—loud, stupid, unavoidable.

But after a while, the horror dulled. Death wasn’t a monster anymore—it was background radiation. Constant. Invisible. Reassuring, in a way.

At night, the jets from Pease Air Force Base droned above my house in slow, endless circles. Their engines mixed with the wind and the rustle of leaves, but I could tell the difference. Those weren’t commercial flights. They were something else. Something loaded.

I’d lie in bed, wide-eyed, listening.

I imagined the pilots—anonymous, clean-shaven men with skulls hidden inside their helmets—staring forward into nothing, fingers near the button, waiting. If the call came, they’d end the world. If it didn’t, they’d come home. Top off the tanks. Try again tomorrow.

One afternoon, I heard my father say it straight:
“If the order ever comes, they won’t turn back.”

He said it like he was talking about the weather.

After that, the ceiling above my bed became a movie screen. I saw Russian bombers meeting ours over the ocean. Pilots glaring at each other through black glass, fists clenched, jaws tight. Then, if spared, nodding in exhaustion. A ghostly handshake at 40,000 feet. No words. No relief. Just the knowledge that maybe next time, they wouldn’t turn around.

There were no duck-and-cover drills anymore. We knew better. Desks wouldn’t save anyone. If the bombs fell, they’d burn through the crust and keep going.

I pictured that ending clearly.
A box of crayons spilled into a skillet on high heat.
First the colors ran—crimson, sky blue, grass green—swirling into psychedelic chaos. Then they curled. Blackened. Caught fire. Snuffed out. What remained was a single slab of waxy brown. Hardened. Dead. Forever.

Only cockroaches would walk the wreckage.

And me?
I found peace in that.

The jets were my lullaby. Not soothing, but steady. As long as they flew, the world hadn’t ended—yet. Each engine hum a cosmic coin flip. Not today. Not tonight.

I’d breathe into my pillow, warm cotton against my cheek, clutching a stuffed animal like it was a fire extinguisher. Imagining the flash. The blast. Everything erased in one bright second—school, parents, teeth, shame, spelling tests.

An exit.
Without warning. Without pain.
Without me screwing it up first.

I’d stopped saying bedtime prayers by five, but the old words still echoed, like a hymn stitched into the seams of my brain. Sometimes I’d whisper them into the dark, just in case the Lord was listening through fallout static.

“Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake…”

And if He can find my soul
in the melted mess of red, blue, yellow—
curled and blackened,
sealed in the ruin—

All the better.