Today, in school, Fathima Varadaraj will learn about the atomic bomb. Her teacher will show her videos on a giant projection screen, of the nuclear tests from the 50s and the 60s, of giant radioactive blasts decimating mock-villages, leveling houses, uprooting trees, blowing cars and buses into the distance. She will be half-paying attention to the lecture while also looking over at a boy named Chander. He wears Adidas trackpants and t-shirts and has a bit of a silly-looking face but is friendly to everyone and he likes reading just as much as he likes football and partying and shouting loud, stupid things into the hallway just to make himself laugh. She will only perk her head up away from this boy when the scene of the blast tests comes on and she watches the burning and the roaring and destruction, and the look of the film reel - that it’s all cold and dark and in black and white is pretty exciting to her, because she has a taste for the creepy and the odd and inhuman.
	After school, Fatima will be at home, on a warm day alone before her parents come home from work and she will go outside and puff on some marijuana that she bought from her brother’s friend named Arjun. She’ll go into a little trance and feel the warm air heat up her skin under her blouse and her skirt and smell the fresh aromae of plants and trees and the ground and see the low sun in the distance, and forget about school and about her parents and about college and marriage and having children and grandchildren and the president and politics, history, authority, what she should be doing with her time instead of smoking pot alone in her house, she’ll forget about all of that and have a few little fantasies about Chander and feel a little excited and find a small thread loosely hanging off the bottom of her blouse and pull it out and start playing with it, sitting on hard plastic chair outside her parents’ house.
	Fathima rotates her fingers around each other rolling the string into mini-knots in her hand. In the light of the sun she imagines a terrifying vision of the atomic bomb she has just learned about in school, a bright flash of sunlight that comes before the sunrise, an awkward ringing and a dull silence that feels painful and heavy and a sudden transition to a horrible scene of roaring hellfires across the entire town, her mother wandering aimlessly outside, her skin is burned to a red, swollen boiled rubber-texture and she takes straight, heavy steps with locked legs, her arms are outstretched and her eyes transfixed in thousand-yard stares out to the horizon. Her father walks into the doorway of her room which is smoldering and melting into black tarry sludge and his face is half-disintegrated, his eyes have no lids or epicanthal folds or eyebrows. They are wide, bulging and endlessly staring monitors. He spreads his lips apart wide showing his entire mouth of teeth unobscured by cracked and rotting skin and he grins at her in ugly malice.
	Just then a phone rings in the kitchen of her house and nobody except her is around to pick it up. She gets up off the chair and walks across the patio into the kitchen, through the doorway, it’s oddly cold in there even though it’s hot outside. She picks up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Fathima, it’s Maansik Buksh, do you remember me? I’m a friend of your father’s.”
“Oh, hello”
“Hi there, uh, please tell your father I called okay? Thank you please, I’m sorry.”
“Sure no problem you’re welcome”
click
	Maansik hung up the receiver and walked out of the front hallway into the family room and flicked on the TV. He had a certain authority now, he could make phone calls like that. He could just tell children to do things. He considered that people who already have their own children never really have this revelation because they boss around their kids anyway, like all parents do. He now feels strong and mature and weak and fragile at the same time, he knows that the way you talk to a woman determines the kind of man that you are. An older man is as powerful as he is impotent, he is powerful in his impotence, in the decay of aging he takes on a centered authority. Maybe. Greying hair has that benefit, but who did it come from? Was it other men? Who built this civilization? Other men, of course. So who would want men to acquire an implacable authority, a stone-like countenance in their old age? Other men? Well, we may never know what the women would do.
	Well, Fathima, a girl, is at the moment washing her face in the mirror of the bathroom of her parents’ house, which they bought in 1993 for a modest price, before the real estate market exploded, sold to them by a 26 year old employee of Century Real Estate Holdings named Sangeeth, who accepted their down payment, assisted by their parents and a little bit from their parents’ parents, and allowed them to move into the house and buy bedsheets and mattresses and pots and pans and other cookware, a showerhead, a few lamps and nightstands, a phone, a computer, and then have a daughter they would name Fathima, who is right now washing her face in the sink of the bathroom. She is concerned with a few zits that may or may not have formed on her face from puberty or too much sugar, and the trouble is that one of those might be her fault but the other one, objectively speaking, is not, but even then she is a girl, and so, in a way, as she learned, puberty is kind of “her fault”.
	She rubs at the pimples vigorously with a scrub pad and Biore brand charcoal facial foam until the pimple looks kind of better. She decides she has done her job, that is, whatever she is able to do right now, and she smashes her face headlong into the bath towel to her left and feels a rush of sweet relief and comfort. She stands there, for a moment, head in the towel, and she is for that moment an infant in her mother’s arms, cradled and cozy and safe and warm and she lifts her head up, confused, and walks out of the bathroom into her room and sloppily falls into bed outstretched in front of her computer and tries to avoid thinking about the zits or her skin or the men or the boys or the people she wants to impress and especially not about wishing she could just be a baby, crawling around in bed. Nursing, seeing, exploring, wishing, wanting, wondering, not talking - none of that.
	On her way to school the next day Fathima will see a large red fox peeking out of the trees in the small garden patch outside of a house down the street from her. She will freeze in rapt attention, unfettered curiosity, and there is, thankfully, time enough to look at the fox because she is always nice and early for school, not because she is a star student but because she enjoys taking the long walk to school. She will not move out of stinging panic that she might arouse the fox and only see the wisp of his tail as he runs away out of her sight. She will stare blankly at the fox with her mouth open slightly and the fox will look back and his yellow, catlike eyes will be glaring and intent and communicating something, but she will never understand it, she is a human and he is a fox. She, and the whole of humankind, will never understand what it is like to see a human, as a fox. Nor what it is like to eat as a fox, to look at the sky as a fox, to see a tree as a fox, to chase after prey as a fox. No, we have an idea, but it will never be affirmed. It is an eternal, unknowable secret, forever out of our grasp. The world, as so many people often forget, is full of these.