MY POP TILLED THE SOIL for five years. Nothing came of it. My mother tried to instill in me the hope that we’d prevail through hard work, but the land remained as infertile as it is colorless. My heartland’s silence states that everything here has died and that a great awakening should’ve come upon us, but anything alive here uproots and flies. A maggot will metamorphosize just to cross the map’s borderlines.

Even our land was getting up in dust storms to leave. So I learned to walk on an earth-poor territory.

I learned to draw before I learned to dirt farm. Paper became a place for summoning oases.

Drawing is how I learned that anything new, which was forced to exist here, would have to come from the wellspring of my mind. One day my Pop left for good, so for money my mom and me would do odd jobs around town a couple miles away. When I was old enough, I left home, seeking new opportunities.

It was a long journey. I rode on a donkey’s back from Dana Farm into the town over where they couldn’t afford to maintain the old facades on their buildings. I traded my animal for some money and caught a bus ride from Purgatory, Oklahoma to a real town. When I arrived in Denver, I worked washing dishes for three days. Now the things I saw in the meantime were already strange. I could’ve assumed I found my “new” enough, but I wanted to go to a big place with the word new in the name, so I went all the way.

In New York City, I bought my first paints. I felt bad about leaving my mother, so I painted her portrait and sold it for a couple bucks and put the money in an envelope and mailed it back home with a postcard saying that I was sorry. A couple months later, I got one back saying she bought herself a nice dinner and that she always knew all about me. Painting portraits was one way of getting by. Another was by means of charity. I was good enough at drawing people. Customers said I was handsome because I paid them close attention.

Throughout the first summer on my own, I lived in a sizable apartment in Brooklyn with a fellow named Thomas Cole. Tommy was going to RISD to get an education in sculpting. That August, Tommy’s parents invited me up to their cabin at Lake Taconic to learn a thing or two from Grandfather Cole, who was a descendent of the Thomas Cole of Hudson River School fame. The three colors I had in my possession were blue, yellow, and green as a result. Out of necessity, my specialty became gardens. It was a religious sensation to dedicate myself to painting. The borderlines of a canvas are the cloisters of a churchyard—a calm place of peace. I remember my first painting. It was a scenic park picnic. In the sunlight and the blowing wind, the undersides of elm leaves twinkled in off-white. Beneath the trees, a run-along dalliance of Siberian squill and wood sorrel blended together. Nearby, light scattered off the creekside in dropped coinheads. I’ll never forget the sight of my finished painting. It was the first vision I felt compelled to capture. How easily dazzled I was by earth’s author. Watching the blast-pixellate on the water taught me that attempting to replicate God's original draft would take a certain stroke of mastery, or a new form entirely.

That following winter, I started painting seriously. As young man, I wanted to make a living by my craft. Looking back before the war, painting watercolors for a commission bought me a small place outside of Providence in Narragansett. The nice thing about Narragansett is that in December the population vacates the town and the place becomes quaint. These were times I could focus on my painting alone. I looked out onto the shore reaching for some inspiration. Observing the weak solstice sun, snowflakes fell gently on the crests of brass waves. How the snow crystals fell upon the break tide.

The wind shifting off the foaming shore blew ice into my eyes. A sadness crept up the back of my throat.




Mary would always say, “I can’t keep doing this.”

Still, we dated on and off in the summers. It wasn’t the same. I really wanted her to be with me. In June, July and August, we’d talk about it. We’d love each other and get close again just like before. She wanted me to come home to her. I told her to come with me, but she said she’d miss her family. Inevitably, we’d go our separate ways for months. This was the rhyme scheme of our relationship all throughout college. Being with Mary was too much heartache. I preferred her to be miserable when she was away. Near the end I got really mean just so she’d stop forgiving me. It was a hate-hates-to-hate style break up. After four years of this, we graduated.

Mary was on track to start a family. I don’t know if I was on any track at all. Just painting, working “dirt jobs”, to quote my mother, and bread jobs, to paraphrase Hermann Kafka. I was on track for getting older that’s for sure. I learned the more you grow, the more people grow away. I thought I could keep more people in my life. That’s the destiny of aging.

When I was younger, I assumed that if I landed in the area of my desired timeline, I’d glean some self-satisfaction in my achievements. Love wasn’t that way. I never had to try to love that girl because it was never a goal. We were in love. Deeply, effortlessly, in love with one another. When things were good it was easy to be happy because it was natural. But I didn’t take the depth of her love seriously. I was naive about how easily it came, and how it was handed down as a gift of fate. Arrogantly, I assumed it would always persevere. I mistook her for a reality of my existence. The love of my life was the sunshine. Her love came simply. I’d bask in it. Then the sun would set and I’d go back to school. And just like the casual beginnings of summer, my love returned.

When I went off to study in Rhode Island, I thought everything would stay the same. People would ask what I would to do with an art degree. I’d even ask myself from time to time. The answer to the question of what I wanted to do with my life was never an issue. The right question was, “With whom are you going to spend the time?” The response, “Myself.” is syntactically false. Though Mary remained my lifelong muse, whether she was my woman or not, was a position I never cared enough to claim.

Anyway, Mary was the first woman I uncovered in detail. The dark circles under her eyes are where I wanted to live on her body. That feature encapsulated everything I wanted to know about women. For my entire life, the differentiations in my days would be outlined in time’s achievements in that little space of marble veins. I’d see days-passed as days of stratifications beneath her eyes. I wanted to see that particular feature age. I wanted to see it regenerate into people into time immemorial. I’ve been in love enough to say that I can love a person’s minuscule features as their entirety. “No one loves you as much as I do.” is what I always told her. How could I have known I wanted every generation after me to possess this one particularity? Even when I was a small boy, I always observed this feature in women with an intensity. It was the most gorgeous trait of all, because unlike the eyes themselves, a person’s eye bags could do no harm. This parcel of skin was a source of effervescent truth below her pupils. Women with dark bags beneath their eyes, all that contains, all that expresses: Tenderness, exhaustion, youthful softness, their youth aging, their sadness, their happiness, their hidden pressures overflowing. Eye bags are dark soil where God plants his holy flowers. The birthright of her children are those eyes. How the earth’s author gives you eyes to behold his writing. She helped me realize I’ve never seen a strange pupil. I’ve never seen a man, woman, or child alive, with ugly eyes. Mary I’ve been wanting to fall in love with you for a long time. These thoughts of summers gone-by consumed me.

What I learned to appreciate about Mary is that I loved her sense of humanist dynamism. I kept her at a distance from me because I thought our relationship was the spawn of trepidation. If she got too close to me, the vivacity would dissipate. Too far away, and we’d drift apart. One way of living gave way to another. I remember the last day we spent together.




John Dana rose before the sky shed its nightness charms. He plucked at a pull string in the bathroom. A lightbulb illuminated like a sun-circular fruit.

He woke up sad to say what he knew to be true—that this would be the last time he would see her for a long time. Some tears welled up. He leaned into mirror-altar and watched his face transfigure.

He got into the shower and washed them away. The corners of his lips were tugged at by marionette strings tied to his toes. When he moved, he frowned. John stood there for a while in the shower. What he thought to himself in the small minutes after he first woke is that he didn’t want to go to work.

After he got out, he lathered a mug with shaving cream. He still didn’t say anything to himself. John believed the first words of each day should be particularly truthful, so he saved them for a proper occasion. What came out was peculiar. When he looked at himself again in his own bathroom mirror, he told himself that he wanted to go home. He was in his apartment when he realized it was an unusual thing to murmur. Then he told himself he couldn’t keep doing this. In a more loving way, he knew the woman sleeping in the other room deserved to hear something beautiful when she woke up.

He took a towel and wiped away the rising steam. In the reflection, he could see her laying in his bed. After shaving, he began combing his hair back in dark brown plows. Every so often he’d take a rearview glance. It was strange to see her there. Mary slept as queer as anything. She laid on her back with her thighs buckled against her belly and her knees jut up into the air. It was as if her legs clung to an invisible bar hung down from the ceiling. She balanced herself on the imaginary, playing sleep’s trapeze.

Her trick was a finer mystery.

Some minutes passed and he went and sat at the bedside. He’d try to resuscitate her through namely recitation.

“Mary. Hey Mary.” He’d whisper it and take pleasure in its exhaling. Mary’s name held meditative depth. He’d say it again. She’d stir. “Wake Mary. I love you Mary.” He’d say her name enough until its utterance held no particular meaning, like how the sound of one’s own breathing is not a cause for stimulation. One’s own breathing, the most inoffensive sound. He’d sit at the bed’s edge, the world’s horizontal, and exhale the Mary-name. She didn’t fuss but he’d stare at her. John knew her better than anyone. He knew the matrices of freckles outlining her body. He knew how each one connected and corresponded. He mapped each red mole by heart, and knew where each one lead. Traveling one pathway lead to another quadrant of her body. He knew the sensations accompanying each arrival. Then he thought to himself: Glare at something, or someone, for a long enough while and the vision begins to lose all meaning—not that it becomes meaningless, rather it becomes as vacuous as the blue sky, or the name-sound becomes another way of closing one’s eyes and looking into the back of the mind-Mary. He laid down next to her.

She woke up in the early morning to a rainy day. The weather was such that whatever’s shaded gray, was made dark blue with the sun’s dawning. They talked together in bed. She pressed her cold feet against his thighs and complained that he was damp. She scratched him with her toenails. He laughed quietly. John used her warm body to dry off. Mary coiled over on top of him. As punishment she jammed her chin-point into the crux of his diaphragm. He winced in pain as he laughed.

She turned her cheek onto his chest, looking at the side table.

“There’s leftover wine.”

“The solution-to-all-puzzles.”

She reached her hand for it and he passed it to her.

“Here ya go.”

She took a sip.

“I don’t want you to go home.” He said.

“I know but I gotta.” “I want you to stay with me.”

She looked at him for a while.

“Your hair looks more handsome when it’s shorter.” Mary said.

“It’ll be short one day.”

She closed her eyes and almost fell back to sleep.

“John?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want you to be a painter anymore.”

“We talk about this every summer. I’m not good at anything else.”

“You’re not good at painting either.”

“And what did I tell you last summer?”

“That even if you weren’t good, it’s what you’d be doing anyway.”

“Come with me to Rhode Island.”

“I’m gonna miss my family.”

She drew a deep frown after she said it.

“I know.”




In the later half of the 1930s, John Dana never gathered a large enough following to become a substantial artist, but his eye for landscapes would be put to good use during the war. In the Navy, he trained as an air reconnaissance photographer, and was later selected to record the atomic bombings at Nagasaki.

Dana’s friends noted an almost immediate shift in his painting style following his participation in the second atomic bombing in the history of warfare. While recognized by some for his striving dynamism, and clear futurist influence, John Dana never felt as though he could justify his participation in the medium.




It was two years ago today.  I remember bomb’s dropping well. The way it went off. Beneath me, nothing but whiteness from point zero—a truthful whiteness—I imagine as the intensity of a whiteness born in hell. My camera held aim at a volcanic eruption out of an aerial hypocenter. Looking back at my footage, I could scarcely form a description of what I saw. As an attempt, I’d call it God’s idea of a bomb —there was that much religious significance in these weapons. For some seconds, I watched the atomic flash. A blooming overturned into an unfolding roseate over Nagasaki. I couldn’t come to grips with what I witnessed. Technical terms were insufficient. Watching the atom bomb go off was akin to watching a sun-egg overdome the city.

In the plane, I felt like a sperm cell flying in sky. We should’ve flown into it. The plane penetrating the core of the A-Bomb’s flash would mean my mind’s conjugation with all of nature’s secrets. A pillar of smoke totem-poled upwards, then mushroomed out in a manner that would only begin to make sense to me in the '50s. The distant explosion hummed in effervescence, then thuumed in a clap. Instead of turning and heading directly towards it, our plane carried us away to safety. The fact that the bomber’s name was The Great Artiste was a shallow and comic irony, though the joke was as deepappearing and thorough stretching as a traffic light on rainy pavement. The name of the bomber might as well had my name painted on its hull.

The name of my first masterpiece was a film I privately titled, The Atomic Bombing of the City of Nagasaki. Propaganda leaflets were distributed beforehand, dropping messages overhead informing the victims about their impending roles as participants in a work of mastery in natural philosophy. After witnessing such aesthetic supremacy, I tried painting the event for two years after the war. Then I stopped altogether. The image was inexplicable. In dreams, I wished I could’ve relived the bomb first hand in complete naivety.

I was twenty-eight at the time.




When John Dana was forty-two years old he attempted to negotiate his way back towards his most formidable memory, the recording of the Nagasaki explosion. At the time, Dana was working as a private contractor for the US Navy doing video and photography work documenting nuclear tests—including the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb at the Bikini Atoll. Much to Dana’s satisfaction, atomic weapons had graduated into a more powerful technology, meaning that as the scale of the explosions increased, so did Dana’s sense of grandeur.

Working against the past became a self-imposed compulsion. John Dana believed that God had selected him to capture the bomb in its fullness and he was not quiet about this belief. Dana became a became a subject of interest by his former associates. In their paintings and novels they often depicted him as a Promethean figure. The bomb was a horror to any reasonable person, but Dana’s sensation of beauty eclipsed any moral opposition to mass nuclear armament. He had to witness and record as many nuclear explosions as possible. This was his modus operandi. At times, guilt would overwhelm him, but his work was more important. For close to a decade, Dana’s documentaries had been for source of artistic inspiration for many post-war filmmakers. After the Soviets successfully launched their first A-Bomb tests in 1949, the American people were beginning to realize that these weapons could be fired both ways.

Unexpectedly, in the late 1950s, the Soviet Union collapsed following the death of Joseph Stalin. The US won the Cold War earlier than anyone expected and Russia agreed to integrate into NATO. The Chinese upheld a treaty of non-aggression, meaning that there would be no war, as long as the United States remained committed to non-proliferation and steady disarmament to under 100 nuclear weapons by the 1990s. Although the United States had amassed a stockpile of nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons by 1959, they now held no clear martial value. With nuclear tests coming to a complete halt, John Dana’s second muse left him without a purpose.




I wasn’t particularly happy at the time. My painting was unsuccessful. Film critics are no longer in a nuclear mood. I had a hunch that something could be done about it. The excess of arms could still serve a tasteful purpose, and that my aesthetic aims could generate paid spectatorship. I gave it my best effort to rile up any interest, encouraging my motives in networks both military and political. After enough advocacy, some important people agreed that the idea of nuclear entertainment should be explored.




Somewhere in the Oklahoma panhandle, there was a long gone stretch of farmland nobody gave a damn about. Until John uttered the name, nobody had mentioned it since the landlady died. On the farm itself, there wasn’t much besides a small shack and some equipment a boy was once accustomed to.

This reproached parcel of dirt is where John Dana’s mother is buried. He was away and couldn’t attend her funeral. There was another woman he’d long since missed, but she passed too. It was just him out here. There’s a man from the past who apparently shares his physique and psyche, but he’d like to think they bear each other no resemblance. John doesn’t want to admit they share each other’s burdens. A long enough stretch of time should’ve severed them into separate men.

In God’s country, they tore down Dana’s childhood home. The Army Corps of Engineers used the spare planks to build bleachers for a small, eastwards facing amphitheater. When the Senate Special

Subcommittee on Nuclear Entertainment realized how many show tickets were being purchased, a viewing space was constructed on the Dana Farm to permit spectatorship. After the seating arrangements were built, guard towers were established on the testing grounds to prevent any stampeding audiences from getting a better view. The venue for the nuclear test was set up. The locale was a strange mix between gun range and little league park. Thousands would make it out for the first showing. People set up picnics to watch the blast. Merchandise was on sale. Food too. Hot dogs, cold beer, peanuts, coke, and nukes.

As detonation time approached, John Dana put his painting skills to use on the bombs out in the desert. Several nuclear warheads stacked upon each other. Dana painted odd faces on the warheads of a nuclear totem pole. They photographed John Dana, near what historians discovered to be a painting of his first love on the nose tip of the upper most stacked ordinance. Once before, John Dana had visited Ground Zero at Los Alamos. He felt a similar ritual aura arise around the Purgatory Nuclear

Entertainment Park. He felt a sense of ecstasy in the anticipation of a sublime moment, where he would reckon upon the audience the culmination of his vision. John believed he was participating in an occult passage. This event was the first of the new mysteries. Cultures afterwards would try to uncover what occurred here. They’ll never exactly get to the core of it. This was a potlatch of cosmic energy. A waste for waste’s sake.




Masses of people were shuttled out by bus. They gathered in their seats facing past the guard towers and barbed wire fencing. The Nuclear Totem waited to ignite. Spectators were instructed to equip their goggles, and those who refused signed waivers accruing blindness at their own risk. Three. Two.

One. A pure and circular flash. I watched a pillar of smoke bloom directly upwards. I was wondering if these explosions could conjure the shape of a woman. •   





Kenan Meral is the author of a novel Stigma of the Living Flesh, as well as A Rash Impulse: A Collection of 14 Short Stories.

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