Flash Fiction
"Adagio for Strings"
“Adagio for Strings”
Oppie looked down as he shuffled his feet on the wooden floor. He touched his porkpie he then he looked up. Dozens of faces were fixed upon his face intent on what he was going to say. Oppie was not loud but forceful in his way, and his long thin frame was two sizes too small for his great suit. He stood beneath the square steeple of the United Church. Outside the walls were white and so was the snow that blanketed everything. It’s a good thing that it was a secret facility, and no one had any place else to be, because the snow had come up quickly.
Oppie stretched his arms downward and then began: “We have been living through years of great evil,” then he stopped, and added: “and great terror.” Everyone knew that the man he was eulogizing was the president who had just died on Thursday, the 12th of April 1945. Out amidst the glaze on the rooftops, there was a serenity. A serenity made of death.
And everyone you that the president was responsible for taking every one of them to a lonely place in New Mexico to invent something that no one had conceived of 10 years before. If there was a place where the atomic bomb was created, you could argue that Oak Ridge supplied the fuel, but the combustion was located right here in the secret city underneath the mountains. Even now they were searching for a test site for the plutonium bomb - which might not work, and which could, in theory, destroy the entire world in an atmospheric skull cap.
Oppie then turned to the Bhagavad Gita, a favorite holy Scripture from the Sanskrit: “He is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.” Oppie looked to see if his words had any effect. But deep inside his heart, he knew that they must have. “We should dedicate our souls to hope, that his good works will not have ended with his death.”
There was a somber pause with each mind picking back to some particular moment some particular resonance that the old president had touched them. In the heart. In the head. In the bowels of their fear. But FDR was like so few in that he could rouse anger and despair and then lift his rhetoric upward to an assured victory.
Then the man with the pork pie hat stepped down and waited for the moment when the past having been recognized the future called almost all to action. Because the gadget still had not been tested and it was the proof in the pudding that counted. A theoretical bomb would not do anything to end this awful war.
Afterward, in his living room, in the small cottage, he told his wife that “Roosevelt was a great architect, perhaps Truman will be a good carpenter.” Even if the termites were boring, far and wide.
And in the wings, a strain melody was heard: the Adagio for Strings, from Barber’s String Quartet.