Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Once upon a time there was a girl who was very pretty. She was in the air force and all the air force blokes enjoyed playing stacks on with her. One day the air force men went on a special trip to Japan where they dropped a huge bomb that pretty much wiped out the whole city of Hiroshima. Talk about a stacks on!
As homage to what they had done, the men created a lovely little crown for the pretty girl to wear. It was in the shape of the mushroom cloud the bomb made when it exploded. Every day she wore her crown. Every day. It reminded the men of how powerful they were, how they could destroy the lives of millions of people in one quick game of stacks on. The girl didn’t think it was amazing. She thought the crown looked like a cock.
One day she decided not to wear it anymore. It made her uncomfortable. She kept thinking of all the people who had died – all of the dreams and hopes that would never come to fruition. She didn’t like the men who glorified it – that big penis shaped mushroom cloud. The fact that they also wanted her to wear it all the time just felt wrong.
The men didn’t like that she refused to wear the crown. They told her she was being unpatriotic and dismissive of their achievements. Who did she think she was – suddenly developing morals and ethics. Because of that she decided to leave the air force. It no longer held any charms for her. She felt she was being used, that she had no worth. Instead of trying to do something about it – challenging the men and their adulation of the bomb, she quit.
And because of that the men found another girl to use because they thought their behaviour was okay and that there was something wrong with HER, not them. And so they never learned. As for the girl, she lived her days in sadness. Sad because of the bomb. Sad because of the way the men had treated her. Sad because she had done nothing about it. Until finally, one day the sadness overwhelmed her. She descended into a state of bitterness and hatred, mostly against herself. She decided to do something about it.
She killed herself.
When reports of her death came out, young girls everywhere walked out of their jobs or out of their homes. They left behind families, children, lovers. They walked and walked and walked until each of them found a cliff or an ocean or a bridge. They fell over, into, off – to their deaths. Never again would young women be used to celebrate wholesale destruction.