Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

A hare darted in front of Joe, looked back in alarm and dashed off at an angle.

There was a long warning siren for everyone to go to the trenches behind the shelters and the base camp. Only a few men, including Harvey and Oppy, would actually stay in South-10,000. Three minutes.

Never knew my heart could be so yearny, Joe confessed. More and more the toads were underfoot, singly and in groups crossing the roads, stopping to sing. Sometimes the whole ground seemed to move. One hopped before Joe and he saw Groves plopping on his belly, toes to the tower. The final warning rocket sputtered overhead. In fact, the song of the toads was a powerful, sonorous trembling. Cello and flute at the same time.

" Do not look at the blast ," Harvey warned. " When you do look, use your red goggles or a welder's glass ." A last warning gong beat frantically.

The Voice of America slipped into classical strings, rousing sleepy Latins everywhere. Mexicans, Peruvians, Tierra del Fuegans lifted their Polaroid all-purpose red goggles and looked north. " Ten ." Cirrus and stratocirrus fluttered in the dark. Rattlers stiffened to attention. " Nine ." He glanced back and the tower floated in a cloud, with impatient, circling beads of light.

"Eight."

He felt Oppy sway, eyes on a door that would safely catch the image from a periscope. Breath held, a burnt, unravelling string through the heart. Fuchs watching from a hill twenty miles away, the only man there standing for the blast. Harry Gold strolling on the Alameda, patiently looking south.

"Seven."

Dolores had left pots in the fire. A gust worked between cedar coals and clay, shooting sparks around Rudy. There was a bootlegger's truck in the corral, and rabbits packed like snow in the hutch.

"Six."

Billy and Al put their hats on their hearts, not noticing that from dark kivas everywhere, figures stole to the surface.

"Five."

The car crashed the gate and the band rushed for the parade ground, striped clowns with trombones, saxophones, clarinets. In Harlem's Palais des Sport, the French heavyweight swooped to the rafters, his satin shorts as bright as a macaw.

"Four."

A piano toured the Rio Grande, its lid raised as a black sail.

"Three."

Thinking Woman wore an embroidered Mexican dress with her turquoise necklace and silver pin, finally enough colour, Anna said, for her.

"Two."

It was a slit trench for coaxial cable that had never been filled in. Maddened by the nearness of their destination, a thousand toads scaled the high shoulder of earth and abandoned stakes, and at the crest sang with pulsing throats. Those on the other side slid deliriously into the miracle of water.

"One."

Last step. Last heartbeat. Last breath.

"NOW!"

From the eye of the new sun, a man diving.