Listen to Justine read this story - Get the RealAudio Player here if you need it. Peace Memorial Museum The brain, intellect, rational part of a soul protects us from pain; puts up walls of reason that seals our hearts to hurt. Walking through the memorial to horror called Peace Museum in Hiroshima, reason, intellect, brain wedged a space with facts so that tears would not dare to flow. Looking at the panorama of destruction while a priced British narrator recounted the terror in my ear, the tape recorded, and those accents, muted the torture of numbers, of degrees, of death. A part of my brain could register grief but quickly intellect reminded my tears that the tiny buildings left standing on man-made earth, surrounded by man-made mountains, were similar to earth forms in museums everywhere; one stands and looks at Egyptian, Roman forms made by men for just such viewing. Looking up across that model of devastation, My eyes saw the life-sized figures, As the British voice says, "of residents caught in the holocaust." First, the thought "but what a lurid sky - all red and orange, not life-like at all;" but then, the soul remembers, that sky that day beneath that sun was not lifelike at all but filled with death. The hair on the models, for they are waxed humans, hangs matted, singed and their fingernails, if you dare to look, appear to melt; nails of the mother and of the child softening in that heat that day beneath that sun. The brain quickly challenges such wax, but the soul recoils, knowing it must have been so. In other cases we see the lunch boxes, hurriedly prepared by impatient mothers who will never fill lunch boxes for impatient children again. We see the coins (fused), the roof tile (bubbled) and the photographs we have put away for thirty years. Those burns, those faces we will not face. Always, a clipped voice in the left ear explaining how many Fahrenheit to bubble tile, fuse coins, imprint patterns from a dress on a human made of flesh. Always a clipped voice explaining the horse, stuffed, the root of the camphor tree, torn, and always the brain, hurrying with facts to seal the pain. But the eye catches, the ear hears, blurred now though by pain that will not stay; the soul notices a student's lined notebook paper with penciled numbers; like one's own children's notes. These notes, (do not listen) these notes, (do not look) these notes, (avert your eyes) are the careful listing of blood count. These figures are the numbers of white cells growing as a young woman, still a girl recorded, for herself, the movement of the sickness through her frame. Penciled numbers on a sheet of lined paper, adding up the increase until her death. A panorama with broken roofs, a red-orange glare, the intellect could accept, reject, but notebook, paper, pencil and the soul released the tears; for one child out of "countless numbers" as the guidebook says, for one child, and for all the others, I wept.