Pablo's Jedha

More about Pablo's Jedha

"The sky was not right. Not the color of sky at all. It was the color of a fresh bruise, and in it hung a globe, a moon that was not a moon. It was a metal thing, a machine, and it was the color of a winter sky, grey and hard. In the streets of Jedha, the dust blew, and the wind was cold. A man held his child close to him, his eyes looking up at the metal moon, and the child looked too, but without understanding. The man knew. He had seen the guns of the Imperials, and the heavy boots that stomped the dust into a fine powder. This was a bigger gun. The biggest gun. The man's throat was dry.

The city was silent now. The usual noise, the shouts of the vendors, the cry of the animals, was gone. There was only the wind and the high, thin whine that began in the sky. It was a sound that made a man's teeth ache. The man held his child tighter, and the child began to cry. The man did not say anything. There was nothing to say. He looked at the face of his child, and the small, wet eyes, and then he looked back up at the sky.

The whine grew louder, sharper, until it filled the world. A green beam of light, thin at first, lanced out from the metal moon. It was the color of poison, and it moved faster than a man could blink. It struck the city, and where it struck, the world ended. The man saw a flash, brighter than the sun, and he felt a heat that was not the sun's heat. It was a heat that burned the air and his skin. He did not hear the sound, the sound of the world ending, because the sound was inside of him, a great rushing that filled his ears and his head. He held his child still, and then there was nothing. No light, no sound, no pain. Only the end."

The destruction of Jedha City from Star Wars recast as a Spanish Civil War atrocity by means of Hemingway's prose style and Picasso's artistic vision.