Author: maleghast (Page 21 of 35)

“Eli, come away from the windows, it’s dangerous!”

He snorted, as he always did when she told him what to do. With grudging slowness he let the curtain fall and stepped away from the window.

“You know Molly, we are hundreds of miles from the Golan. I really don’t think that they would be lying to us on the television. There would be instructions to head for shelters if we were in any immediate danger, you know?”

She smiled at him, amused and relieved by his certainty;

“Then come and sit at the table. You should eat.”

He glanced down at the table, there was enough food for when all four of their children had still been living at home, but he was in no mood to have a fight about that; their two boys were up in the Golan with Syrians streaming over the border. He had been looking out of the window, trying to imagine what it was like for his boys crouching in the darkness, clutching their rifles, cowering from the shelling and watching for other people’s sons coming across a line on a map. There was no way to imagine.

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This Ficlet was inspired by the front page of Wikipedia for the 6th of October 2008, in English. The Article was from the “On This Day…” section from the 6th of October 2008 and concerned The Yom Kippur War, which began on the 6th of October 1973; you can find out more here.

The cold stone flags felt good under his feet after the heat of the day. Having grown up in the Great Forests of the north he would never enjoy the heat of the Salt Pan. He padded over to the open doorway and leant against it; more cold stone to soothe his naked skin.

The heat really did preclude clothes, but a mixture of the strength of the sun and the potential dismay of visitors meant that in public, at least, the inhabitants of Erestella covered their bodies. Once they were able to hide from the sun, or enjoy the darkness, most locals would spend their time unclothed. It had taken him a while to become comfortable with this norm; now he was glad that no one cared about his nakedness.

Serena stirred on the bed, behind him. He wondered if she would appreciate being woken, if she would see his amorous intentions as displacement for his insomnia, as a distraction from the day to come and the problems he needed to face. They were, but they were no less real or urgent because of that truth; he just wanted her.

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James pulled the edges of the hood tighter around his face and wished that he had listened to the little voice in the back of his mind that was humming ‘wear a coat… wear a coat…’ when he left the house that morning. It was the first real rain of the autumn, and the hoodie that he was wearing provided almost no protection from it for the first five minutes after he left the office, let alone now thirty minutes out, trudging along the Wokingham Road towards home.

Susan was already at home, her text message short but certainly sweet;

‘Am home, need cuddle. Love you, S x’

As he took step after step through the standing water from which there appeared to be no escape, his feet becoming more and more drenched in shoes completely unsuited to rainy weather, he focused on the idea that very soon he would be in his warm, dry home with his arms around her, and the weekend stretched ahead as a partial cure to the week he had just endured.

Sales was never where he had been supposed to end up; selling copiers was the worst.

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“The sun is coming up”

He snapped back into the moment, from his reverie, and looked into her eyes. He reached up and brushed the hair away from her eyes and fell deeper into them, trying to to reach her without speaking.

“What is it, David?”

He smiled;

“Nothing, Cara. Well nothing bad anyway. I was just thinking about how much I love you, and how happy it makes me to be awake all night with you. My mind was wandering when you spoke; I was wondering if you would marry me.

Her face fell just a little and his heart sank. She had not said a word and already he was wishing he could do the previous fifteen seconds over again. They had been seeing each other for well over a year, living together for eight months; they were happy, or so he thought. It was not as though he was even asking her because he thought it was what she wanted. No, this was something that he wanted and now, seeing her reaction, he was starting to think that his first guess might be wrong; she did not want to marry him.

“David, I – I don’t know how.”

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Elena closed her eyes, took a deep breath and tried to calm her beating heart, to slow and deepen her breathing, and prepare herself. She anchored her thoughts onto the soft babbling of the stream as it flowed into the silvery pool, and brought the first few bars of the tune up to the front of her mind as she raised the pipe to her mouth. She began to play, and she quickly lost any sense of time as the music flowed through her and out into the woods lifting her mood and her hopes.

Across the clearing, not trying to hide but also not trying to be seen, Luca watched. He was hunting when he first found her practicing out in the woods. He wondered why such a clearly talented young woman would wander over a mile into the woods in order to practice her music in the relative cold and potential danger of being alone and some distance from safety. That was not all he was fascinated by of course; she was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen outside the palace. He longed to speak to her, but did not know how.

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“I don’t mean to sound confrontational, but I have been pushed into this room and told nothing for five hours, and while I could have left I came here at the urging of the mayor’s spokesperson; why did I do that if there is no information to be had here?”

The young aide blinked as if to clear his eyes from this barrage, looked down at his clipboard;

“Er, I’m sorry but I’ve got nothing new for you yet, but the Press Secretary has let me know that he will be with you in no more than ten minutes,”

he softened a little,

“I know that you are frightened, and confused, and I am so sorry that this has taken so long.”

The angry man sat down again, muttering under his breath and shaking his head.

It all happened so fast. We had all been waiting for our kids to come back from the summer school trip and then the deputy head was on the school steps with a very worried look on her face asking us to assemble at the mayor’s office. Have you ever found yourself somewhere else and not known how it happened? That’s what it felt like.

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I forgot to run the Wednesday Poll and so I offer this instead.

“Who is that man, Daddy?”

The little boy was pointing at the famed statue of Bonhoeffer, the one that had been raised in Berlin only two years after the Abwehr successfully ended World War Two by assassinating Hitler. Now, sixty-five years later, I was curious to hear how this young father would explain why Dietrich Bonhoeffer holds an honoured place in our history.

“Well, son, that’s a statue of a great man.”

The little boy stopped for a moment, his finger by his mouth, his face a picture of childish confusion.

“But Daddy, how do you know that?”

And now the confusion was on the father’s face. He was grappling with how to explain.

“Well, have you learned about the war in school?”

The boy nodded.

“And you heard how the people who took our country into that war used the fact that we were at war to secretly do many bad things here and in other nearby countries? Well that man was one of the people that stopped those bad men. He was a priest and his wisdom helped to justify what was done.”

I smiled; it was well explained.

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“What are we going to do about this Edgar?”

“What do you mean?”

“This idiot Chamberlain really thinks that this agreement he has made with the Austrian Corporal, Mussolini and Daladier will stop what is really going on. It’s delightful really that the Prime Minister of our country is still someone that believes in honour, but if what we are hearing from our men on the ground in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich is true then this is only the beginning.”

Edgar nodded, pushed himself up in his chair and leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“So the intelligence coming in is reliable, Tom? We’ve been hearing this scare mongering for a while and then the politicians come back from summits with their treaties and tell us that it’s not true.”

“What I am about to tell you, Edgar, it’s shocking, but the time has come to share this information at the higher levels and you are cleared Top Secret. I checked before I invited you to dinner, it bears mentioning that this is an official approach from the director of the Foreign Service.”

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This Ficlet was inspired by the front page of Wikipedia for the 29th of September 2008, in English. The Article was from the “On This Day…” section from the 29th of September 2008 and concerned The Signing of The Munich Agreement on September 29th 1938; you can find out more here.

The long drive home was becoming longer and longer as the last can of Red Bull wore off. Joel opened his window and started slapping his chest in time with the loud fast music (Clutch of course) coming from the stereo.

The string of orange lamp posts stretching off towards the main junction for Birmingham, like a string of flourescent beads. He was a few miles from Birmingham and that meant there was only an hour of driving left ahead of him if he kept his wits about him and his right foot down.

He looked over his shoulder into the back of the car to see Lottie and their little daughter Rose soundly asleep, the cutest of smiles on both of their faces. How were they sleeping through the music? He needed to rest; he needed to put their safety ahead of his desire to get home. In his heart he knew that there would be trouble if he kept driving, that he would not be able to stay awake. He could stop and get more Red Bull.

BANG

He could not hold the steering straight; there had been a blowout. At least he was awake…

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“It eludes me.”

“I know that, that’s one of the things that I really like about you.”

“Why would they do this? I mean it doesn’t make any sense.”

I nodded and smiled. Even faced with the reality of it all and even with all of her intelligence and education it was her feeling for humanity, or rather what is good about humanity, that came to the fore.

“Look, I understand how this upsets you and how it confuses you in equal measure, but I need you to dig in right now. We will never understand this, but we do have to prepare the public for it as if we do. You know?”

She nodded, and headed out of the office. As my door started to close I could hear her delegating tasks and asking for work from the team. She was going to be okay for that one day, but then I was going to have to have some answers for her.

I picked up the photographs from my desk and tried to make myself look at them again. One hundred and seventeen dead, another two hundred plus injured, and for what? I needed to have an answer when Sheena asked me again.

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