I got on to post this one the day the submissions ended, so I was glad to see that they are still being accepted!
Peter and I
Any bombed-out house is interesting to look at, but they are more so when you used to live in it.
It’s raining now, and I wrap my rain coat—it’s too big for me now, but isn’t being thin good?—tighter around me. I pick my way through the rubble. There’s the dining room. My great-grandmother’s china doesn’t look so great now, shattered and strewn on the floor. What is left of my couch is soaked. And ash and rain doesn’t do much for a carpet, no matter how high-quality it was advertised to be. The Luftwaffe knew what it was doing, I decide.
“What are you doing, Aunt Emmy?” Peter’s voice startles me.
I turn around. He’s standing in shell of the kitchen. His black hair is plastered on his forehead, and he clutches his elbows in the cold. He doesn’t look a forlorn orphan. He looks like an angry teenager.
“You really should wear a raincoat or carry an umbrella or something,” I said. “Especially when you haven’t any available roof to go under. Common sense, my boy, common sense.”
Peter stepped over the tiny barricade of plaster and brick that lay in the dining room doorway. “I wish you wouldn’t joke about this,” he said. “Look at us, Aunt Emmy.”
I look. It’s exactly as I expected: two homeless people standing in the ruin of their home, getting soaked by the rain. Nothing new.
“I see. The house is bombed. We are here looking at it.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Rather, yes.”
“Then why are you so nonchalant about this whole affair – this mess?” Peter shouts. His eyes blaze. With that kind of heat inside, he must be warmer than the entire neighborhood combined.
As he glares at me, I feel my witty banter lose its charm. Peter’s hot, frightened eyes bomb my humor as easily as Hitler did my house. Both are frail. Very frail. Very temporary.
I sit down on a fragment of a dining room chair. The rain drums down on the hood of my rain coat and on my shoulders. I glance up quickly at the grey sky, framed by the blackened edges of the walls, jagged and bare.
“You’re right,” I say. “I’m sorry, Peter. I only meant to keep our spirits up.”
“You weren’t keeping our spirits up,” Peter says. “You were drugging them with humor. The drug has worn off mine, Aunt Emmy. It will take a good deal to get them up again. It will take a good deal more than pretty jokes, Aunt Emmy.”
I can tell that the drug is wearing off mine, too. I stare at the wet floor, at the shards of Great-grandmother’s china. The tiny, gold-engraved rose pattern seem as though it might rather vanish than be subjected to the harsh, unfeeling weather. All I can think of as I sit there is how pretty they had been last Easter. How we had all sat about this table and eaten a feast off them and talked and laughed and listened to classical music on my father’s old phonograph. How strange that one bomb could have turned the entire memory into more of a fantasy that an actual event. How strange that one minute, one plane, one bomb had destroyed everything I call home. That one war could have destroyed everything that Peter calls a family. All that is left now is two irritated people sitting in a bombed-out shell.
“I know, Peter,” I say. “I know.” Tears prickle my eyes. At first I bat them back, but then I decide that what with everything else in the room wet, it won’t matter if my face is wet, too. So the tears roll down. I hope the rain masks them.
Apparently it doesn’t because Peter walks over, crouches down, and puts his arm around me. He’s so awkward doing it that it almost makes me smile. Almost. Not quite.
“There, there,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” I say. “I am.”
Although I don’t turn my head, I can tell Peter is crying by the way his arm trembles on my back. The tremors subside, but by that time I’ve started all over again.
We finish eventually. I take a deep breath and stand up. Peter stands with me. We stare at our little dump. I can’t help but notice my piano; a beam had slipped from the ceiling and crushed the entire center of it. My, it had been a good piano. I look away and up at Peter. There are other pianos in the world, after all.
Peter’s face is rather red and swollen, but he nods vigorously. “Well, Auntie, Rome was not built in a day.”
“Quite right,” I say. “Very true, Peter. Yes, you’re quite on track.”
“And Edison had many failures before he invented the light bulb.”
“Right again. Good observation.”
We stand still a moment longer, then I take his elbow. “Let’s go,” I say.
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