Just a short piece I felt inspired to write. Critique is welcome of course, but not asked for. Just putting this up here for lack of a better place to store it.
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Not every one of you can see me. Yet I feel you, and you feel me. The miracle of our age is that you have found me. And our great country’s fortune is that I have found you. I am right here, to restore that which was taken from us by force, to restore our national pride, to restore our great nation.
“Peter put that away please,” Emilie said.
Peter closed the book he’d been reading with a sigh. Mother wouldn’t let him do anything, it was miracle she’d even let him go the camps, although that of next Saturday had been cancelled because of the cold.
“You shouldn’t read such hateful things,” his mother continued. She put a serving tray on the table and poured him a cup of tea from their silver teapot. “There,” she said, but he stubbornly ignored the cup. Why did she even bother? He didn’t like tea, she knew that. Resting his chin on his hands, Peter gazed out of the large window and onto the snow-covered street.
“It’s not hateful,” he protested. “Why do you hate Germany so?”
“Peter!” she cried, putting her hands on her hips. “I don’t hate our country, I just don’t think it’s right that you should read those books.”
“But our Rottenführer-“
“Forget about the Rottenführer!”
“Just because you don’t care-“
“But I do care!” She yanked the chair next to him backward and plumped down beside him. “Peter, please listen to me, that stuff’s not healthy for you.”
A fire burned in his chest, smothering the desire for him to talk back to her, to tell her how wrong she was. Imagining that she’d eventually give up, he kept his lips sealed and refused to even look at his tea.
“Fine,” his mother sighed, “if you’re going to be like this you can go to your room now and stay there.”
He’d waited for this cue. At once he stood up, grabbed his book and dashed for the kitchen. Like a claw, his mother’s hand seized his arm. “Without your book.”
Peter gave her a furious look, tossed the book on the table and pulled his arm free. He ran through the kitchen, ignoring the smell of lasagna from the oven. Skipping several steps, he ran upstairs, bolted into his room, smacked the door shut behind him, and belly-flopped onto the bed. Stupid mom. Now that his father was away, she was trying to keep him in the house and away from the camps. His uniform, ironed and folded, laid on his desk, the swastika sewed onto it made him feel proud again, One day, he’d be a soldier too, like his father.
That day couldn’t arrive soon enough.
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