i.
He carries her in his arms as he runs.
The bombs drop from the sky like overripe fruit and the city shrugs and sighs and the buildings kneel down like altarboys and the air is filled with cinder and bodiless cries. The old man runs. He runs and wheezes and the little girl in his arms buries her head against his chest. Old flatfoot with the heart murmur and the arthritis in his shoulders. He can feel her breathe. It is an unsteady, reluctant sound. She does not cry. Her breath warms his chest. Her hair smells of lavender and a kitchen. Thin, pale in his arms – some washed up curiosity. Ghostling, hair netting a halo of sheltered light from the fresh bombs and the slinky streetlights. The buildings alongside the gray road look in on them, like a mother looks in on a slumbering baby.
He does not know her name.
He has never seen her before.
He picked her up at the fountains, after the bombs had started. Motherless, narrow face and scared eyes. She let him scoop her up. By the fountains and their pursed spitting by the naked statue boy with his stony curls and minnow lips who looked on as they ran, ran, ran.
Run, old man.
He does not know where they are going. Some shelter, bunker. He doesn't even know if these exist or where to look for them. He glances in doorways and down alleys that hunch and shrug secretive ghastly vaticans. The air grows thick with smoke and cinder and the city burns screaming. He has lost his hat. White, thinning hair sprayed in the air and the nameless girl in his arms and his lungs caving in on themselves like paper kites.
The cinder is hot.
The heavy, belly-up clouds on the horizon throb with sporadic light. He knows that he cannot keep running. It is hard for him to breathe. It is hard for him to breathe so he listens to the little girl breathing against his suitjacket and he knows that they will be fine.
Hush, he tells her.
Hush.
ii.
He smokes his cigarette and watches the horizon. He can see Dresden from his apartment balcony, lit up and twitching, like some kind of perishing firefly. The clouds are purple cushions. The moon rests upon them like a pale, ugly queen. Darkness squirms over the hills, breeding. Dresden pops and sputters. The bombers are anonymous farmers, sowing black seeds, and there is much screaming, yelling in the streets below. And breaking glass. Colicky motors.
He exhales smoke.
He turns away.
His apartment is a yellow, peeling room. Sorry, fitful lightbulbs, twitching like dreamless children. The cramped appliances, a squatting loveseat, floor creaking and squeaking. The floorboards are long, tired tongues and naked wires are stapled along the ceiling like suture marks.
He goes to the kitchen, turns on the radio. They are talking about Dresden. He changes the channel. This one is also talking about Dresden. He turns off the radio and finds a bottle of wine in silence and he can hear the city grumbling quietly in the background. The wine is red and loping. He pours it into a wineglass and takes the glass back onto the balcony.
As he sips the wine, he thinks about the men in the airplanes, dropping their bombs like mutes, and his brother living in Dresden and he wonders whether any of the men in the airplanes have older brothers in nextdoor cities and he smokes his cigarette and counts each bomb as it falls.
iii.
They wait in the cellar. There is no light. The cellar smells of splotchy mildew and old glass and rat droppings. The dark is cold and blue as a dead baby and the ground trembles, the supports murmur and mumble like priests reciting old prayers. She holds her belly. Her mother and her husband are somewhere in the dark. They whisper. The sound of their whispers rustle and bask, reptilian on her skin. It sounds outside like it did three years ago. Ceaseless pounding on the streetside and the cries and the cheers and the nazis with their big, black boots and their righteous rigidity. Thumping, trouping. Words in the air like a heartburn. Now the bombs march through the streets and there is a heartburn in the city center and the people cry for their children, where are my children?
She shivers. The dark mends her in like a sarcophagus. And she holds her stomach, she thinks about her baby and she wonders if they'll die. She is fairly sure their house is burning. All the lovely chinasets and the woven rugs and the fancy, woodpolished chairs. The cellar is not a bunker or a shelter. The supports are disjointed, quiet in their struggle. They uphold the ceiling and their backs bend and they have cold, enslaved faces in the marshy dark.
There are many pangs, contractions within the hour. Set close, like sweethearts. They wrap around her middle, her chest, her head and they squeeze. Uncontrolled. Nauseating. She sweats and closes her eyes and bites the inside of her mouth. The air is dusty with plaster which makes a paste on her face with the sweat and the silent, calculated tears. She cannot think about much anymore, but to stem the pain. She calls for her husband and he gropes his way over to her. He holds her hand, whispers to her. The pangs are bright and exquisite. The humping trills and thumps outside, above them. The moaning supports. Her mother in the corner exhaling small, complex prayers.
It's coming, she says to her husband whose spectacled face hovers obscure and eclipsed in front of her like a frail lunar body.
Lord in heaven, she says, it's coming.
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