Postcards

Today Pegman took us to Minsk. I’ve once again gone to the dark side because I’ve recently started a class about the Holocaust. Dark times. Dark story. On the other hand, Happy New Year, fellow Pegman Writers!

You send taunting postcards from AfricaChinaNorwayPortugal. Some signed MissYou, WishYouWereHere. Others WeWillVisitHereTogether-Someday. The worst say WeWillNeverSeeOneAnotherAgain. They arrive in a neverending mixed-up rotation I can’t process.
But this last postcard broke me. You are the one person who knows my parents were thrown into a ditch then shot by Schutzmannschaft in Minsk. You know, because, just as you shouldered your rifle you noticed me, legs shattered by a hail of bullets, clinging to my father’s chest.
For some godforsaken reason, you pulled me out of the mud. Hid me inside your coat. Gifted me to your wife who kept me as if I were a child of her own. You? You merely kept me.
Twenty years later I lie here, half a woman with a gun beside my bed while you travel the world with your mistress, and send postcards. Today, Herr Stein, I choose WeWillNeverSeeOneAnotherAgain.

Wait

This was inspired by a school shooting on October 24, 2014. A fourteen year old boy – who apparently had everything in his favor including family ties, strong tribal connections, a winning smile, intelligence and a good sense of humor – shot four fellow students and himself. He and another are dead. Two girls are alive but so disfigured they have not yet been identified and one young man may have lost his jaw. What is it about young heartbreak that drives children to such measures? (Remember, this boy had one foot merely dangling over the boundary between childhood and the world of a teenager, and was years away from becoming a man.)

Son- Before the Story
i am broken
how will i mend?
how is it possible
to shine in her eyes
one day
and be invisible to her
the next?
I cannot sweat it off

Father – Before the Story
just wait
you have loved her one short year
a nano-second, a blink
there will be another girl
many other girls
that will shine in your eyes
take time
wait

The Story
there is no waiting
son hides the gun
in his day pack
between a sandwich
and her class picture

lunchtime – eight shots
two dead
four disfigured for life