(12+ due to slightly dark content... it's not very explicit but the references and suggestions are quite nasty, because it relates to such a dark time)
So this is for the Big Contest, 1000 words based on random generator - mine was: Your story is about a publisher in the Bermuda Triangle folding clothes.
“Hmm. I don't like those clouds over there. There'll be a storm later, you mark my words.”
The delicate melody of my mother's voice drifted through the open doorway and reached me where I sat, hunched over the morning paper. Even though by nine o'clock most of the news is already out of date, at the rate things change these days, it was nonetheless fascinating to examine the standpoints of all those journalists and learn. I had always loved to learn.
One of the first things I learned was the exalted mythology with which the rest of the world viewed my home, the Bermuda Triangle. I myself have been drawn into the intrigue that surrounds the place; and on the rare day where a wind blows in from the sea and large clouds weigh heavily on the horizon, I stand on the beach in front of the house and I wonder about the lost ones. Not the curious, lost in the sea not three miles from my home – no, I wonder about the lost generation, my mother's generation, and the awfulness knocking around Europe back then.
Peering my head around the doorframe, I watched her for a minute in her rhythm of picking up, folding, placing. She caught my eye and smiles, and suddenly the question flitted from my mouth again. “When you left Germany, why did you choose to come here?”
I was sure she wouldn't answer, just like she hadn't every previous time I have asked her exactly this. Then her aspect changed; she paused mid-fold and her shoulders rounded a little. “I didn't choose,” she said, the germanic cadence and accent of her words wilting sadly in the air between us. I walked slowly into the room and sat in the hard wooden chair beside the neatly made bed. Ready, for whenever family came to visit. Not once had they made the journey.
“Forty years ago, I lived in Dortmund. I was young, I was bright, and I was German. That was so important then. The 'National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei' was in power for much of my childhood and adolescence, and they taught us that the Germans were a superior race in every respect. To describe it like that is so clinical! We all believed it, we believed in it with every fibre of our being. We idolised our Führer, and at that time everything seemed perfect. No one was unemployed – at least, that was what I could see. We had progress, we had peace…”
Pausing in her story, she resumed folding and focused on a point out of the window. Following her gaze, I saw the dark clouds she had mentioned earlier, only now they were a solid black mass inching up from the horizon and covering more and more calm blue sky every minute.
“When I left school in 1932, I had romanticised ideas of the Party. I had brought myself attention due to my skills with language, and I quickly gained a job in one of the Party offices as a publisher of propaganda. A necessary requirement of such a job was to read the Nazi Bible, 'Mein Kampf', and so I did. I read it, and with every chapter that I finished, my sense of uncertainty increased. The things he was saying, the ideas he so firmly presented … I felt unnerved, Hanna, I did. But I felt guilty, too; all these ideas were for the improvement of the Aryan race, my race, and yet … I didn't like it.
"Neither did I like the obvious hatred of Jews. You see, my aunt had married a Jewish man many years before and they had three children. He was a wonderful man, and was a father to me after my own died in the Great War. I loved my cousins, too. But even then they were penalised because of who they were: he was never promoted, and seemed to pay much more tax than anybody I knew. He worked harder for the Fatherland than everyone … but he was taken away soon after that night in 1933 when they burned thousands and thousands of books, and we never saw him again.”
A quiet tear was already rolling its way down my cheek and falling onto my shirt, and all of a sudden the room felt very dark. I realised the sun had been covered by the closest cloud, and from there to the murky grey sea the sky shivered angrily.
“I had to speak out. I absolutely had to. Whispers of dissidents disappearing in the middle of the night only fuelled the fire in my heart. I knew when I was alone in the office, when there was nobody to monitor what I was publicising. So I printed the most explicit sections of 'Mein Kampf', the sections that outlined in awful detail his plans for the Final Solution. I felt powerful, because I knew they would not kill me, a healthy Aryan female. I made copies upon copies of his plans for war, and of records uncovered in secret that related to the numbers in labour camps – and the numbers that were leaving, in wooden boxes.”
There was no glimmer of blue in that sky any more, and somewhere over the ocean lightning flashed, followed a few seconds later by the quivering rumble of the sound of its destruction.
“Soon after, they broke down my door at half past two in the morning, and found me sitting on the hard, wooden chair in my kitchen, waiting for them. They detained me for a while, then shipped me far away where nobody could find me.
"But I found people. And I told them what he wanted kept secret.”
I put my hand around hers, and together we waited for the storm to pass.
