Friday, April 17, 2009

Victims of Ashes

This is my attempt at 'flash fiction':

Victims of Ashes

Stepping out of the ashes of the dead, Henja brushes her shoulders and walks out of the camp into the nocturnal sky filled with smoke. Her eerie appearance announces to the world the cataclysm perpetrated by the masters of inhumanity—a shaved scalp, a body now composed of cinder and bone, sunken eyes and a protruding belly. Henja, the fierce woman with 78923 seared onto her skin no longer knows how to live in a world where ashes blind her eyes, a constant raining memorial of those lost. She cannot look to the future when she cannot even bear to look to the past. When she closes her sorrowful eyes, a scene flashes of a girl with lustrous black hair, dancing around a table filled with challah and matzo ball chicken soup, but then this ethereal dream is drowned in crimson blood, with screaming whispers inundating her ears. There is no escape. There never is an escape from the cruelty of man and the havoc it wreaks upon its victims. Henja is a victim. Her sister, Pieja is a victim. Poland is a victim. And even Deutschland is a victim—to the ashes falling from the sky but originating from the corpses of once childish and happy individuals with dark hair and eyes and slightly pointed noses. We are all victims.

No comments:

Post a Comment