Dinosaur Nazis. Custard metamorphosis. Baking cults. Secret organizations. Murderous child detectives. Space fetuses. Medieval Mars. A robot empire. Diners at the edge of reality. Satan. Time travel. Omniscient machines. Apple pie.
In a hostile...
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My father was a Nazi but so were we all back then. He had been an officer in the Wehrmacht, acting under the Geheime Feldpolizei or the Secret Field Police. While in their employ, my father helped to root out enemy agents and make sure the Fatherland was not infiltrated from within. He did noble work, my father, but dangerous work nonetheless. I saw him little while the war raged. I saw him more when the fighting stopped. After we moved to the new country, he was able to come home everyday. Well, everyday except one. When he finally did come back, he wasn't the same. I was fourteen when I realized that my father had gone missing. I was fourteen when I realized that doppelgängers were taking over the world.
The nature of one's breakfast often sets the stage for the rest of the day. In this specific case, that morning's meal foreshadowed terrible things to come. The morning of my father's return, I woke with a keen sense of dread. After putting on my uniform and fixing my hair, I went downstairs for breakfast. My sister and mother were already at the table and I smelled pancakes frying on the griddle. My father was yet unseen. Mother said that he was away on official business. I detected a hint of something more sinister in her eye. Her smile didn't contain its normal joviality and a few of the pancakes turned black on her watch. I ate the burnt dough anyway, as if to hint that nothing was wrong. Everything was wrong but I didn't quite realize it at the time.
The kitchen in our new house was a lived in space. The building itself had existed for decades and the kitchen for just as long. The walls were colored a crackling sort of white. The paint had deteriorated over the years due to the settling of the house into its own space. The cabinets mirrored this curling ramshackle pattern, bits of wood exposing themselves to the elements. The stove and other kitchen appliances presented themselves as tenured residents of the abode, securing a definite place amid the colonial lumber. Blue and white coalesced into a shocking reverie with the addition of a brand new tablecloth, one of a few items of decor that had been brought from the homeland. For all its antiquated aesthetics, our new residence was surprisingly hospitable. It was not as sumptuous as our old house but it was substantially more sizable, providing enough space for everyone to live in comfort. My sister still complained that she couldn't see the River Spree from the comfort of the living room window, but walk a few blocks and the Mississippi could have been a dead ringer for any German river. I was sitting at the dining room table when I heard the door open and a familiar voice hiss to life.
My sister and I ran to the door to hug our father. My mother smiled when she saw his uniform and they kissed as he entered. My sister latched onto the trouser leg of the dark fabric that my father wore. I proceeded to do the same but noticed that something was strange, something not quite right in the way his leg twisted. The muscle was too taut and his skin too rigid. Squeezing onto the flesh of his calf was like squeezing into an uncooked potato not yet rid of its outer layer. I let go and backed away slowly from the person who was supposedly my father. He and my mother were talking about some news that had come out of Berlin. My brother had since turned his attention back to his meal. I looked at my father's face and stifled a scream. It would not do to provoke the attention of a beast.
