A collection of short stories/journals/one-shots/memoirs/etc.
Most has been written from one clear moment of inspiration, I never write them because I feel I should, only when the words need to escape.
Some are products of writers block, or previo...
A.N. Inspired by Blitz: Plane Flying by Clive Branson, 1940. It is inspired by the WWII Nazi air raids on a working class street in the city of London.
•••
Shells break upon the cobblestone street under starlight while the enemy flies overhead, dropping bombs of destruction onto the city and onto innocent souls. One must stop to wonder where planes are going as they fly over the city, looking for a place to land-- or possibly to attack. Strikingly enough, the plane contains two different emblems on its wing: one is the seal of Nazi Germany and the other the seal of the British Royal Air Force. A woman dressed in a faded yellow peacoat stands clutching a small bag, her baby beside her in a carriage. Her small child wails uncontrollably into the faded and torn blankets around her as she bounces up and down and sways side to side whenever her mother takes another tentative step down the street.
The woman suddenly looks up at the beaten steel wings of the plane flying overhead, blowing out jet fuel and fumes like rotten eggs. Her heart sinks in her chest as she sees the emblem sprawled across the wing directly above her, so close that she can clearly see the Nazi insignia of the Swastika and the British blue and red and white bullseye as it streaks along the sky. Her skin crawls and a cold hand grips her heart, a shudder going up her spine. Whipping overhead, the propellers create a deafening noise, and jet engine fuel fills the air as the plane cuts incredibly low to the buildings, as it comes circling around and around overhead. Her daughter has woken up once more to the sound of enemy planes, crying salty tears into creamy pastel covered blankets as she looks up at her mother. As the infant looks up at her mother standing stoically above her, she has yet to realize what this woman has done for her, all the things that they have lost, and all the new adventures and new beginnings ahead of them.
She makes her way down towards the bomb shelter fearing the worst; the enemy is back once more, and ready to strike. Her infant screams at the sound of the engine overhead, and screams at the men that they walk alongside, and screams at her mother, and screams at the moon, hanging like a beautiful and radiant chandelier in the night sky. The child does not know where they are going, and does not know why she can hear the sounds of panic around her increase exponentially with every second she sits in the cool night air.
Her mother is now in more of a panic than ever, as the bomb shelter is now in sight. The plane zooms by overhead, beginning to cover the moon in its path of flight. Tin this single second time is frozen as the woman in yellow wonders whether the plane is going to drop its bombs once more, whether the building beside her, now in shambles, would have been the very place they celebrated her daughter's first birthday. She wonders whether her daughter would have carved stick figures into that cherrywood table, whether years from now she would have looked out upon the very same stars overhead at night and wished away on every single one of them. Would her precious little daughter have skipped along on this very same cobblestone street on her way to school?
As the enemy plane flies overhead the air smells like rotten eggs, and shells line the shadowy streets, sitting near houses stripped down to their steel skeletons. The enemy plane whips in front of the cold, stale illumination of the moon in the sky. men and women walk along the streets and for a moment as the moon is covered up they walk along nearly in complete darkness and chill. A woman in yellow walks slowly towards a bomb shelter; she thinks melancholic thoughts about the future of her and her daughter, growing up in a world full of tensions and full of war and bitterness and deceit. She thinks of the pain of war and what it brings for people not just in her own realm of reality but also the lives of people on other side. - She imagines a woman- perhaps in the same tattered and frayed yellow coat- and her own children, walking along the street towards a bomb shelter in the shadow of a plane. She wonders whether the woman's heart would drop to her stomach when she saw the symbols of two mortal enemies side by side flying above her.
This is not her battle, nor is it the battle of the women and men and children walking towards bomb shelters in fear of their lives in the dreary dark dead of the night. Maybe the pain that she feels can be felt in some way shape or form by another person, maybe it can be felt by a whole nation. Maybe she won't get out alive this time, but what if someone might, and go on to do great things and make the world a better place to live in. Maybe, just maybe someone good will make it out alive, maybe something good will come from all of this pain. But maybe history will be doomed to repeat itself once more, and the woman and her daughter will be walking towards their only safe haven only to never reach their destination.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
