featuring:
the end of a world—the ninety-eighth day—
a war maker—way of the words—a catatonic girl—
confessions—ilsa hermann’s little black book—
some rib-cage planes—and a mountain range of rubble
THE END OF THE WORLD (Part I)
Again, I offer you a glimpse of the end. Perhaps it’s to soften the blow for later, or to better prepare myself for the telling. Either way, I must inform you that it was raining on Himmel Street when the world ended for Liesel Meminger.
The sky was dripping.
Like a tap that a child has tried its hardest to turn off but hasn’t quite managed. The first drops were cool. I felt them on my hands as I stood outside Frau Diller’s.
Above me, I could hear them.
Through the overcast sky, I looked up and saw the tin-can planes. I watched their stomachs open and the bombs drop casually out. They were off target, of course. They were often off target.
A SMALL, SAD HOPE
No one wanted to
bomb Himmel Street.
No one would bomb a
place named after
heaven, would they?
Would they?
The bombs came down, and soon, the clouds would bake and the cold raindrops would turn to ash. Hot snowflakes would shower to the ground.
In short, Himmel Street was flattened.
Houses were splashed from one side of the street to the other. A framed photo of a very serious-looking Führer was bashed and beaten on the shattered floor. Yet he smiled, in that serious way of his. He knew something we all didn’t know. But I knew something he didn’t know. All while people slept.
Rudy Steiner slept. Mama and Papa slept. Frau Holtzapfel, Frau Diller. Tommy Müller. All sleeping. All dying.
Only one person survived.
She survived because she was sitting in a basement reading through the story of her own life, checking for mistakes. Previously, the room had been declared too shallow, but on that night, October 7, it was enough. The shells of wreckage cantered down, and hours later, when the strange, unkempt silence settled itself in Molching, the local LSE could hear something. An echo. Down there, somewhere, a girl was hammering a paint can with a pencil.
They all stopped, with bent ears and bodies, and when they heard it again, they started digging.
PASSED ITEMS, HAND TO HAND
Blocks of cement and roof tiles.
A piece of wall with a dripping
sun painted on it. An unhappy-looking
accordion, peering