Write...Edit...Publish: Dark Places

The Apartment

Although only ten years old, Pierre had known for a long time that he was different. For as long as he could remember, he’d heard things others didn’t seem to hear. Voices, screams, laughter. Cries of pain. When he entered a new place, he could hear those who had been there before him. He heard their joy. Their pain. Their terror.

At first he’d assumed everyone could hear the past. He’d learned quickly that his parents couldn’t. When he’d mentioned the voices to them he’d been frightened of the looks they’d given him. They’d chalked his experiences up to a vivid imagination and a desire for playmates, imaginary or otherwise. He’d wondered why anyone would want a man screaming in pain or a woman gasping for air as hands tightened around her neck as playmates, but he’d kept quiet. From then on, he’d never mentioned the things he heard again. He’d merely listened.

But now he realized that just listening was no longer going to be an option. Soon after he and his parents had moved into the loft apartment in Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood for the summer for his father’s work, Pierre knew that something was different in this place.

The apartment was old and spacious, and his mother had declared her love for it the day they had moved in. She’d visited a woman who ran a flower stall on the corner and purchased white rose bushes for the front window box. His mother told him a white rose symbolized innocence. She loved flowers and their meanings. Pierre remembered that at one point she had told him that dried white roses symbolized sorrow.

That would be more appropriate, as the apartment was a place of sorrow. Of grief and fear and death. Pierre heard a woman crying for her lover, a World War I soldier lost forever to the trenches. He heard a Jewish family frantically trying to plan an escape from Paris now that the Nazis had taken over. He heard a man sobbing at his wife’s bed as she lay dead following the birth of a stillborn child.

Pierre was used to these sorts of voices. Tragedies from the past. But this apartment held something new for him. Voices of those whose stories had not yet ended.

He’d first heard the women’s cries when he’d gone to bed on their third night in the apartment. His room was small, with a strange extra closet built into one wall. The landlady had explained that the previous tenant, an architect, had built the closet himself and added a padlock to its door. When he moved out, he didn’t leave her the key to the lock. She was defensive when questioned about the locked door, saying she’d meant to get a locksmith to unlock the closet but we all know how busy life is, don’t we? Not wanting a fight, Pierre’s mother had dropped the issue.

Pierre wasn’t totally sure why the padlock had been left on the door, but he knew it wasn’t for anything good. He’d known that as soon as he’d heard the women’s voices that third night. So many different voices. Pierre couldn’t keep track of them all.

“Help find us, please.”

“Our families don’t know what happened to us. Won’t you help?”

“He killed us. But no one knows. Please, please help.”

Pierre heard the pleas, and he was unable to shake these voices off like he had all the others. Because their stories weren’t over. They needed him to help. But what could he do?

He was determined to find out. Unfortunately, he knew he couldn’t pressure his mother to make the landlady hire a locksmith. If he told her why he needed it to be done, she’d fly off the handle. His parents both thought Pierre's "imaginary" voices were a thing of the past.

He ventured to the library and checked out books on how to pick locks. He’d open the closet door himself. How hard could it be? Pierre had always been a smart boy, and good with his hands. He was sure he’d have no trouble.

He stopped at the hardware store to buy a small lock picking kit. Now he was ready to solve the mystery. As he returned home, he noticed that in spite of his mother’s best care, the white roses were drying out and dying.

Pierre shut his bedroom door and got to work at once on his new project. He tried every suggestion in his books and used all of the tools in his kit, yet nothing opened the padlock. Night after night Pierre heard the voices begging for help. And day after day he tried to pick the look. Nothing worked.

Before he knew it, the summer was drawing to a close and it was time for Pierre and his family to leave the apartment. The voices weighed heavily on his mind. He still heard them, and he knew that there was something they wanted him to see in the closet. Something that would tell their stories

On his last day in the apartment, Pierre sat at the closet door. Frantic, he tried one last time to open the lock.

“Pierre!” his mother called. “We’re leaving. Get down here!”

Pierre sighed and stood up from the floor, staring at the locked door.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I tried.”

He dropped his tools on the floor and let them roll away. There was nothing more he could do now. The mystery of the closet would be someone else’s to solve.

“Pierre!” His mother’s voice had turned shrill.

“Okay!”

He ran down the stairs of the loft and went outside with his parents to their waiting cab. As the cab driver pulled away from the curb, Pierre looked up at the empty apartment.

The voices were silent. The window box roses had turned black.

This story is a companion to my WIP called A Windowbox in Paris. It's not part of the book but the adult Pierre is one of the WIP's main characters, as is the apartment. I never intended to write anything about Pierre's childhood though until I started thinking about a story for the October hop.

Big thanks as always to Denise and Yolanda for hosting this great hop. 😊

Write...Edit....Publish: Reunions

The Last Reunion

Oscar opened the door to the party room at the Cincinnati senior center and prepared for one final reunion with his World War II buddies. They’d been infantry men, part of A Company of the 1st battalion, 116th regiment. They’d been among the first to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day, going ashore at Dog Green. Within 15 minutes of landing, most of the company had been shot, their bodies shredded to pieces. Oscar and his friends were among the few survivors.

When the war ended, the men had returned to their home towns of Milwaukee, New York, Houston, Sacramento, Savannah, and Bloomington, Indiana. Chicago, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and Windsor Lock, Connecticut. They’d found jobs, married, and had children. None spoke of Omaha and the horrors they had endured on that bloody June day. There was too much life to be lived to focus on so much death.

But as their children grew and their nests emptied, as retirement took them out of the daily grind of working life, as they began traveling with their wives and visiting places they’d never had time to see as young men, their minds started to drift back to the summer of 1944. They allowed themselves to talk about what they’d experienced on the coast of France.

When the 50th anniversary of the day so many young men had been slaughtered loomed, Oscar realized he wanted to return to Normandy. He wanted to see Omaha Beach as it was now. As it had no doubt been for thousands of years. A peaceful stretch of coastline, with the waves of the Atlantic lapping the shore. The tide coming in, the tide going out. No blood, no screams of the dying, no terror.

For the first time in decades, he allowed himself to remember the men he’d screamed with, cried with, and found shelter with as bullets whizzed past their heads. He heard the cries of those who’d been shot and slaughtered as clearly as if their deaths had been five minutes, not five decades, ago.  And he wanted to know if his fellow survivors were still here, like him. Surviving.

So Oscar had arranged the first Company A reunion, and the men had traveled across the sea once more to meet on the bluffs of Omaha Beach. They’d visited the graves of those who had never been able to return to their home towns. They’d shed tears as they paid their respects in the cemetery marked with an unearthly silence and a sense of young lives taken far too soon.

From then on, they’d met every two years, taking turns hosting the reunions. Randy was the first one to leave them, felled by a cancerous tumor at the age of 75 rather than German artillery at 18. Harold went next, then Roger, Charlie, and Mick.

Two years ago, only three had been left to attend the Omaha reunion. Now, as Oscar prepared the room, he knew he would not be here by the time two years came around again. He hadn’t needed the doctor to tell him he only had about six months left, if that. There are some things a man simply knows.

So he’d reserved the room one last time. He’d asked his daughter to set up the folding chairs in a circle, the way the men had always sat when they met up. Now, he took out a folder of photographs.

The photos were taken when the men had first been drafted into the Army. They were young and trying desperately to look older and more distinguished. Their faces were those of innocence. Of neighborhood baseball games, summer jobs, first dates, and first kisses. Faces that had no comprehension of Omaha Beach and the horrors that awaited them.

Oscar went around the circle and placed a photo on each chair. Randy, Roger, Harold, Charlie, Mick. Tony, Bobby, Hector, Steven. All gone now.

Oscar sat down on the last chair and took a bottle of beer from the cooler he’d carried in from his car. He opened it and raised the bottle in a toast.

“Here’s to us, boys.”

Through the window of the senior center, Oscar could hear a dog barking and a cat mewling in response. A bus stopped, let its passengers off, and drove away again. The footsteps of a runner pounded the pavement of the sidewalk, fading as the runner moved along. A horn honked and a man shouted obscenities. A police siren wailed. Two women talked and laughed.

The time was coming when there would be no one left who could remember Omaha Beach. No one who would think of D-Day, or the war itself, as anything more than a chapter in a history book.

But that time was not here yet.

Oscar sipped his beer and looked around the room at the photos of his friends. “Here’s to us.”

My story was inspired by this photo of my Dad, a World War II vet who reconnected with his war buddies in the 1990s.

I'm excited to be participating in the WEP hop for the first time. Thanks to Denise Covey and Yolanda Renee for hosting!