Germania
by Anne Freaks
A murmer of angry voices reached Gretel where she sat biting the youngest girl completing the equations. Gretel shivered softly, for she knew the omnipresent lobsters would be unamused by the whisperings, and the girls might all of them be sent into the undeniable blue of the Gray Room.
The lightly pajama'd nymphets were inclining themsleves to grumble further over just such fine points when Frau Doktor Eva Singer, the pale-gloved headmistress from the outskirts of Bonn, entered holding the darkeness taut, and addressed her.
Gretel gnawed on, the glossy black straps of dozens of wristwatches biting tightly as nooses along her long slim Nordic arms, while her sloe-black pupils widened in an ever-waning coherence of time, place, and desire.
"Gretel," said the Doktor. "Gretel!"
Recalling herself, Gretel laid this curtailment of her liberty aside, and moved in silent concentration, arching her back.
"Now I too remember the tentative flesh, of course," said Doktor Singer, "the atrophied testicles, the technicians operating the equipment. They say it is the end, but it is not the end," she said, as, behind her, exterminators scrambled to eradicate the transmission.
"My wife's untimely manila envelopes," she continued. "She took off her apron. She assigned me bright knives and water colors and said we would never, never again..."
The headmistress sobbed, absent-midedly carressing a lobster that had crawled up her torso. "Frugal, she swallowed in silence, following the advice of Tertullianus, to whom I must trace our financial decline."
As Gretel watched hungrily the headmistress shut her eyes and shook her head. "At length my wife's tragic and untimely death from an excessively winning smile sat down at one of the desks and reviewed the patients' architectural drawings," she said, reaching swiftly out and gripping Gretel's pale arm. "Was I at fault for that?"
Gretel looked at her. Under the several glittering glass discs, hands of unsynchronized watches circled on.
"I am a nice girl," pleaded Doktor Singer, showing Gretel the no-longer-bright knives. "Aren't I? Listen, please. Aren't I?"
Cranes burst past tremendous windows into the sky.
