Toy Soldiers
Who: Fancy, OPEN What: Anything Where: Church (Evening Mass) When: April 13 Incomplete
The smell of the incense burned her nose. She thought about the stories she'd heard. About the boys who'd been in the last war, their lungs burned from the inside, condemned to cough them up in chunks as they waited for a choking death that wouldn't come quick enough . She also had heard that they were gassing the jews. They may have already gassed <i>her</i>. She shivered then, not so much as from the cool april air that wafted in through the opening and closing of the heavy church as from the memories in her mind. A smile, a touch, things powerful and yet fragile. Here in an instant and gone in a flash. Life was so short and too long all at the same time.
She glanced around at the people who filled the pews. <i>I should have done something. I could have done something. Tried.</i> But she hadn't wanted to get involved. Just wanted to be left to her own devices. Good God was she ever paying for that now. What had France been thinking? Letting these monsters in? They looked so at home here, were already settling in. How long would it be before they decided to 'morally cleanse' Paris? Would her occupation suddenly cause her to be an undesirable citizen. At least her Parisian neighbors only glared and slurred her behind her back. But the Nazi's, regardless of the fact they were guilty of using her services the Nazi's could turn on her at any moment. And they wouldn't use words and looks to get their points across. The Nazi's signed all their contracts in blood.
She wanted to do something. Fight back, make them pay, find answers to her questions; something, anything. But what? And how? She'd heard rumors that people were doing things, but it was all second hand information. She could get papers, information; drunken lusting soldiers slipped up, or passed out. Either was helpful. But what good was any of it if she didn't know what to do with it?
She really didn't know why she kept coming to church.