Night of Broken Glass

Alistair sat on the floor of the alleyway, looking up at the stars. Why wouldn't he wake up? This must be a dream, forgive me, a nightmare. In real life something like this couldn't happen. Well, it could, but he would have acted differently.

The image of the jewish girl flashed in front of his eyes. Her big brown eyes had looked so tired. Why had the looked tired and not scared? This one night had shattered so much inside of her, that even the worst of moments could not spark fear in the deep brown iris but rather exhaustion.

It had to be a dream. There was no scientific way that he could actually be here, leaning agaisnt the brick wall that had once been the wall of a jewish shop. What had they sold here? Everything was broken and the inside had been burnt. The smell of smoke lingered in the air. 

Why hadn't he helped the girl? When the grinning men had pounced upon her, tearing her off of his arm, stealing her away into the shadows where she could not be seen or heard. And why, even when he tried to focus, could he see nothing of her face in detail excpet for those big, round eyes?

Alistair rested his forehead on his palm. He made a quick promise to himself that he'd book an appointement with a therapist. These nightmares were spiraling out of hand. But on the inside, he knew they weren't nightmares. His dead soul, pessimistic and lachrymose, had always known it. But his mind, the sharp and witty construct he'd built around himself, around the blackened core, was that of a good-doer. 

Alistair looked up. But the polluted sky over the cleansed German city refused to show him the stars. All he saw were man-made clouds. He hung his head heavily. I should have done something, even if I would have been beaten to death.

What had they done to the poor girl! Had they humiliated her, or hit her, had they torn at her dress, exposing her bare legs, running their fingers up her inner thighs? Had they raped her? First sticking their bright red cocks into her mouth before laying the pistol on her tongue, which they'd fired, leaving a hole through her brain? 

Alistairs thoughts tormented him. He found himself jumping on his feet and walking in the general direction which he'd fled from, only to fall back down to his knees and start sobbing. But his struggle was cut short as his mind reminded him that this was not reality; it was just a nightmare. One he'd wake up from in the morning.

But how dried up and shriveled would the life inside of him have to be for him to continue to dream of places like this? Reoccuring nightmares exist, but not historically acurate ones, filled with sensitive information that one couldn't know...

His mind jumped back to the present, to his knees which had become wet on the damp floor of the alley. Why were they wet? It hadn't rained? When he touched the fabric on his pants it wasn't moist in the slightest. Just freezing cold. Sometimes the kiss of November feels like water. 

He crawled back to the wall where he leaned against it again. The sky still hadn't cleared, the air was still tangy with smoke. Maybe it was the smoke that was enriching his brain with these terrible visions and halluciantions, maybe it was slowly poisoning him. The first thing poison does is take your mind. 

But naturally he was wrong. A slight breeze was blowing, and it scattered the smoke particals. He was only receiving slightly less oxygen than usual; not enough to make him insane. 

He closed his eyes and counted to ten. In those ten seconds the first meeting came to mind, the one where Goebbels had jump-scared him in his room, than Hitlers speech, the cocaine, the afterparty. He reminded himself that it was all a fallacy; made up by a depressed and burnt-out history freak who happened to be in office as the US President. But when his eyelids flickered open again he was still in the alley, in Germany's early November night. 

He stood up, brushed the dust off of his pants and slowly, taking his time, staggered down the alley, towards the street in which he himself had helped to vandalize jewish shops. 

There was something very wrong with him, he knew it. He was ripped out of the hellish nightmare as he stepped on shards of broken glass, the crunch under his heel reminding him of the shattered place Germany now found herself in. The shattered nation. 

When he looked up he was no longer in the alleyway, but marching towards a brown door. His first reaction was to open it; and when he did he found himself in Hitler's office. Goebbels was there, they were drinking whiskey. As if in a trance he kept walking, and he greeted both of them heartily. After a second, he was handed a glass of whiskey with ice. But although his hand hadn't trembled as he'd shaken Hitler's hand, it did when it touched the cool surface of the glass. And before he could grasp what had happened, it slipped out of his nervous hand and smashed onto the floor, causing little sharp pieces of glas to jump up his pants leg. 

"Are you alright, Alistair?" Goebbels said sligthly worridly, "you seem to be somewhere else in thought."

"I am." Alistair Bowmore admitted with a weak smile that reeked of nervosity and inner torment, "I was..." But he couldn't say he'd been outside, so he lied, regaining his composure on the outside, "I just had an argument with my wife today, it got pretty dirty."

"It'll blow over. Just buy her flowers." Goebbels answered reassuringly, "Adolf, pour him another glass of whiskey. We must celebrate! Revenge was ours tonight!"

So, after being handed a second glass of honey-brown alcohol, a sweet liquid that looked so careless and so unlike the tormented brown of the girls eyes, he toasted to the Kristallnacht with Hitler and Goebbels.