The opening of my new story, hopefully to be published soon:
Marie waits for Dietrich, as she has every day for two years, on a crumbling stone bench facing the Burgplatz in Essen. It is warm for November, and she wears only a light wool coat and beret. Behind her sits the ruined cathedral of Saints Cosmos and Damian whose bells have been silent all this time. Since the war, the charred stone arches are open to the grey-white sky, the symmetry of stone and stained glass shattered by bombings, and the structure is a heap of rubble overgrown with weeds and vines. Marie waits for Dietrich, but she is not convinced that he will come, or even that he is still alive. At her apartment on a table by the door, sits a collection of letters that she has written, to Dietrich’s family home, all returned to her, marked unable to deliver.
Near Marie’s bench a group of children begins a circle game, singing a chant, Ringel, Ringel, Reihe, Ring around the Rosy. Marie’s eyes close and the scene around her is gone. In her head is the opera Wozzeck whose last scene includes a circle of children singing that very song. The haunting tune in the horns and strings opens the scene, and the children’s chant begins after an eerie harp glissando. In the opera the children clasp hands while a little boy circles them riding on his toy horse, his meager ethereal voice echoing: hop-hop, hop-hop, hop-hop. He continues his shrill song even after they tell him his mother is dead, murdered, of course, by his father, since all opera is overwhelmingly tragic.