Dreamer

Anneliese

Anneliese Haas had been beautiful. Naturally beautiful. The kind that doesn't wash away. She had the innocent kind of beauty that takes people by surprise, turns heads, creates the need for a second look. It was the kind that doesn't walk by very often and is gone too soon—too easily crushed, destroyed. That was Anneliese Haas.

Her eyes were more radiant than the sun itself, pools of pure gold pulling you in, drowning you. She had a cute perky little nose and the mouth of a china doll. Her hair was deep brown which sparkled when the light hit it. They had chopped it all off. It used to flow down her back, bouncing as she walked. She reached up to touch it, to bring herself back to reality, but her hands were bound. She had forgotten.

She hadn't seen herself in a mirror in over a month. She shuddered to think of how she looked now, sitting in a stinking cell, waiting. Her eyes sunken and surrounded with a new darkness, darting around—full of fear. Her once soft skin, darkened by the sun, was pale and pasty now, shriveled. Her form was shrunken; she knew that. They didn't feed her. Her lips were chapped and her hair was gone.

She used to sit in class at school, twirling her hair about her fingers. She knew it was prideful to think so, but she enjoyed how soft it was. Her mother used to put curlers in it before she went to bed at night so that tight, bouncy curls sprouted from all over her head the next morning. She would tie it back with a red ribbon she had gotten off of a shoebox and then skip off to school in her Mary Janes. Now, she imagined, her hair was sticking up at odd angles—sharp points protruding from her head—forming some sort of morbid crown. With nothing to tie her ribbon around, she had twisted it into a bracelet. As far as she knew, it was still around her wrist.

To her the ribbon represented all that had been and no longer was. She wanted it back. Not just her hair, not even her beauty; all of it. Her mother, her father, her grandmother, her little black kitten, the stone cottage at the end of the lane, the babbling brook, the church with its white steeple. Perhaps her memory was muddled and anything looked brighter and better and perfect in comparison to where she was now, but even still she had never realized how much of a fairy-tale she had been living in until she had lost it all. Now she was not in a fairy-tale. She was surrounded on all sides by cold, hard reality.

They had taken her when she was sixteen. How long ago had that been? A month? Two? A year? Not a year, surely. Was she still sixteen? She couldn't remember. There was no sun, no way to tell day from night other than the shift of the guards in the prison, and no one to keep her company besides the voices in her head whispering things of the past.

She had been a wild child before they had taken her: bad grades, talking during church, neglecting her chores, and constantly reading some romance novel, writing some romance novel, or living out her own romance novel. Peter Dyllis had been her last beau, before they had taken him. They had taken him even before they had taken her; they needed more soldiers and Peter had been a strapping young lad. He was dead now, she figured. They might as well all be dead by now. They'd be better off.

When they had first taken her, she had fancied Peter would show up in his stiff, ugly, Nazi uniform, carrying his big army boots to silence his feet. He would come to her with his finger on his lips, silencing her sudden exclamation of joy, and proceed to untie the tight ropes which bound her. She would leap into his arms and he would carry her away from all of the pain. They would escape to America where they could be married and live happily ever after. She was a dreamer, but dreamers don't survive in the real world. Peter never came. 

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