Hey everyone so here is a story Im writing about a woman in WWI, who falls in love with a German man. Its called, My Enemy, My Heart.
Anna stared into the package through tear glazed eyes. A few pieces of metal, a packet of letters, and a tattered uniform. All that were left of her Joe. Next to the package lay the telegram, the one that had started it all, the one that had turned her life upside down.
She pulled out the uniform then put it to her nose and took a deep breath. A bittersweet smile touched her lips as she breathed in the scent of smoke, dirt, and sweat. The scent of Joe. He had never been one very taken to worrying much about sanitation and had constantly annoyed her with the scent he often brought to bed. She had never imagined she would miss the smell, but she did, oh how she did.
Sobs racked her body and her fingers shook so much that the uniform fell from her hands to the ground. Anna wiped her face with the back of her hand, handkerchief forgotten. With a tremulous hand she reached out and grabbed the frayed brown fabric. As she picked it up it came unfolded and a slip of paper fell unnoticed from a pocket.
After carefully refolding the uniform, a process made longer by the need to constantly wipe away her tears, she placed it back on the table and returned to sorting through the contents of the package. She still couldn’t bring herself to call it what she knew it was, not even to herself. She couldn’t bring herself to refer to it as her husband’s remains.
Partially because she still couldn’t believe he was gone, but mostly because these few items showed so little of who were husband really was. They didn’t show his gorgeous blue eyes, they didn’t show the way he said ‘I love you’ just because he felt like it, they didn’t show his incredible heart.
She took out the letters next, her entire correspondence with her husband during his two year tour. She didn’t need to read them to know what they said, they’d come from her heart and were still there, but she did anyways. The sun set before she was done but she just lit a lamp and kept reading until her tired eyes were too blurred to continue.
She stood and pushed in her chair, sleep impeding her movements. She gave one glance to the pile of undone dishes at the sink, but decided they could wait until morning. She padded up the stairs and into her bedroom. She pulled off her dress and tossed it onto a dresser then pulled her nightgown over her head.
Throwing back the covers she fell right into bed. After her day she was drained both physically and mentally. She fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow, before she’d even bothered to pull up the covers.
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Anna blinked her swollen eyes as she sat up. The bright light pouring through her window told her that she had slept far beyond what she normally did. She brushed a hand through her blond hair, her fingers catching on the knots she hadn’t bothered to brush out the night before.
She threw back the covers and stepped to the floor, her body protested but she knew that staying in bed would do her no good. Over the past two years she had seen many widows, far too many, but the saddest were always the ones who retreated so far into themselves that they became mere shells.
There were moments when Anna was tempted to do the same, but she’d promised Joe that she wouldn’t. And that was a promise she didn’t intend to break. Instead she threw herself into her work. Running the farm on her own wasn’t easy, but it was also her only choice. With so many men fighting there was no one to hire.
Most of her family had tried to convince her to sell but that was something she wouldn’t do, at least not yet. The idea of selling the home she had shared with her husband was not a pleasant one.
She picked up her discarded dress from the night before and added it to the growing laundry pile. Doing so many outdoor chores had caused the inside of her home to suffer, but the farm came first. So she wasn’t exactly the perfect domestic women, so her skin had been reduced to the texture of sandpaper and her hair was growing more and more similar to a bird’s nest, she was okay with her life. More than she had been since receiving that telegram last month.
She looked out the window, it was bright and sunny, something she needed to take advantage of after the recent cloudy days. Besides, after last night she needed to let off a little stress, and there was no better way to do that than working outside.
She decided against a full breakfast, merely grabbing an apple on her way through the kitchen, and headed right for the barn. She gave a sad look to the many empty stalls, despite the work they entailed she missed the cows. Now the barn’s lone occupants were her pair of work horses, her mare, and the single cow she’d kept for milk.
The horses knickered as she stepped through and she stopped to pat the noses of each of them in turn before pouring oats into their troughs. After seeing that each horse was taken care of she left the barn and went around to the back of the house to work on her garden.
Anna couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride when she saw her garden. When she and Joe had first moved here the garden, planted by their homes previous owners, was weed infested and dry. Now it was filled with blooming plants of a great variety.
However her garden had suffered after she’d had to take up the farm work and she could see weeds popping up between the rows and yellowing leaves drooping towards the ground. Snapping on her garden gloves she went straight at the weeds, doing her best to pull them up right at the roots.
She had always thought it was a pity that she couldn’t just farm weeds, after all they grew healthy and strong without watering or tending and they seemed to plant themselves somehow. All she would have to do was harvest them.
As she was in the middle of these thoughts she came to one particularly stubborn weed, all her pulling seemed to have no effect on it. She finally found herself squatting like an umpire at a baseball game, trying to get better leverage. She pulled hard leaning back, and all of the sudden the weed gave and she fell back, striking the dusty ground with an ‘oomph’.
“Well, maybe the harvesting wouldn’t be so easy either.” She muttered to herself.
A high-pitched giggle came from behind her and she turned to find a little girl standing behind her, a smile on her face. Her pale blond hair curled around her grubby face in wisps and her bright blue eyes were nearly hidden under ridiculously long lashes. Her dress, which was little better than a rag, was likely red at one time but now appeared brown.
The child’s presence puzzled her, although the countryside had become far more populated of late her farm remained remote, the nearest neighbor being several miles away. How could a little girl get all the way out here all by herself? That brought another question to her mind, was she alone?
“Where did you come from?” She asked, getting to her feet and moving toward the child. The little girl just continued to smile at her, it was only now that Anna noticed the sign of tear tracks on her face and a piece of paper pinned to her ragged dress.
Anna moved forward carefully, slowly, not wanting to alarm the child until she could kneel in front of her. She reached out and unpinned the paper and unfolded it.
Dear Lady, I hav ben watching yu, the idea made Anna look around subconsciously, I no yu ar a gud lady and yu will bee a gud too my girl. Her naim is Sally. Pleez taik gud cair uv her.
Anna’s first reaction to the crude letter was to laugh, this had to be a joke, this sort of thing only happened in stories, certainly not in real life, and certainly not to her. Still, there didn’t appear to be anyone with the child, and she couldn’t just leave her like this.
“Are you hungry Sally?” She asked in her best sweet voice, she had never been very comfortable with children.
The little girl nodded emphatically, sending her blond curls bobbing, but she didn’t say anything. Anna held out her hand tentatively but the little girl didn’t hesitate to wrap her tiny fingers around Anna’s. Her skin was incredibly soft, almost the texture of silk, and her grip surprisingly strong.
Anna was shocked at Sally’s trust in her, a complete stranger. Although that certainly made her job simpler, since it appeared she would be caring for the girl for the time being, at least until she had time to call the sheriff and ask what she should do.
The pair made slow progress to the house as Anna found herself forced to match Sally’s small steps. When they reached the step Anna impulsively swept up the child, who giggled in response. She tried to ignore how soft she felt in her arms and the warmth of the tiny body pressed against her own. She couldn’t get attached to the child after all, she didn’t have the time to take care of the child, and this was a matter for the authorities anyways.
Inside Anna set Sally down on a chair at the kitchen table then went to the icebox to see what she could feed the girl. She pulled out the milk jug and the butter then took a loaf of bread out of the breadbox. Taking a knife she cut a slice of bread then slathered it with butter. After filling a glass with milk she took the snack to the table where she found Sally laying on her stomach over the chair, stretching her tiny arm towards something on the ground.
Anna set the food on the table then bent over to see what Sally was reaching for. She leaned down and picked up a scrap of paper. She was going to throw it away when she spied handwriting on the back. She turned it over and read it, it was an address, a German address.