Dear Franz,

My mother (who is not my mother) talks with me in the kitchen. We are back in the old house of my childhood. It was a small house where we knew all our neighbors and their children by first names, where we had all been in each other’s houses many times. Almost as if we were all subconsciously doing inspections all the time.

A young German soldier has taken shelter with us and is terrified. The house right above ours on our street has been taken over by Nazi soldiers. It’s become a makeshift barracks. It’s late at night and they are carousing loudly. You can hear German music and glasses clinking and the laughter of younger men wrapping around the laughter of older men. Because they are drunk and distracted, my mother encourages the young soldier to sneak out the kitchen’s back door into our dark backyard and make his way around to our driveway in front. He can sneak from shadowy tree to shadowy tree to make it. He can take our car and try to seek wherever it is shelter might be for him. Maybe he will join a different army. Maybe he will join our army or some faction of the resistance. Another man had been shot dead in the darkness of our yard less than an hour before this exchange. It might have been my brother in dark clothing. It might not. It might have been a dream stranger forming his features but never quite achieving them, like a mushy cookie whose baking tray was taken out of the oven too soon. Dreams have that remarkable cut-throat physics. People who are not quite people can affect you in the most remarkable ways.

The young German boy who had been sitting at our kitchen table weeping his story slips out our back door into the darkness. I don’t know my own age in the dream. I think I’m a boy, maybe an adolescent. But you can hover between ages in a dream. Maybe I’m no-age.

It isn’t long until we hear the gunfire outside and we chastise fate with each other, my mother and I. That poor boy. We don’t know what to do. We go to the front of the house and the car has not moved. He’s clearly down with the gunfire, probably dead. The carousing Germans must have left a few sober sentries watching our dark backyard. Probably they just sat in dark trees waiting for just this moment.

My mother decides to go out the back door after him, to follow the same path from our backdoor, up the hill and across our yard. I don’t know what the plan is. I guess reconnaissance, just to see what happened, but a rescue is possible. Maybe she will drag the young German boy back into our house and be a hero. Maybe we can save him. I watch her don her dark clothes and leave. We are not sentimental in parting. I am alone in the small night kitchen in the house that is the war come to America.

After an excruciating amount of time has passed, I am worried enough to leave the house to check on her. I decide to go out the front door and pass the car as I climb the hill from this unexpected direction. I see a body lying at the base of the next hill, the small one on which the neighbor’s house has always perched, the one that has the mix of rocks and perennial flowers like blue iris. A body lies still in darkness at the base of this hill. It is the young German soldier. He’s obviously dead.

I run back into my house. Whom do I call? Can you call the police in a strange neighbor war like this? It seems doubtful. What have they done with my mother?

But then I hear her voice through the night. She is telling a story, sometimes laughing. I don’t hear as many German voices now. I make my way back outside, into the night to get a view of the house.

I cannot see my mother but I hear her telling a story in German inside the neighbor’s house. It’s punctuated now by rounds of laughter at certain points and sometimes she sings snatches of German popular songs to further illustrate some point in her story. This makes both the young and old soldiers, whom I cannot see, laugh uproariously. I see only the small neighbor’s house on the hill and its lit windows. They are all clearly under her spell as she entertains in her perfect German.

I go back inside the my house and wonder at the dead German boy in our yard. His clump of darkness lies inside my head too. I sit on the living room sofa and watch a television screen that is just white static swirling with a hiss like a waterfall. The living room is otherwise dark, so if you stare into that screen you start to hallucinate things. The white particles edged with darkness seethe and teem. My white socks on my legs extended before me glow in the t.v. light. How perpendicular I am. I must be a boy.

I don’t call the police. I don’t call the police. And I don’t call the police.