The lost daughter and other short stories, Angela Werner [good romance books to read txt] 📗

Angela Werner

The lost daughter
… and other short stories

 

Content

The house with the red geranium

The monkey and the gazelles

The falcon

Late Christmas-luck for lottery-gamer

My time between cow-dung and King Thrushbeard

The lost daughter

I don’t let someone hurt me anymore

The prevented men’s night
 


The house with the red geraniums

On the end of the small village there was a white-painted house, the roof was covered with brown-red bricks. Two windows showed to the street. In front of both windows were flower-boxes arranged; both planted with blossoming red geraniums. Round the house there was a small garden, very well-kept, but no blooming bushes, only well planted beds with tomatoes, lettuce, strawberries, onions, carrots … Behind the house there were also, neatly planted behind the fence, bushes with red and black currants, raspberries and gooseberries.

Here lived, already since many years, a man with his wife. The name of the man was Walter and he was 78 years old. He felt like 78 as well. “I can’t understand the oldies who always claim they would feel 30 years younger”, he once said to his wife Elli. “That’s simply not true. I can’t run up the stairs anymore like a man in the prime of life. I can’t get drunk anymore like a man in the prime of life. Every morning I first need a few minutes to get up from the bed at all. Not to talk about some other things which I can’t remember anyway …”. He more whispered the recent sentence. Thereupon Elli reprehended him not to lament so much and anyway he finally should remove his stamp collection because they are going to have dinner.

Walter left the house. He deeply inhaled the clean air and noted that it was really warm. He didn’t notice that for a long time. In front of the windows the geraniums hang in full flowerage. “It looks like the house would bleed from its eyes”, he thought and digressed his head. He came down the two stone steps in front of the door and went on the paved between the beds behind the house. The sun gave a friendly light to the whole garden; anyway Walter looked sullen to the vegetable patches. Here he kneed day by day and picked strawberries, pulled carrots out of the ground, cut salads, picked snails from the leaves and trampled them down, pinched weeds, picked berries from the bushes and let them scratching his arms, he got back pains and knee pains and sunburn and all this because she wanted it so. Elli loved her garden and it always had to look clean. She picked every fallen leaf from the ground to throw it into the green ton. During the cold season she wrapped her beloved garden gnomes into plastic film that they don’t took any damage. Of course she could not do all this work alone and because her Walter was hardly to get out of the house so he had to work in the garden, on the fresh air. While he came back groaning into the house, she fast ran outside again, to remove his footsteps between the plants with the rake. At least she could teach him to knock off his garden shoes and leave them under the stairs before he came back into the house.

Walter watched a butterfly that set down on the Currant bush. He thought of the many glasses full of jam, preserved carrots and tomatoes – never would they be able to eat all this and every year there came new glasses. In the past Elli gave to the children at least. During every visit they had to take a basket full with self made jam and vegetable. But since two years the kids didn’t come anymore. Elli scared them with her pedantry. A phone call every year for Christmas, that’s all.

Walter walked on around the house. Thereby he regarded not to step on the paved but right through the middle of the beds. He enjoyed to thread down a strawberry plant and viewed the red slush which was forming under his shoe. “Well, today is not harvested!” he thought evil and he already looked forward to step into the house with his dirty shoes. Elli would become crazy. A dirty floor – that was for her as same unimaginable as sleeping in the morning (Every morning she stood up before six to do her gymnastics.), as same unimaginable as putting glasses without mats on the table, as same unimaginable as boiled eggs for breakfast without the crochet chicken over to keep warm.

Walter passed the garden gnomes family while he don’t missed to poke Mrs. Garden Gnome with her floral pinafore and the rake in her hand headfirst in the ground. Then he left the land and banged the dark brown garden gate behind himself. He went along the grape-vines which were in splendid flower; little grapes were to see already. Behind the vine-yard the forest began but Walter would even not walk till there. He felt again a dragging pain in his left breast-half which radiates to his arm. “My heart is no longer with me”, he sullen thought. Still, he had not felt in a long time as well as today. Again he deep inhaled the summer air and thought how long he wasn’t here outside anymore. It was so beautiful – the grape-vines, above the blue sky with a few white clouds, a light breeze that blew over his nearly bald head. He thought briefly that he forgot to fit his hat. Because of the sun. But that was nothing to care about anymore.

Everything was so different came as he envisioned his retirement. He wanted to visit his stamp-friends in France and Slovenia, wanted to show his wife the Portuguese Coast whereof he had read so much. They were never more than to come to the city for the children. Elli doesn’t want to leave the garden alone. “Imagine how it would look here if we leave for some weeks!” she always said. “The people will think since dwell philistines!” It was absurd to explain her that all the people here knew who lived in the house with the garden gnomes.

Walter turned back to the house. The red geraniums already shined from afar. He opened the garden gate and after a short hesitation he let it open. He opened the house door and stepped in with his dirty shoes. Elli lay still there as well as he left her. He wondered if he maybe would have expected she would stand up again to at least remove the bloody stains from the floor. She lay on her stomach, the head turned unnaturally to the side. The large meat knife from the top drawer still stuck in her back. Her beige blouse was colored deep red like the geraniums in front of the windows. Walter stepped with a large pace over her and went to the office room. Very back in the little cupboard where it was him allowed to keep his stamp albums, there was a small hollow and from there he got out the bottle which he had always successfully hided from here once she tilted down a whole bottle of Nordhäuser Doppelkorn (schnapps) in the basin three years ago. Walter took a deep swig satisfied. Then he took the phone and dialed the number of the police.

Later while the two officers, each on one side, leaded him out of the white painted house, he turned a last time and looked to the geraniums. “They will now dry up”, he thought and a satisfied smile began to spread on his face.
 


The monkey and the gazelles

The boss of the monkeys had become a megalomaniac with time. He wanted to become the disposer over a herd of gazelles and began to build a high border around the place where the gazelles browses. With the help of some other monkeys he built a high wall of stones, wood and brushwood – so high that the gazelles were not able to jump over.

He convinced the gazelles that this border would protect them. He talked to the gazelles about the dangers which would lurk behind the border, about the lions and leopards who seek for their life. Some of the gazelles were thankful for the protection, others were outraged by the restriction of their freedom, but over time, the animals got used to it. For the younger gazelles, which were born within the limits, the life was normal.

But among the animals themselves outside of the gazelles-zone was discontent widespread with time. The lions had to go so far away from their usual resting places to find food. The high fence disfigured the savannah. But most of the animals annoyed the arrogance and megalomania of the Apes. They began to work together with the birds and they let the birds get through secret messages to the trapped gazelles.

The birds talked to the gazelles about the world behind the border – yes, there were also dangers but there also was a vast and unexplored land, many other different animals, flowers, trees ... and finally they all belonged together and they should not be dominated by a herd of arrogant monkeys.

Among the gazelles came more and more protest against the dictatorship of the monkeys. Suddenly they felt a strong desire for freedom and they finally wanted to know the world outside the limits. Because the monkeys did not listen to reason, the herd of gazelles formed a big and strong community and by joining forces, they succeeded in one night and lift with their horns a hole in the fence. It was big enough that one gazelle after the other could slip through to the other side.

From this day on the gazelles enjoyed their freedom. In leaps and bounds, they explored the savannah. From now on, they always had to be on guard against predators but there was so much new and beautiful to discover, so many different animals to know.
Never again, they could be suppressed by a monkey because freedom is more important than a dubious safety.
 


The falcon (free by Boccaccio)

Matthias just sat in the shadow in front of his house door and strummed a little bit on his guitar as he saw her upcoming the street. First he thought it was a mental delusion. But it really was Claudia of Eberstein! Matthias stood up and did slide the guitar to the ground. Did she really want to …? In fact – now she waved to him and came smiling to his garden gate. “Hello Matthias” she said and looked a little bit embarrassed. She had dark shadows under her eyes and seemed to be a bit thinner and paler than just a few weeks ago as he random met her. But for Matthias she seemed to be the most beautiful and most elegant woman in the world. Never before he had seen such cocoa brown eyes, than this high forehead, the long and black shining hair and then this figure! He always had loved her, never wanted another woman than her but she always was so inaccessible for him. He did remember that her husband, something like a baron of old German nobility, died two years ago and that she lived alone with her little son since