PLEASE DON'T ASK WHERE I HAVE BEEN. JUST ENJOY THESE UPDATES…YES, I SAID UPDATES!
A Wound Left Behind
By Fantasy Cat
Part Three
He seemed to have come out of nowhere, same filthy clothing and smell. He had a look of disgust on his face but at least he wasn't yelling at her.
Rin was torn between her desire to run and her curiosity as to what would happen now. The moment the two came eye to eye of each other, there was no turning back.
She saw his eyes look down to her hand. Rin noticed the lunch bag she gripped.
Slowly, the man was taken aback as Rin lifted the bag up to his face. She was pushing the bag towards him with her eyes closed.
She felt him snatch the bag.
The man began scavenging through the bag. The first thing he grabbed was the bottle of coke.
"Oh here," said Rin. Without thinking about her situation, she reached into the bag and grabbed the bottle opener and then opened the bottle for him.
He was sniffing the strange aroma that came from the bottle before he took a sip. Had this man not drink a coke in his life? Probably not since he was a foreigner.
Rin tried not to chuckle. He was sucking down that entire bottle. But then something caught Rin's eyes. It was a symbol patched to his shoulder. It was strange black symbol in a white circle against a red flag.
"What's that?" she asked absentmindedly. The stranger stopped chugging the coke bottle when he looked down and noticed Rin pointing to the patch. He shoved her hand away with a grunt and went back to his drink.
Rin rubber her hand in confusion and looking down she noticed that her time was running out. To stay here a minute longer would mean to get grounded again by her parents.
As she began to back away towards the exit, she watched him. He didn't seem to care that she was leaving. The moment Rin stepped outside she felt as though she never met the foreigner, except she never got to eat her own lunch.
She went straight back to the house and up to her room to lie down. It was the only place where Rin could concentrate on her thoughts. They have been absorbed by thoughts of the foreigner: his strange clothing, his language, his familiarity. It was killing Rin.
And worse yet, with the passing of time, it gave Rin a hard time when it came to studying. Her teacher yelled at her once because she wasn't taking notes. Now to make it look like she was, Rin would make doodles in her schoolwork when lecture were taking place. In history class, while the teacher and the rest of the class were talking about something like "world wars", Rin was busy trying to fit two awkward pieces together: her past and her dreams.
It all came to a screeching halt one afternoon while she was up in her room still struggling mentally over the thought of memories. Whenever she thought of the foreigner, she felt a deep sense of connection and concern for him…
"Rin, honey." Sango was at the door of Rin's bedroom. "We need to talk, dear."
"What? I'm okay," said Rin. But Sango shook her head. "Your teacher doesn't think so and neither do your father and I." Sango joined Rin on the bed and Rin became attentive when she noticed the sheet of paper in her mother's hand.
"Hey," Rin pointed. "Isnt that my…"
"Your English homework from yesterday," said Sango. "Your teacher has been concerned that you haven't been focusing in class. It shows because this didn't get a very high mark but he also brought something else to my attention." Sango pointed to the far left of the paper near the top where a black symbol had been heavily and cautiously penciled in."
"Rin, what in the world possessed you to draw this in class?" she asked her daughter.
"I don't know," Rin shrugged.
"Do you think that after all of these kinds that anyone would allow this kind of thing to be present, especially in this country!" Her mother's sudden outrage threw Rin into a frenzy of confusion. Why was she getting upset over a little mark.
"I…I don't understand," said Rin. "Really…I don't. I don't know what that is…I just saw it one day and I couldn't stop thinking about…"
"You saw it? But where?" Rin was relieved to her some calm in her mother's voice again but she shook at having to ask the question of where she saw the mark. It would be ill mannered to let her know that she met some stranger on the beach.
"I…," shook Rin. "I can't remember…It was a long time ago, I guess."
"You mean, that long ago…?" When hearing this it saved Rin from trouble but also comforted her to know that they were talking about their pasts again with great curiosity. "Yeah."
"Do you know what this symbol represents Rin? It represented something back where we came from."
"Our symbol?" asked Rin.
"No, Rin. It's not that at all. You know, your father and I haven't told you a whole lot about the war, but maybe it's time you understood how bad it was on all of us, including you."
That was all that was needed to get Rin out of her daydreams and disturbed mental state. All she ever knew was that she was a war orphan but she never knew anything about the war itself and that alone could've been an important key. She made a note to herself to start paying attention in history class from now on.
"That symbol," Sango pointed to the paper again. "Was used by the enemy. Of course, no one never expected them to be the enemy until they started doing terrible things. It was only a little over ten years ago when they started sweeping throughout all of Europe."
"So they must've killed a lot of people?" asked Rin.
Sango sighed. "Yes, Rin. But you must understand. These were not the usual sort of bad guys, they only targeted a certain group of people. A large but individual group and the fact that they killed as much of this certain group of people as they could throughout their growing land made them more feared."
There was a moment of silence by Sango until…
"That was us wasn't it?" asked Rin. "Tttttthere aren't many Jewish people here. Everyone at school is weird when I bring that up so that makes me different and everyone in this house is Jewish and they said they all had a bad time during the war…Is that what really happened to everyone and…my family? I thought they all went to the prison camps."
"They sent all of our kind to the prison camp but only as a means to make death more organized. Even before then however, Jews would be randomly targeted for death. Mr. Inuyasha and his wife were in those camps and they saw a lot of carnage."
Sango noticed her daughter shaking. "Rin, is this bothering you? Do you want me to stop?"
"No…" Rin quivered. "It's alright. I want to know more."
"Well," Sango continued. "It took a few years but finally reinforcements from countries far away banded together and that was how the war got started. But none of these people who came to rescue us had no idea of what was happening to our people, not until they finally came to free us. But by then so much damaged had already been done. The enemy was so determined in their one goal to kill us that many families were torn apart or extinguished all together. Some couldn't last a few months in that kind of condition and only a few got off lucky. You could not remember having a family over there. It's likely that they were taken and had died. Otherwise, I'm sure they would've come looking for you before we came here."
Rin wanted so badly to remember her past family, even if they were without much doubt deceased but these days she had given up on that. This enemy had been capable of destroying so much. Even hopes and dreams were crushed under their reign. She looked down on the floor and asked "What was the enemy?"
"The enemy was a political party. Many wars start because of different views on how a country should be run. But it was rare even now to see a certain group of people so bent on taken over the world, and these were Germans. A National Socialist Party, which ran Germany and soon, Germany wanted to steal other lands and control their people. That was how they were able to kill so many of us. Here in America, they just like to call them Nazis."
Rin's heart stopped at that very moment. That man…the lunatic Nazi…a man responsible for slaughtering so many of her own kind…maybe her family...
…it couldn't be.