Read Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories for Free Online

indefatigable trains. I don’t know—maybe it was just from being starved—but even if I’d complained back then about the cramps and the low-grade headache, about the messy red napkins and the elastic sanitary belt, even though I griped like my girl cousins and school friends, I’d been secretly pleased when I got my period. Like being admitted to some exclusive club you longed—ached—to get into. But, that had been taken from me, too.
    “Up ’til then, even though she said she had Doctor Viktor Freisler wrapped around her little finger, Ludi hadn’t been able to convince me to ‘organize’ the supply room. Oh, I knew she was taking things here and there—bandages, ointments for trench foot—that kind of thing. But she was crafty and she didn’t have to rely on stealing from just the infirmary. She had ‘Canada,’ too. You could buy off an SS-Totenkopfverbände —a young German guard—for a half-pint of schnapps , or a kiss . . .
    “It was about a week before my birthday and Ludi said, ‘You’ve been eating a little better and now that you look a little better, Gia’—she called me that, a nickname for Eligia and I’d never had any nickname before—‘and Rudi’—Rudi was one of her swains, ‘Rudi has a friend named Frederic, and he would like to spend a little time with you . . . ’”
    I knew who Frederic was. He had blond hair and green eyes, a grin like my father’s. If he weren’t German—if he were Polish—I’d have had a hopeless crush on him. Still, he was very good looking, and Ludi said he was nice.
    “Take your time,” Stella Johansson, said. She could see I was struggling to get this out; she didn’t even glance at the thin bracelet watch on her wrist to check how long I’d been talking. She was very pretty; even the weak, intermittent late April sun brought out the golden highlights in her soft brown upswept hair. She was so much like Ludi, I thought maybe I could tell her everything. Tell her how, without meaning to, I betrayed my mother for a pair of red high-heeled shoes. Red shoes . . .
    Red shoes . . . and a broken tooth.
    Stella Johansson was so pretty, I thought she’d understand better—more clearly—if I explained about my father and Ruta and my mother. Surely, as a good-looking grown-up woman, she knew the significance—the importance—of physical appearance. “When my father disappeared, there was a postcard,” I said.
    “Yes,” she said, nodding. “That was such a low trick the Nazis played. Giving those early prisoners postcards making them say all was well and that inmates could receive packages. The SS got more goods for the Reich, they got addresses of others who would, in turn, become prisoners. They falsely assured those not yet rounded up that things were not so bad in the camps. All lies . . . and more subterfuge . . . ”
    Stella was right about the postcards, but the one written in my father’s hasty scribble also said “I have seen Ruta in the women’s camp.” I never understood why he’d tell my mother that he’d seen the woman he left her for in 1939. Maybe he mixed up the cards and meant to send that one to his brother or a close friend—maybe it was a Nazi prank after they’d beaten out of him the names of his colleagues, the details of his life.
    All I knew was they’d been arguing for a year or more. He told my mother that she was sad and angry all the time. She was no fun, she’d let herself get unkempt, sloppy— niechlujny! he kept shouting at her in Polish. The other nurses at the hospital worked just as hard and they looked all right. Ruta worked with him in the operating room and she looked fine. Ruta liked laughing, liked a bit of fun. “The war is going to kill us all,” he yelled. He was packing his suitcase. “And I mean to have a little joy, a little beauty! Before the Nazis kill us all, I’m going to have just one summer rose. Tylkojeden zanim umrę!” Just one before I die!
    I was angry at her. If she’d