Acoustic Shadows

Awakening early in her attic apartment, he stood at the window looking out over the rooftops of the German city.  He imagined the flash and detonation of British bombs dropped here thirty years earlier.  That night she had told him her father had been a Luftwaffe pilot who bombed London during the Blitz.  Staring across the rebuilt city he recalled his grandparents telling him about a night spent in the Covent Garden tube station, coming up the next morning to find their flat a pile of rubble. Fires still raging. Their neighbors dead.  He did not tell her that story.