Flash Fiction Contest Winner #12 – “Read Me”

Please note: Flash fiction stories are submitted by members of our Discord server. Many contain adult themes and may be objectionable to some readers.

“Read Me”

If you’re reading this, then I’ve died and you’ve found my safe. All my things are here, but you’re probably wondering most about the gold.
     The people of Buenos Aires know me as Pierre Bisset, the bachelor businessman, the philanthropist, the builder of hospitals and schools. But I was born Wilhelm Hans Hermann Göring, formerly rank SS-Obergruppenführer and one of the Führer’s closest advisors.
     You’ve surely heard the legends of the Nazi gold. They are all true. We took everything from the untermensch, emptied their banks, even melted down their fillings and wedding bands. It was never really about Jews, it was about funding the war. If the bankers had been Christian, we’d have turned the public against them as well. But it was the Jews who had it, and it was the Swiss arms dealers who would not take our Reichsmarks—it was gold, or nothing.
     At the new year of 1945, the Wehrmacht still had plenty of gold, but we lacked the men. I knew this better than most. I saw a million sons of Germany shot in the fields, fall out of the sky, and burn to death in bombed factories. We had lost the Western Front and retreated to Berlin, and we knew that the end was soon. Men were being shot for desertion, but many more had escaped. Berlin, and the Wehrmacht, were hollowed out.
     On the bleak, cold evening of the second of February, 1945, I was alone at my desk. It was strewn with maps and briefings, and I was drinking glass after glass of Kirschwasser until I could no longer see the flames of a burning city flickering on my window panes. I kept only three friends—the glass, the bottle, and the pistol—and we sat together in stupor, me tipping the glass, then tickling the trigger and wondering what it would feel like, if it would feel like anything at all. 
     I had nearly fallen asleep in my chair when I heard a sound I had not heard in a year—laughter. It was high-pitched, familiar somehow, and I wanted to find it more than anything. That laugh could save me, it could save all of us.
     I slowly opened my door and tiptoed out, but the building was deserted. From down the hall came a shuffling sound and another small laugh, and I followed it. It led me to the Führer’s office, which was dark except for a few candles. The door was slightly ajar, and I peered inside. What I saw changed everything.
     Eva Braun was a man, a beautiful man. It had all been an act. I know you won’t believe me. I am still not sure either. But I saw her without her wig, I saw her fake brassiere, and most of all, I saw the Führer giggling as he knelt before his man-wife.
     I should have quietly stolen away. But what man can maintain his mind when he has seen his hero like this? I watched, I watched for longer than I can remember, until I forgot the glass in my hand and it slipped out and shattered on the floor. The sound stopped them, and I threw the door open and I had the pistol pointed at them and I yelled drunken gibberish. 
     The Führer, famous for his speeches, was for the first time lost for words.  Eva, or perhaps Evan, looked at me with stiff contempt, but the Führer, a man I trusted with my life and the life of every German, was kneeling before me, trembling and pale. He smacked his red lips, but no words came.
     I lowered the pistol and searched for the words. “I thought you were mine, Führer.”
     “Wilhelm, I—I still am. Truly. But the German people, they would never—it had to be a woman.” He slowly stood, then softly stroked my cheek. “You are too rugged, too handsome. You are mien übermensch.”
     He turned away and opened his desk. Inside were two large, golden hooked crosses. Each of the four ends was a massive phallus. “Remember these? Take them, take them and flee Berlin, before—before it all ends.” 
     I looked into his eyes, and I saw that his love still lived, but I could not speak.
     The months that came after are a blur in my memory. I used every coin I had to escape, and one of the gold crosses—melted down—to buy my new life in Buenos Aires. The other one, well, I suppose it is for you to decide.