Typhoon

• Mila Julian - Te Kiri, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2019

Thunder slapped its fat fingers over the charcoal horizon, rainy wrath bellowing and vehement over the drenched landscape. The ensuing flares of light that stabbed at the darkness, heroically battle the imminence of oncoming death with all the true, fleeting brilliance of a falling star. There are many things you can whisper to a typhoon like that – secretive things, terrifying things, things that shouldn’t ever be brought to light.
That is specifically why I, Adolf Hitler, spruce and cleanly cut at the prim age of 22, enjoyed the Germanic countryside with a fervent and deep-seated passion. It was a place where one could fold away the faded reflections of the buried and the undead into the voluminously crimped pleats of Mother Nature, without a fear or thought of retribution. What with the merciless rainfall of the summer months, there was only ever the resonating clap of rain on thunder on lightening; a perfect slice of paradise, pleated safely away from the gaze of prying and beady eyes.
But I would be lying if I told you that I was residing here purely for the methodical hum of the gale season. I was here, dear reader, because the fight for my life – which had begun all those years ago in the demurred and starched summer of 1907 – was far from over. This tiny, cobblestone cottage, tucked away into the lush and overgrown hills of the country, provided perfect closure and protection from…the foreign forces seeking to destroy my persons. I may retain the ring of a madman, but what I speak is only the truth.
For the past four years, I had been on the run from strange men and women. Men and women who dressed in garb that was exotic and unnatural to my eye – travellers from the future, I finally managed to deduce after the sixth or seventh attempt on my life, obsessively set on my demise. I was utterly clueless as to why, I only knew now was not my time. This oasis, this haven in the hills, was my last plea for safety – if this failed…I didn’t know what I was to do.
Suddenly, as lightening sizzled the edges of the air, the cloaked frame of a strange figure became lividly outlined before the shut doorway. Panic congested the drain of my throat. They were here. I twisted in obdurate dread; a last, futile dash at life done in hopeless pride. However, before I could even wrench the heel of my boot away, the form clutched my arm in one hand, and the crown of his hood in the other. As he, somehow, gently removed it from his head, casting his face in the momentary light of nature’s virtuosity, a capacious ball of frizzy African style hair was starkly revealed.
“Who are you?!” I cried, despondent at my ultimate failure. The probable assassin’s smile blazed, his ludicrous hair bobbing.
“I, Adolf Hitler, am Bob Ross, and I am going to teach you how to paint.”