Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming our final artist of “Identity,” Canadian writer Angela Zimmerling, with “The Note,” a heartbreaking flash fiction story about prejudice. A note left under the windshield wiper of her car, a Volkswagen Beetle named Hippie, takes our protagonist back to memories of growing up German in 1960s Canada. You might not know that Great Britain sent “enemy aliens” to internment camps in Canada during World War I and World War II. Some of these “enemy aliens” were German and Austrian Jews fleeing persecution who ended up settling in Canada after being freed because they had either no home to return to or no resources to get there. Many people heard their accents and made false assumptions about their identity.
“Perhaps the first time she heard herself named a ‘Hun’ was her first school year. She wanted to become a go-go dancer, to wear mini-skirts. She wanted to marry Batman.
The boys in her class played ‘War.’ Their hand and finger guns pointed in her direction. “Pew Pew,” they yelled and laughed as they ran away.
After school she curled in her mother’s lap and asked, “Was I born bad? Was I born an enemy?”
The woman remembers the touch of her mother’s voice. “You were born neither good, nor bad.””
Angela paints a believable reality. Our protagonist’s first reaction to the note is to scan the parking lot to make sure that no one is waiting for her to do her harm. The characterization is vulnerable and tender as we learn how verbal assaults and micro aggressions stick with people and shape where they go, how they carry themselves, even what dreams they allow themselves to dream. How much better could the world be if we broke generational cycles of prejudice so that everyone felt safe?
Read “The Note” in Synkroniciti’s “Identity” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Angela Zimmerling is a former journalist who works in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. She is passionate about animal and human welfare, and she cares deeply about the environment. She lives on a small farm with two ponies, a dog, cats, a flock of giant chickens, and two flocks of Indian Runner Ducks.