Sentence The Sixhundredandseventysecond
Countess Brunnhilda von Machfleine-Hohenzollern was awakened from her opiate slumber by the insistent buzzing of an angry bluebottle which seemed to have crawled into her head through her left ear and was now trapped inside her skull desperately failing to find the ear-canal which would lead it to freedom; she could feel the frantic beating of its wings as they brushed the inner surface of the
bone which was supposed to protect her from the outside world but, on this occasion, had allowed the outside world inside and prevented it from leaving; if she only had a corkscrew, she would place the point against her forehead and, needing to exert just a little pressure to start the hole, simply twist and twist clockwise until her skull was pierced, then twist anti-clockwise to remove the tool and release the pressure which threatened to burst the top of her head like Etna, throwing the ashes of an erupted brain into the room, followed by the lava of all her dreams, ambitions and melted desires which would run down her face and body until they cooled and set and hid her identity from view; not that it was her real identity, not that the 'frigid-wife' or the 'betrayed-spouse' or the 'wronged-women' in any wise identified her as the girl who was pushed into marriage with Baldur Graf von Machfleine amid promises of a Great Romance worthy of Goethe or one of Caspar David Friedrich's masterpieces, 
only to find that the Count was a brute, who violently raped her on their wedding night and then abandoned her for his mistresses, his harlots, whores and a succession of servants who arrived as virgins and left when their pregnancies could no longer be hidden by shapeless uniforms and they were packed off Schleswig-Holstein for the confinements and then married to farmers or tradesmen more than happy to have an aristocratic cuckoo in their loveless nests; and for fifteen years, Brunnhilda had wept bitter tears over her plight, contemplated suicide a thousand times, attempted it fifty, failed miserably at every attempt and been subjected to every 'cure' known to modern German medicine, from Freudian and Jungian psycho-analysis to Electro-Convulsive-Therapy; she had been plunged into icy baths, had her core-temperature raised to dangerously high levels, been starved, force-fed and jabbed with more needles than a porcupine, tried by arithmancy and many other practices to divine her true purpose if any pathetic broken life could possibly have a purpose and now this wretched bluebottle had found a way inside her mind that had eluded every doctor her father could afford – Baldur, the 'husband' who managed with all the uliginous slime of a slug, to portray
their corrupted marriage as all her fault, playing the martyr for all it was worth, besmirching her reputation at every opportunity, had contributed not one pfennig, caring naught what became of his 'wife' so long as she did not interfere with his womanising, huren-chasing, child-abusing, debauchery; and then he was 'Born Again' through The Thule Society and it's mixture of Aryan Myth and Nordic Saga into first the nationalist Freikorps, then the Brown-shirt, a dedicated follower of Ernst Röhm and the SA and now the Black-shirt racing up the ladder of the SS headed by Heinrich Himmler and dedicated to the Cult of Adolf Hitler, the upstart Corporal from Austria transformed into Fuhrer of the
Thousand Year Reich! she truly wished herself dead, anything to remove her from the madness which was her beloved country in the grip of dangerous, evil lunatics, hell-bent on the destruction of the past thousand years of history, culture, art, religion. poetry, music and philosophy, to replace it with smouldering rubble and rivers flowing red with the blood of slaughtered innocence; and her eyes snapped open, as occasionally happened when some synapses in her desiccated brain actually worked and she could put two thoughts together and make sense of her location in the present timescape (did she not have some impression of a time and place in her memory, yet ever sliding out of sight whenever she thought she had caught up with it, a time and place where she lived a happy existence before this one?) and she realised that the buzzing bluebottle had been the doorbell and that as the servants did nothing beyond spread their legs for the Count, if anyone was going to answer it, it would be she, made her way, a little unsteadily, through the apartment to the main door and unlocked it, then pulled it open – stared at the familiar face of the man who stood there, flanked by two others.
could think of nothing to say, except, "you'd better come in than stand there," and led Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels into the drawing room, faintly waving towards where they should sit/