“What started it?” the dark little boy asks. “Did we attack them?” I don’t know this one. One of Chaz’s new friends? “What are you talking about?” “The war, Chaz told me you saw when it started.” I look around the kitchen. The noise of the birthday party hums in from the front room. “Why don’t you join the party kid.” “I’m not a kid, I’m thirteen, and you’re an old man.” For a few seconds I stare...
This is Part II. For Part I, click here. The young girl walked for many miles in the young hours of the first night, with only the dim glow of a jaundiced moon to light her way. An inconstant gale stirred the low plants of the plain, projecting suspicious shadows in the corner of the young girl’s eyes. In her mind she filled in the darkness around her with an imagined wilderness, tearing...
This is Part I. For Part II, click here. Under a perigee sun, in a desert village twelve kilometers west of the great metropolis, Sher’tlaa, in the stoney, black foothills by the sea, there lived a young girl. She had the aspect of the mythic Amazon; tall, tightly muscled, but lean; the hardened body of her father, Kuwshad, no doubt, and filled to her fingertips with the uncompromising compassion...
I stare into an evening sun; a pebble-sized hole in the reddening horizon. The world stretches towards this sun, as if painted on the inside of an enormous straw; I, standing at one end, the sun the other. All the world curls around us. A boardwalk, wooden fencing, a hill covered in coastal shrubs, all rush to the shore ahead, where curious figures dance and sing and fill my nose with smells both...
The house’s front door bangs shut, clipping out the evening sun. I listen from a narrow half-hall on the second story. I recline at the foot of my parents’ bedroom door—an idiosyncratic delicacy much missed this past month—rocking my knees together and flexing my jaw, attempting to relieve air pressure the thirteen hour plane ride stuffed in my ears. I hear socks sweep over carpet...
The afternoon sun has the cowboy squinting his eyes. A woman stands next to him, twisting her hips and smiling into his leather face. Both recline against a gray wooden cow fence. A warm breath lifts from the heat-soaked dirt and grass. The cowboy breathes in the prairie. His scent is rude and distinct; hard-labor and brine; a spicy, musky cologne from his button-down; he scowls. It disfigures...
The diner was a long, yellow train car, permanently set into a cement slab, with a little caboose at the back where the cooks worked and white smoke rose from a tin-hatted vent on its roof, perfumed with grease, salty warm breads, and rich sauces. The middle-aged mother and teenage son tilted their heads to read the crooked railroad sign out front that read, ‘Velma’s — Home of the world’s...
I need to write something . . . I don’t have anything to say. I’ll ask a couple of questions, but I may have reached the limit today; there’s nothing but dim dusty-space stirring in my mind. Oh here’s something, coming along, but it’s just a dream that I said goodbye to already, before I knew what was bad. I’m talking to myself because I need to write, I need to get words on the computer...
Years ago, before PlayStations and Xboxes, iPhones, Android’s, tablets and streaming TV, when a young boy would play with no more than warm stones or thrown-out processed food cans, this young boy, our young boy, the young American of our story here, found a feather. He said, “Ah-hah! here I have a token of the angels,” then he turned his baseball cap and stuck the feather in the plastic snap...
It’s been three days running in the hot sun. My supplies were set for a five-day journey, but I passed the fifth day a fortnight ago . . . I can’t fail my people. The beast is quick— bounding and arching from left to right like my son’s plastic ball on cobbled roads. To be quick, isn’t it conventional to be slight? lightly built; to give the laws of physics some credit? Even the first people...
