This story must be told, that of a young girl, not taken but ripped from her mother’s arms. A mother following instinct to protect her daughter, to find safety, a place without fear of death. This mother, witness to murder, inside a spring day while the birds sang of new hungry babies, opening wide beaks
There is an old piano with chipped keys and fine lines on display inside Whitechapel station. There is an official bucket tethered with a silver chain and a not-unworthy cause interleaved between two sheets of plastic. For some, a chance to showcase. Performances erupt intermittently, often during the calmer moments between rush hours. Songs are
A post by the account PDX alerts: Report of a nude female masturbating on the Cesar Chavez Blvd I-5 overpass, incident causing slowed traffic in Northbound lanes. Eight minutes later, next post in the same thread: Police responding to multiple calls. Eleven minutes later, next post: Police in foot chase with suspect. Thirty-seven minutes later,
Pity on passing faces, like I’m dumb for doing what smart guys avoid. Females at first smile on seeing a spiffy young male standing tall alongside the ramp up to a west-bound highway. Short hair parted left and combed flat with white sidewalls. Pale Oxford shirt tucked in, belted dark chinos, thin black necktie, shined
Hello. You must be…? Yes, guilty, I’m Mrs McCready. But you can call me Eleanor. Did you find the house easily? Oh, you saw the gates? Yes, they are rather large. It might look like overkill but I live here alone and I like to feel safe. Come on through! I thought we’d do the
Marie was stretched out on the sofa, sipping a glass of wine, flicking through the television channels. We’d already watched two shows featuring evil people, smart crime solvers, and autopsies, not speaking much while we watched, dozing off from time to time, but not at the same time. Marie rested the remote on her thigh.
The Islamic philosopher Averroes once wrote that God, the Eternal, did not create the world. He knows the world, and because God only believes the truth, the world exists to justify God’s honesty. Against this Averroes’s predestined enemy, the destroyer of philosophers Ghrazali, denies that self-made things could live up to the standards of a
The Moon is 2,000 miles across and about a quarter-million miles from Earth. It formed from chunks of rock and ice when the Earth and the rest of our solar system was molded from the Grand Cataclysm responsible for everything, about 4.5 billion years ago, the one that ended one thing and began another. Perhaps
A panda appeared in our street, skewered to the railing outside my house. Let me paint the picture: there’s the road outside my house, then there’s this long strip of grass, then there’s the houses opposite. And the grass has got these railings all the way around it, for kids to kick their footballs off
Marjorie sees the young people in the town sometimes. They are maybe sixteen or so, young men mostly. Somehow they have become separated from their family though she can’t imagine how. She tries not to meet their gaze, not to look into their dark eyes. She is told to be afraid of them, told she
