Stories

 “Those faces?  There on the posters?  They’re the new Berliners!,” the old lady said, pointing to the scattered giant photos of faces scattered around Potsdamer Platz, across the street from her shop.  In the plaza in central Berlin stood two or three dozen 10 foot high pictures of faces, Blacks, Browns, Latinos, Asians, Caucasians, Aborigines,…

NORMANDY

STORY

‘What’s the name of the restaurant?’, Colleen hollered. ‘MAMO’ with an accent mark.  I don’t think it’s Irish,’ her husband shouted back.  ‘Sounds foreign to me,’ yelled someone in the group.  ‘Look, anything not named Murphy’s or Shamrock sounds foreign in Ireland.  Let’s try it,’ added Richard.    This was a shouted semi-conversation because so much…

We had been robbed, or at least that’s what we thought.  The nine of us stood frozen in one spot on the baking pavement.  We stared at each other in disbelief, torn between anger and shock.  Emily began to speak but trailed off in impotent gibberish.  Mark opened his mouth, moved his lips but nothing…

Most cliches are bullshit. They’re the phrases found on greeting cards or what people say in uncomfortable situations. ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Really? Is that what the poor guy who lost everything in the Depression thought as he leaped off a tall building on Wall Street? Or, ‘What you don’t know can’t…

The tiny speck on the horizon, distorted in the shimmering heat of early morning, grew larger and morphed into a wobbly, tented roadside stand, half way between Aswan and Abu Simbel, Egypt, deep in the Sahara Desert.  Our van had left Aswan about 4:00am.  It was now 6:00am and the sun was a blazing disc…

A single missile shot into the bright blue sky, arched toward the hill across the valley, curved down in a perfect trajectory and slammed into the cache of gunpowder in the huge Greek temple. The explosion thundered through the hall, ripped off the roof, destroyed walls and tore off the marble carvings. When the dust…

The Cairo Bazaar stretches over several city blocks, bordered by cafes, tea houses, bakeries, mosques, restaurants and open plazas.  The Bazaar is a grid of open air narrow lanes, lined with countless tiny shops no different from the shops that would have been near the Roman Forum of the 200s or at Delphi in Greece…

MARY, MARY, QUITE CONTRARY Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells,  And pretty maids all in a row.    Her impotent rage boiled as she heard that awful rhyme float up from the lawn below, chanted by a group of children waiting for a school bus.  If…