On the way to Bani Walid, a burned-out truck hulked in the middle of the road like the fossil of a tar-pit mastodon. It was a Libyan government ammunition carrier, incinerated by a coalition airstrike. The blackened ground glittered with broken glass, shrapnel and unexploded ordnance. Marwan skidded the car to a stop at the…
In the old Clatsop story, God pinched the mud of the north Oregon shore into mountains, carved rock to jagged crags. That’s how he cut his hands and his blood stained the flats of the north plains. Every autumn, as if remembering this event, the soil north and east of Astoria pushes forth blood-bright cranberries….
I started running into men, strangers, who looked like my brother. In the grocery store, at the bus stop. Fate warped the air like oil on water and then they’d appear at the edge of my vision, wearing the family nose. If I could get their attention, we’d talk. How are you? was how I…
The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water. Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the sign burned in this momentary darkness: TIME SAFARI, INC. SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST. YOU NAME THE ANIMAL. WE TAKE YOU THERE. YOU SHOOT IT. A…
She loved him best in the wintertime, on those mornings when it was so cold that crystalline spores of frost could be seen in their glinting conquest over every smooth surface. Winter was the only time of year when the world might properly stop, and morning in its stillness could morph into an equally silent…
“Every animal has just enough brain to preserve its own hide.” In the backyard of our first house, the roots of the sod we laid wouldn’t take. The front, when we moved in that spring, was fine if a little weedy, but the back was thatched up with the dead: long overgrown and run…
Theirs was a landlocked tribe, generations deep: ghettoed in the old country, urban in the new one, smart, klutzy red-haired Jews of the Ashkenazi type, and not a fisherman in the lot, until we get to Lily’s father. Chicago-born-and-raised, he begged a pal to take him to a lake, and next thing you know, there…
It is never completely quiet in Gilot. The UN tents crowding the hillsides up here are thin as air and swelter in the night heat, dense with the smell of urine and bodies. Before sunrise, you can hear babies crying down in the ravine (especially Lovely’s baby, who is sickly) and tin pots rattling around,…
In spite of what the radio told us, we knew Berlin was likely lost by the time the cherry blossoms opened. That was when the dead women began appearing beside the Landwehrkanal. Once a week we found them sprawled as though sunbathing next to that bottle-green water. But while I’ve seen many reactions—quick grimaces, the…
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