But I was not a general magpie. I was a dimensionally discontented magpie. Without regular access to flight, our perception comes unmoored from all four magnetic dimensions and three temporal dimensions, nearly bringing us down to dimensional par with humans.
My brother Amin and I sit on the ground by the road west of Jalalabad. We whisper together, wondering if we will be rescued. My name is Aadela Karimi. I am hidden in a burqa my brother bought for me, wearing hiking boots I stole from a store as we fled the city.
Even before we’d met, I’d been warned off her by my Egyptian friends. She likes to enjoy herself, man. You’d better have protection. She’s only good for a good time. In reality, she was just the rare woman who had the audacity to behave like a man.
“All politicians molest kids,” Heboru said, exhaling smoke.
Emilio sighed. “But how do yeh know?”
“That’s what the rich and powerful do. It’s the only taboo left to them.”
Five-and-a-half weeks before Toshihide Nakagawa dies, his son Yusaku takes him to see a rerun of the film Rocky at the Paradise Repertory Theatre in Burakuricho, Wakayama, a theater known for its continuous state of disrepair.
Inhabiting the rich borderland between poetry and prose, these stories combine compression and narrative in a form that, author Dana Wall says, “effectively captures the compressed intensity of war.”
He said, You’re different from all the gringas. I know I am. Sometimes I sleep but sometimes I lay with my stomach gurgling and think about it: The difference between me and a gringa is that I’ll work all my life. This would be the case even if the revolution had lasted …
The next day, Alan tries to collect a dead Japanese officer’s sword. The body was boobytrapped. It blows Alan’s legs off, along with other parts. The Graves Registration guys had to use body parts from both men to make up enough to bury.
Fighting the Russians would give Hamid the chance to prove his túra (bravery) and nang (honor), some of the Pashtunwali values he’d been taught since childhood. He often plucked at the scant whiskers on his chin, convincing himself he was ready for war and glory.
“Gaza by the Sea” was inspired by true events; the characters and plot line are fictional. The story was written in the summer of 2023, prior to the outbreak of the war in October. Since then, many of the landscapes it invokes—and the lives of the people inhabiting them—have been destroyed or transformed beyond recognition …
It was a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices—we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear . . . you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb.
She’d never flinched, not once, in the final months of the war in Europe. One of the few women journalists finally allowed to the front, she’d perch at her typewriter in dank press tents most afternoons—her uniform mud-caked and ripe with mildew, her fingers cadaverous in their soggy gloves—and bash out descriptive dispatches.
