by Diane Caldwell
Mortification exploded over my friend’s face when I told her of my decision to visit what I thought was our mutual friend Iris in Andalucia. Eyes wide and ominous as flying saucers, mouth open in a soundless gaping hole of horror—she looked like a reenactment of “The Scream.”
I was living in Istanbul [...]
by Ken Lovering
It would be easy to blame my sweat on the mid-afternoon Tanzanian sun.
But there’s more to why my glands are working overtime: I am sitting in a tiny Maasai enkaji , a circular hut constructed of a mud-manure mix that these five beaded women, my hosts, likely slapped together with their bare hands. [...]
by Miroslava Turk
When in Cuba, do not attempt to calibrate your expectations.
If you make that mistake, you may fail to notice the presence of irony all around you. If you expect only certain results, you will never see what actually does occur. Irony often leads us to mystery and the beyond. Away from sameness and [...]
by Adrian Cole
I couldn’t really ever tell you why I left home. I’d come up with some superficial reasons, of course, but just so that we could avoid an awkward and unhelpful silence. The deeper truth probably lies somewhere in the inherited murkiness of the human psyche, a monkey’s inclination to wander, always, one has [...]
By Tom Cheche
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Shade kept us from seeing the sign. The narrow country lane, devoid of traffic, meandered through farmland of the Cotinten bathed in glorious autumn sun, highlighting roadside fields of squat, manicured apple trees but intensifying darkness in the occasional stretch through a palisade of looming shade trees. It was a rough board nailed [...]
By Catherine Watson
I was in Ecuador, on my way to a folklore performance, sharing a ride with two other tourists – a middle-aged Canadian woman and a young computer guy from California. They started comparing notes on their Latin American travels. I didn’t join in. I’d seen the continent edge to edge over the previous [...]
By Zack Kushner
Lost in the swirling dust, the sun scalding our scalps and our pursuers gaining, we go for broke. In order to escape Ethiopia, we resort to madness.
High above the Ethiopian city of Gondar, 17th century castles square their shoulders and face the sun. It is as if one of the exuberant potholes on [...]
By Michael Shapiro
What’s the worst that could happen, I asked myself, when an attractive young woman I’d met in Tiananmen Square invited me to dinner. Three hours later I was being held against my will in a dimly lit ground-floor room many miles from the heart of Beijing. I didn’t know where I was, a [...]
by Pamela Cordell Avis
A modern tale of metamorphosis.
I was at one of life’s crossroads, you know, the kind that either can or cannot divert you to a journey down an untraveled road.
To move from L.A. to a tiny farming village in France was not an option, it was not even an idea. It often happens, [...]
by Carmen Semler
“I wish for you that when you grow up you will return to Malta and visit the good Sisters at the orphanage.” Those were the words my father repeated to me during his worst of times. I knew what he meant by “the good Sisters” and how important it was for him that [...]
