The last night began like all the others. After Star Trek Voyager they clambered off the couch, threw on their coats, and shuffled out the door. Jason as usual was first, and had to wait as Paul scrounged up cash. It was just as well that the ice cream parlor didn’t accept credit cards, because Paul had misplaced his the day before.
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My political awakening landed on a tarmac shortly before Christmas 1981. From the back of our new Oldsmobile, I stared at the pallid visitor while my father clattered in a language that sounded like one long ‘shshshsh’. Uncle Pawel, as I would call him even though he was my father’s cousin, looked into the dimness of the six-lane highway and never uttered a word.
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Dr. Rees, I presume, said Caruthers looking through the binoculars, He’s late.  Must be the storm.  Wiping the sweat from my eyes, I stared into the shimmering distance from the shade of the acacia, Let’s hope it breaks soon, relieve us of the heat.  Indeed, Caruthers agreed, Stifling.
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“So the big guy with the beard whumps J.C. upside the head and says:  hit the street bitch and don’t come home till you bring me some real souls” – that’s what frilled lizard said and of course none of us believed her although he swore up and down she’d been there from jump, sequestered behind a boulder at the Temptation, scuttled all the way from Gethsemane down the Via Dolorosa and had personally weighted the dice at Golgotha.
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Zeinab put her chador on and left her apartment early in the morning. She had a lot to do that day. In the alley black flags were hanging above the doorways of several houses, signaling that someone in the household had been killed in the wretched war. At the mouth of the alley a hejleh was set up, a bunch of tiny bulbs lit inside its glass case and an enlarged photograph of a young man pasted on its front.
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The sewers of Paris stewed behind a row of worn buildings lining one side of the Rue des Italiens. The waste-ways churned, bubbled and sloshed like wretched ponds, filthy pools and rancid brooks of the nature found in Dante's version of hell.
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Winter gripped the city tightly, like a lonesome spinster clutching a bleached white handkerchief. Nearly a foot of snow blanketed the ground, the obelisk that was the Washington Monument pierced upward through the clutter like a mammoth wintry spear.
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‘What is your worst nightmare?’
‘I don’t know. Let me think. I don’t have any nightmares. I’m a lucky guy I guess.’
‘His worst nightmare is kissing a gay.’
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Molly loves the dog but Edwin doesn’t. She found the puppy on a busy road near school trying to bite the tires on moving trucks. Since the dog’s future seemed doubtful and brief, Molly opened the door of her Subaru wagon, and the pooch, without invitation or treat, jumped up into the passenger seat, sitting there as if it was her spot.
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