Always Sami. I was tethered to her somehow. To that scared little girl I’d found on the staircase nearly a year earlier; to the past, when teaching was simpler and I could care about everyday problems, when being relentless meant running two extra ...
It was too late to pray, though. The sky was clear. The helicopters were gone. Too late for so many things. My fists hit the floor. My head hit the floor. My heart broke, hardened, and I lost my faith. That’s when the killing thoughts came. When it...
On the TV and in the newspapers all we hear and read is 'live your life or the terrorists win' and it sounds great, I’m all for that, except my kids won’t ask for a bathroom pass because the faculty facilities are on the first floor of the buildi...
Korea is often called the “Land of the Morning Calm.” It’s a country where you notice the filth and the smog on your first trip and you can’t imagine why you ever thought it was a good idea to visit. Then you meet the people and you walk amon...
The only thing worse than his arrogance was his incompetence. He was a bully, behaving like an ass. I saw Angel though, not him. The memorial was right there, just outside the window. It’s in the flowers, and it makes me angry. Angel liked to sit o...
Ahead in the distance we could see the main gate, but there was a sea of cars, none moving, people standing, milling around, waiting nervously, perhaps fearfully, as heavily armed MPs and military working dogs searched every square inch of every vehi...
In Korea I’d been so afraid that Sami would lose her dad. She did, but she didn’t get a flag. He went to Doha, then to Baghdad, then to Kabul, then to someplace else, and then to a different someplace else, on and on. He’d come home, leave agai...
DPRK translates to Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—and if the words Democratic and Republic sound like a good thing, well, it’s oxymoronic because the Korea we’re talking about here is the communist one in the North, and when I said the...
It felt like we were reliving the first day of the school year, when students and teachers do the get-to-know-you dance—teachers tell students something about who they are, students pretend to care, and then vice-versa.
It all feels so different than it did yesterday. Is it because I'm aware of your feelings now? Or is it something else? Is it that...I know...what love is?
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
The fact is that in order to do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the bank thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.
When John-Joseph Heller's fights became too much of a sure thing, story has it he moved on to more risky fights with grown men and even starved dogs. Though he was scarred often, he was never beaten. But as he brought each opponent to his knees, John...
There are creatures in this world, small things and pretty things, which burn within them a fire for survival.
What do you mean, my life is at risk?" I questioned. "From one of the other professors?" "Oh, it goes much deeper than that, Freddy," he said with a half crazed, wide eyed smile. Leaning in, he whispered, "I stole something.
The tools of their trade were simple, effective things: iron knuckles, saps and the like. But the iconic tool of the scuttler arsenal was a woven leather belt with a heavy iron or brass buckle used to decrease intelligence one wallop at a time.
It pleased him to see that things, and not only people, suffered the wear and tear of age. [53 yr old Inspector Bordelli's view]
Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar ...
I'm alive but I have no life. I'm alive but also dead. I'm dead and alive.
He sneered at his father. “He’ll live. I’m going after her.” “What?” His sister stood up in front of her brother. “Fearghus, don’t. She’s angry. Very angry. She impaled your father . . . twice. Give her some time to calm down.
My love for Neo-Tokyo is a bulbous mass of post-human organic circuitry. Cyperpunk is my mother tongue. My love is a man-machine interface gun.
