Tbilisi, Georgia
What he saw in the streets he had seen before. He had seen chaos other places, had seen young men dying. It wasn’t any different here. The advance and retreat of rebellion. A military’s strength…
If I didn’t believe, I wouldn’t still be here, he thought.
Tbilisi’s streets were burning. A helicopter overhead. And Jonathan was there, crouched and cold and waiting. The silences came and went. The periodic…
Far is what you wanted and far is what you got, he thought.
Jonathan stepped from the small bus with the men and the women crowded in. They watched him and one pointed into the darkness around. Zugdidi, the man…
The two men drove from beneath the trellised canopy before the sun was up. A sick blue gray met them already. The heat and heavy wetness met them already. A mist meandered down potholed streets, unpaved streets, streets littered with trash…
Landscape tells a good story. We are rapt by oceans and their turbulent waters. We are awed by the waves cast upon rocky shores, white sand beaches or black sand beaches. Shoals. We marvel as the shore gives way to valley, earthy…
It was some days later that he fell when walking above the village on the rocky slope with its switchbacks and loose stones along the way. He caught a leg or a stone gave beneath him where the trail crested one ridge and turned back on…
When they had eaten Anna’s brother Ramazi got up from the table and sat on the bench beneath the windows and held the guitar that was leaning there. Jonathan cleared the table and Nunu and Anna both said no. He smiled and sat on the sofa…
Beyond the coal darkness to his right, beyond the short sea of black that swayed away from him and the porch where he sat, beyond the dark lawn and fences beneath him, beyond the neighboring stone wall and home and fences there, a single…
He stepped out of the home and into the morning’s pale light. He stepped out of the home with its rough pine siding and base walls of mixed concrete and stone. The door listing, he stepped into the short yard with its dew and frost coating…
It was a hot day already and Jonathan and Anna hiked out of the village on the highway heading up. The road made turns with the mountain’s rise and fall or where the plateau ended with the steep descent to the river. The villages along…
Jonathan walked up the mud path with its strewn rocks and its few hogs. The fences on his side were burning orange in the sunset’s light. The plot of spare green and the gorse and the lone tree at its far edge were alive with amber-lit…
They cut the animal’s throat with the animal struggling and tethered where it was. The blood emptied from beneath its jaw and the animal knelt and rolled, making gasping sounds, hollow drowning sounds. The warm sweet blood smells met…
Time too tells a good story. It is its own landscape, its own metaphor for things. Past, present, future. Experience. And the bridges between. And we cannot know one without the other. But one fails save our memories, the other save our…
In bed they lay listening to each other. They listened for signs of life around. Noises in the dark. In the room, the scratch of mice. Outside, an occasional lowing. In the morning a rooster. Chopping wood. Fires in the kitchen being…
“He is a Chechen.”
“Who is he?”
“A Chechen from the other side but he is a good one.”
“Was he a fighter?”
The day of wailing, the Day of the Dead, Jonathan sat at the cemetery’s uphill corner in a stand of young hardwood. He sat with his legs hanging over a concrete brake, his heels and toes just reaching, or he leaned against the low wall…
“I want to go with you,” she said one morning.
Jonathan looked at her. Her eyes were closed where she lay and he saw her dark hair and her eyelashes and her dark brows and the line her lips made. He loved her…
Streator, Illinois
It was late when he walked in. He put his bags on the stone tiles in the foyer and turned on a lamp. A stale, heavy air met him. Silence. The bulb cast a soft yellow glow over painted walls, hung…
The past is always with us. Time and distance, geography or changing landscapes cannot mute its influence. Or the past is with us so long as we do not keep moving, making each moment a world itself so that the collection is simply an album…
“What will we be reading this time ‘round?” one asked.
“Are you happy to be back?” asked another.
“We’re glad your back safe,” a woman said.
Streator. The row housing. The tracks. The glass plant rising out of the mud intersection, rising out of the massive earth plot with its steel and aluminum siding. The glass plant over the four routes of iron rails that were there, beyond…
“I am an old man afraid of dying,” he said finally. The two were driving—a onetime favorite thing—down corn-lined highways. A fall harvest was on and low light cut through the first rows of stalk before being swallowed within.