That summer of Saucony

SOME DAYS it rained, that summer of Saucony. I took long walks on the clifftop paths. The grey-green sea broke against the rocks in rolling swells and sent long, foamy washes into the coves, and the beaches were closed for days at a time by dangerous currents and sudden blooms of stormwater. That didn’t stop the…

boarding pass

Boarding Pass

The people were queuing up to board, some through the front door, some through the rear, according to which line the flight attendant checking our boarding passes had assigned us: in theory the two queues would never meet, dissolving somewhere in the middle of the aircraft: “Row 19 – board through the rear door, please.…

The Dead Ball Men

“Do you see how beautiful the stadium is,” the father said. “The flawless emerald rectangle where the players assemble, the crowd hushed, the giant screens replaying the game in hallucinatory slow-motion, like our dreams projected on the night sky…” On Friday evenings they were swept along in the crowd hurrying towards the glow of the…

A Body of Water in Indonesia Known as the Java Sea

The immediate problem was a traffic jam on the freeway bridge. The car crawled in the middle lane among a line of trucks carrying containers to the port. The lanes to the left and right were moving more freely, though both lead to the wrong exits. The bridge at that point gave a fine view…