#uncoffeed...

My love is like sand that clings to my feet when I walk on the beach: it's cold, yet giving, conforming to my shape and then falling away, leaving irritating particles that must be brushed aside when dry. Beginnings of a thousand novels, like case files of long-forgotten crimes never to be solved, clutter my shelves and our computer. I keep them buried, but at hand; perhaps one day something will spark and all will become clear. I call the shelves mine, because my husband has no use for them. They hold things waiting for me, not us. I tell him how important it is to always have a "me" in my culture. Mine, not his - his, not mine. What is his? Where is ours? The cats are ours. He tells me his mother doesn't think we should live with cats. "I think she wants to be the woman of this house," he says, his eyes twinkling while his face remains placid. He looks at me from an angle, waiting for response. "Of course she does," I reply. You le...

Iqbal was born into his 33rd life as a cat. This would have surprised him had he retained more memories, because his 32nd life had been spent as a Muslim who believed no such thing could occur. Iqbal the Muslim had in fact spent delightful hours over tea with a Hindu neighbor discussing the possibilities, or lack thereof, of reincarnation. Iqbal the cat dutifully washed his paws in the drinking-bowl after visiting the litter-box.  Then, catlike, he would be distracted by the trail of water splashed out. He would follow it with his nose and return again to the bowl to splash out more water, never able to solve the mystery of gravity. Iqbal peered out from behind the door of the barn where he spent his sleeping hours.  He took his naps in the straw-pile, which was much like the bed of straw his momma made him as a young boy growing up in the Swat Valley.  Iqbal the cat didn't so much remember his  human childhood as he felt a natural comfort in the smell of stra...

The early morning sun bounces off the ripples in my coffee. She dips a finger to retrieve the gnat, its wings like oars on the inky black. "Look - I rescued him." She presents her finger, gnat-wings plastered to her skin, for my inspection. "How can you tell it's a him? Tiny balls?" I snigger. I feel her eyes roll as she focuses on peeling the wings loose. "You're such a pig. Shit. I think I broke one. Shit." I know better than to laugh. She believes - we both do - that every life is precious and deserves an equal chance to be happy.  Happiness does not seem to be the fate for this gnat. But I put my mug on the wooden spool table, and slide across the seat of the porch swing until our legs are touching. "I'm sorry, baby. Is he still alive?" "Yeah." She uses a fingernail from the opposite hand to slide the soggy insect onto the arm of the swing.  "He's walking, or trying to. Damn." She leans again...

Bells tinkled somewhere, and children laughed while they chased a dog with sticks. The dust sparkled magically as one passed through the Prayer Gate - it was the visual counterpart to the tinkling of unseen bells, thought Peter. He  moved slowly forward. The heavy thud of his own boots, muffled by the dust which was everywhere, and the lumbering walk of a former soldier who was no longer carrying enough weight on his shoulders - these were nonexistent to him as he moved forward, numbly as if carried by a conveyor trolley on a movie set. Sights and sounds detached and tunneled around him. He felt himself shrinking smaller and smaller. Like the small boy he once was, he tugged at the soiled garment of a blind man who sat under a sparse tree next to the Prayer Gate. "Can you tell me my future?" he queried, putting a sandwich into the blind man's gnarled hand. The blind man's donkey idly lipped the sandwich as the man returned to Peter a few-toothed grin. ...