Love Lost: Moscow
The moment I took the final step up the wide staircase and reached the third floor of the MS Sergei Yesenin, I stopped and looked at my left wrist, before recalling I had lost...
Tagged: culture
Deceit and Desire in a Hot Place
At 9:00am, Lan, Howard, and I finished breakfast and left the dining room on the 2nd floor of Hotel Vissai. Lan and I were going to the Golden Smile Clinic on Ký Hoà Street...
Ch. 4: Guet N’Dar
It was already too hot. Moving south across N’Dar Island, Lomax stopped, removed his cell phone from a pocket of his photographer’s vest, and checked the temperature: 29°C. I stopped next to him and...
Ch. 2: Esby and Lomax – St. Louis
When a few minutes before 3:00pm, our driver, Joseph, who had said little since we left Dakar, drove us into Saint Louis, not far from the border with Mauritania, I felt my anxiety rise....
Under Cover of Night
Rain falls. Gustavo can hear it. The drops pound the glass of the bar’s lone window, closed to the black night beyond. But what happens here no longer matters to him. He is leaving....
Rising Water: Royal Valley
I met Rachel, a coordinator for a non-governmental organization, at a restaurant called Mesa. She wore a long, white dress and told me that she had trained as a nurse. It was 11:30 on...
A Young Visayan Man: Davao
It was a Saturday evening in Davao, at the southern tip of the Philippines, one week after a massive rally for Rodrigo Duterte, the nation’s new president, in a local park. It was the...
A Death: Davao
The house in Royal Valley was the same. With a doorway missing its door and a window frame without any glass panes, the tiny house offered little separation between an inside and an outside...
Ch. 1: In Plain Sight – Dakar
I had been on longer flights. But this one was particularly uncomfortable. Lomax, my younger brother, didn’t fare much better on the plane, but he could brush it off faster because he liked to...
Flying to Dublin
The huge plane seemed to float over the Irish coast and then over the outskirts of Dublin, a beautiful capitol city, at 8:30 AM. It was light outside. The people in the large middle...