By CHRIS KELSEY
We booked three nights but stayed four. We traveled in-state to save money but spent just as much as we might have on flights to the West Coast. It was November. Going against all reason at our latitude, we headed north.
Driving on the Peak to Peak Highway through Colorado’s Rockies with my husband, Bill, and his mountain-climbing friend, Bob, I glimpsed in the valley beyond a cluster of low buildings painted blue, pink, and green. It looked as if a 19th century frontier mining town had been transformed by a happy band of pot-smoking hippies who had journeyed cross-country from Woodstock. The incongruity was so pronounced, I wondered if the air at 8200 feet had thinned my brain cells, causing hallucinations.
By GEOFF KRONIK
Every morning I sat on the terrace and waited for him. Night would fade to gray dawn, the sun’s first rays struck the kilometer-high spire of Burj Khalifa,and then the sculler would appear. No other craft plied Dubai Creek at that hour, no working dhows or party cruises. River belonged to sculler and sculler to his boat, and I would sit with my coffee and envy him.
To get to St. Govan’s Head on the southwest coast of Wales I must drive through the Ministry of Defense firing range at Castlemartin where space-age tanks launch high explosive shells across the sky. They’ve been blowing things up here since 1939. There’s a website that will tell me when the road is closed for target practice, but I’d have to drive miles in another direction to the McDonald’s in Haverfordwest to hook up to the free wifi. Instead, I stop at an inn along the way where I order a lemonade, which is carbonated and tastes like Sprite. They tell me today’s bombing begins after sunset. Welsh Pubs are usually reliable sources of information.
I heard him yelling as I ate breakfast.
“Help! Won’t anyone come out and help me?” I looked out the window and saw a tall man with feathered blonde hair and large sunglasses standing on the sidewalk across the street. He reached out, trying to find something, anything, to guide him.
There is something in me that loves an island. I live on one (Queens, New York, on Long Island, across the East River from the isle of Manhattan). I’m attracted to all kinds—those buried by volcanic eruptions; adrift in a blue void endless as the cosmos; locus of nearly extinct languages; and even the fictitious Island of Lost Souls ruled by the mad scientist Dr. Moreau.
By NOOR QASIM
I wake up from my three-hour nap because of a text from my brother.
I’ll be there in five!
After reading some texts and checking Facebook, I summon the strength to pull myself off the mattress, leaving the sheets damp with sweat behind me, and approach the red-framed mirror on the bright yellow wall of our hostel room. The nap had been good and deep but my head feels swollen with the heat and the grogginess of an interrupted sleep cycle. My eye-makeup is slightly smudged, which makes sense considering I’d applied it five minutes before I passed out. It didn’t have time to dry.
I was not allowed to walk or ride my bike along the highway without an adult. “Blonde hair and blue eyes,” my grandma would tell me. “Just the kind they’d want to steal.” As though at any moment, I could be taken and sold for profit like a chunk of copper wire.
“They’re not gonna steal me, Grandma,” I would tell her. “I’m too mouthy.”
Portland was vibrant, despite its mistiness; always threatening to rain, but never truly downpouring. G. and I walked up and down Fore Street, looking for the restaurant by the same name, trying not to look too much like lost tourists. We had escaped to Portland in search of good food, which was always a comfort to us and which we needed now more than ever. Finishing our undergraduate degrees a few weeks earlier had left us feeling more somber and empty than excited. After days of enduring many heartfelt goodbyes from friends we knew we’d never see again and lengthy advice from proud, overbearing relatives, we were aching to get away from it all; to distract ourselves from the constant reminders that a chapter in our lives was closing forever.
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