She sat on the toilet seat to wait for the dye to set, and while she did she ran a bath to soak her feet in. She poured in mint bath salts. She thumbed through a magazine. There was a spread about women before and after plastic surgery. She no longer thought plastic surgery was vain; she thought it had to do with the autonomy of a woman’s body. She associated it vaguely with the word empowerment.
CategoryCreative writing
Dig Where You Live
“I’m going to the Thai Market.”
I didn’t react with a start. I merely cast a brief glance at the eager visitor in the doorway of my room and nodded silently, hopefully a nod that conveyed, “Have fun.” I was sure that I had heard incorrectly; the idea of home in a city so far away from the likes of my past seemed impossible. I returned my eyes to my computer screen, continuing my fervent search for activities in which I could partake on my first weekend in Berlin. I had an especially vigilant eye for anything that indicated hints of home.
“Do you want to come along? I could really go for Thai food right now.”
Empathritis
Naomi did not want a man: she wanted a child for herself, a child raised in the city – running around in the dark alleys and playing in the lush courtyards of her own childhood, munching on sweet, warm challah from the baker on the corner and living on the fifth story…
Frankl’s Burden
The wet thunk of plummeting metal impacting animal matter. The watermelon-ish explosion emanating from the point of impact. The unspeakable splatter. The ghastly silence before the screams. The seemingly endless instant before reflex, the guilty party, the murderer, intervened too late, forcing his eyes from the spectacle, his body back from the edge.
I and the Village
“Give me some valley deep in America, something that freezes over in winter and smells of rotten flesh in summer, or a prairie by a lake, in Romania, a naïve little fishermen’s village where you don’t speak the language, and all the fish have died and the fishermen have gone to work in the nearest city…”