by admin on June 30, 2009
My sister Zoe, a travel writer, had just returned to New York City from Tel-Aviv or Riga or St. Petersburg when somebody told her I had three months left to live. The news struck Zoe as rather odd: nobody at the headquarters of the travel publishing firm where we both work could trace the source of this information or venture a guess as to the cause of my impending death, and Zoe is not the one to believe uncorroborated rumors. She brushed the idea aside, and proceeded doing business as usual: finished her report on the latest adventure, ordered new custom luggage from Signe Mou on Fifth Avenue, and went out for lunch with her boss, our chief editor Karen Everest. Karen is Zoe’s boss only nominally; in fact, Zoe herself hired and trained Karen during her own brief stint as the chief at Kongo-Roo.
The job kept her stationed in New York for several months at a time—it was the longest period of time Zoe had spent in one place since college, and she almost single-handedly caused the demise of this 100-year old organization driving everybody crazy with her constant flow of ideas for radical change. It was she who opened our surprisingly successful West Coast office (hiring me as a technical editor), and immediately attempted to do the same in China and Ireland, I think. When those ventures almost bankrupted the company, Zoe announced that she was a travel writer at heart and turned her position over to Karen. They say that after two and a half years of tenure my sister’s office had remained a bare white-walled room without a single picture or personal item.
Silent Signs features a painting by Gay Degani. Read the rest here. Read more about Olga Zilberbourg and Gay Degani. You can also click here to read another story by Olga in The Writer’s Eye magazine.
I opened the door without looking. You know how you do, like sometimes when you answer the phone without checking the caller ID. Then a week later you find yourself helping a friend move to a fifth floor walkup on a sweltering July Saturday, or attending your grandmother’s poetry reading at the nursing home. It was like that. I opened the door without looking.
“Blessed morning to you, sir.”
“If you say so.”
“How are you today?”
The woman’s smile was determined, expansive. Maybe they gave out pills at Kingdom Hall. I wish this woman, Delores, would simply tell me so. She might get somewhere then.
“Delores, I’m gonna be real with you, I’m pretty friggin’ hung over.”
Read the rest here, and click here to read more about Eric McKinley.
Christopher Caldwell crosses the space between the stove and kitchen sink for what could have been the fiftieth time tonight. He turns the faucet to fill the kettle he’s holding. Returning to the stove he starts to boil water for more coffee. He then hears the door open and close in the adjacent washroom. His brother Michael now enters the kitchen. It’s 11:40pm and a single light overhanging the tiny kitchen table illuminates the small room.
“You’ve been gone awhile,” Christopher says. Michael pulls a chair from the table and sits without saying a word. Reaching into his pocket he grabs a pack of cigarettes, pulls one out and places it between his lips. Outstretching his arm, but without looking up, he offers one to his brother. Christopher quietly accepts one and the two brothers light their cigarettes in unison, and both exhale large plumes of smoke, Michael’s slightly larger.
With photos by Atina Thorning. Click here to read more, and here to read more by Josh Mitchell.
The radio came alive with the dispatcher advising the Fire Dept of the need for an ambulance at the golf course clubhouse. A man had stopped breathing.
He was just passing that building on his way to check on a house while the owners were away on vacation, so he pulled into the lot and ran inside the building. He checked the man’s vital signs – no pulse, no breathing. He began CPR and instructed a woman offering to help on how to give the man breaths of air while he maintained the chest compressions keeping the blood circulating.
Click here to read the rest. Click here to read more about David A. Kentner.
FarawayJournal.com is undergoing some maintenance at the moment, which explains the new look. We haven’t worked out all the kinks yet, but in the meantime our new issue is still available. Give it a read, and be sure to let us know what you think.
Spring issue: http://www.farawayjournal.com/volume-2-issue-3-spring-2009/.
And there were pools among the rocks