2023 through a fairy door
I am sitting at a table in a house on a hill somewhere on the California coast. It’s morning, it’s almost the end of 2023, and I can hear my nephew talking. He’s just a year and a half old, and he’s still in his crib. I look outside. It’s gray and it’s raining, and […]
Cape Town’s cable car
CAPE TOWN, South Africa—I am a journalist living in Cape Town, South Africa. The writing I do here comes from “listening to the city and its people” and writing down what both have to say. Cape Town could be any city or place. There is no specific reason why I am writing about Cape Town […]
A café encounter
Words conjured by sunlight and a mountain in Cape Town. 31 December 2022 CAPE TOWN, South Africa—There was a woman sitting in a window of a café. The woman wore a black tee and she sat hunched over a laptop and an empty plate. Then a man entered the café. He went there because he […]
Magic
The baker felt in his heart that he was a wizard who could do all different kinds of magic. ‘What isn’t magical,’ he thought, ‘about taking things that look nothing like bread, and making something that brings people together as if drawn by some unseen force?’ He loved this feeling, because he had once been […]
The Skeletons of Bonneville
TRUCKEE, Calif.—The wind blows hard in the Sierras, and when the sun is gone there is a cold that freezes me at night. When the cold releases me in the morning, I feel new. The air here smells of vanilla. The smell comes from trees, and I wonder how it is that a tree could […]
The Carousel
I was at a rock-climbing gym, and I saw a woman climbing up a wall. I imagined her climbing up into the underside of an old mechanical carousel made of brass gears and sprockets. The carousel isn’t moving, and the woman climbs through its inner machinery. One moment she’s reaching for climbing holds, and the […]
Tavern
The laughter that poured from the tavern roared like a campfire. It was the kind of campfire that you wanted to go and sit around. Snow fell outside, but the snowflakes were in no great hurry to reach the ground. The snowflakes that fell around Phoenix melted and turned to vapor before reaching his orange […]
Drakensberg
The opera music played from the man’s headphones as he and the woman hiked the gravel road next to a field of wheat. He was not talking to her because he was angry, and also because he liked how his music played as a blue and yellow airplane with a propeller dipped and rose overhead […]
The Girl With the Golden Shoes
She was the girl with the golden shoes. She liked to swing dance to jazz music, and when she danced her shoes left behind streaks of gold paint on the dance floor. She danced at a place called the Mercury Café, which is a dream shared by swing dancers every Thursday night. Inside, little red […]
Tafelberg
The girl’s grandmother often said to anyone who would listen that the mountain that cradled their town by the sea was not a mountain, but a ship. ‘The side that faces us, that’s her starboard side, and where the starboard side ends over there to the right, that’s her bow.’ She said this to so […]