Hey there!
Here are two short stories I've been working on lately- they served as entries and pitches for some recent University applications and competition, but I am pretty happy with how they turned out so have decided to share them on here.
The first explores the emotional struggle of a Kurdish refugee, whilst the second is a look into an inmate on death row's last few hours. I appreciate this is not travel content as such, but both are about putting oneself in someone else's shoes, about empathy, which is surely a key aspect of both travel writing and broadly, travelling. These stories were a perfect opportunity for me to develop my wider writing style and experiment with different topics and very different perspectives from my own. They are stepping stones for me onto longer features and articles. I clearly haven't been in these situations, so these stories are research-based but mostly some emotional guesswork!
Enjoy!
'Iteration'.
Algebra was my favourite subject in school. The last thing we studied before the raid was iterative processes. A series of repeated operations, with which eventually you come to a solution. I don’t like algebra anymore, it’s a lie. Abstract. Iteration does not work in real life. Scale the same walls. Sneak across the same borders. Float like fragile origami figures on the same ravenous seas, trapse across the same fiery deserts. Beg the border guards again, every day. Beg, borrow and steal. Repetition. But no solution. Nothing works. Apart from stealing, that works quite well here, I have no choice.
Aheng is her name. She sits in front of me, dark locks fall gently on a dark, dirty face. Small fists clench, swollen by the harsh temperatures. Her big brown eyes stare back at me, begging for a joy I cannot feel nor give. She looks down at her small feet and becomes fiercely concentrated, trying to tie the stringy laces of her holed trainers. Faded like a sore palimpsest, a swoosh which has seen brighter days marks the side of her shoes. Every movement of her fingers is slow, laborious, intricate, as she channels her whole being into this one task.
We’ve been here for ten months. A whisp of cool autumn wind whips scraps of paper and old wrappers across the dusty ground. Everything is dusty here. The corrugated tin rooves and towers of boxes and wooden crates. The ramshackle fire pits and stained makeshift curtains. Even the faces are dusty, every crevice of every visage stretched to its limit, exhaustion is not just physical. This shanty community stretches as far as the eye can see. A blue flag adorned with olive branches waves tall in the distance, a speck of life in this grey wasteland. This is not a slum. A slum is temporary, people come and go, they leave to better places. This doesn’t feel temporary.
She’s onto the second shoe now, the one with the detached sole, I think I’ve never seen her so focused. Aheng is my sister, but I hardly think of her in this way. I cannot afford the luxury of relationship now. Too precarious, too fragile and ephemeral, I cannot afford to be torn in two again. For now, Aheng is just an entity I must sustain. Food, water, and minimal exposure to explosives. Affection can wait.
This is not a slum, because slum inhabitants look out for each other. The family in the shelter next to ours do not speak to us. The other day the mother struck Aheng. They do not like Kurds. They are different to us, but not indifferent. Hostile, icy.
An aircraft hovers far above us, in the realms of cobalt and wispy cloud. The pilot must be able to see the Mediterranean from up there. He must see the waves which caress and then kill.
We studied inequalities in algebra too. Mr. Bashur taught us to balance and solve them. This too is a lie. Since we fled our home, I have learnt that in the real world, inequalities are neither balanced nor solved. They simply endure. And we watch, numbers in an endless equation, falling, rotting, waiting.
2. ‘This is the night’.
This in the night. Last. Last one, ever. My last night, last supper. Last supper? I should have chosen bread and wine, more fitting I guess, but instead I settled for some southern style pulled pork, and a glass of fiery whisky which trickles down the throat like tar on a blazing summer's afternoon. Pulled pork, stretched, like life, like luck, when does it snap, reach its limit of elasticity?
A window, a fork, bars, bars everywhere, like ladders, but oddly horizontal, or maybe ladders are just vertical bars? Thoughts race, sense and order abandoned me some time ago, panic and folly reign. It’s overwhelming: too much to process, too much to remember in just one night. The numbers on the door are distracting, I feel as though they’re surveying me, defining me.
"Can we stop for a minute?"
Who said that? Right, me, my head, this conscience. Stop for a minute, breathe. The chaplain with the greying sideburns told me to concentrate on my surroundings, on the here and the now, so I'll try to do just that. Focus on what you can see in the room. Ground yourself.
It's about six fifteen pm, I think. I am thirty-seven years old. 2.
The room I find myself in is essentially a concrete cube. Like a Rubik’s cube. I used to solve them so fast when I was a kid. My brother taught me the algorithm. Forty-seven seconds, that was my record. 20.
I can't figure out if the table my food is placed upon is real wood, or fake, plastic with a wooden effect. My grandpa was a carpenter, and he’d made a coffee table which this one reminds me of. It was oak, heavy and hard, especially when I’d tripped and chipped my tooth on its corner. From then on, I was known as ‘Toothy’ in school. School. Knowledge. Wisdom. I’d always thought I’d know more and be wiser by the time this came around. 208.
The whisky could be mistaken for liquid honey, straight from the honey bear like at home. Down at the local bar Old Mo's, by the interstate junction where I'd go on Fridays, they'd dubbed it ‘liquid gold’. Precious elixir for the tainted mind. Fool’s Gold. I’d sneak in after high school and pretend I was over 21. So did Julie, that’s how we met. She was like the whisky in a way, golden hair and sun-kissed skin, and eyes which made me dream. I wanted to spend every last second with her. Is she thinking about me? Does she even remember me? 2084.
Beyond the barbed wire my eyes marvel at the great plains. Fields upon fields, square metre upon square metre of space to freely walk, jump, run in. I remember a hike I took with Junior when he was only seven, around the National Park a few hours from home. He’d got tired so I’d ended up carrying him most of the way. I remember the feeling of the heavy pack digging into my shoulder blades, a burden, yet a blessing, carrying all our food and supplies. I’d hoped he’d be at my bedside when this happened, telling me about some grandkids or something, or some wonderful daughter in law. 20841.
The window is square, and beyond the enclosure fence the sun is setting, its amber light blinding, blinding like light reflected off a blade. The blade, dripping, without which I wouldn't be here. Sharp, beautiful, deadly. My right hand twitches. 208419.
A glint in the window catches my eye, and if I tilt my head far enough, I can just spot a rusty iron ladder propped up against the brick wall, on the far-left side of the compound outside. It looks like it's been stood there for decades, waiting, wrung by wrung eroded by the elements, but I've never noticed it before. My ma used to say we never notice the most important things until it's too late. Again, she was right. Where will my ladder take me, after this one last night? Can I climb up, to forgiveness, maybe even salvation? Or am I destined to meekly climb down, into whatever the bowels of the earth hold? Or maybe the ladder isn't a ladder at all, maybe it's a wheel... what goes around comes around, my pal Sam used to say. Or there may be nothing. Void. 2084199.
I finish the whisky in one fiery swig. I dig into the delicious pulled pork, bittersweet, savouring every mouthful like it is my last. Oh wait, never mind...
The weathered steel door swings open. "Come on, it's time". Standing up, blood rushes to my head and my vision blurs. I catch one last glimpse of the ladder outside. This is the night I climb. I'm ready, ready to climb it, wherever it leads.
Inmate of Cell 2084199.
Executed by lethal injection, July 23rd, 2019.
Idaho Maximum Security Institution, Kuna, Idaho, USA.
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