A Sip of my Writing

Journey

 "No luggage, eh?" the man insisted. "Waiting for someone?"

The boy looked away from the man, away from the platform, into the distance. A few old houses, built right by the tracks, were visible. The once-white paint was now a nondescript shade of brown. Even from a distance, it was visible that no one lived in those houses – the open doors swung backwards and forward in the warm afternoon wind, the window frames like hollow eyes, staring onto the rails.

Paulito’s Last Christmas

Christmas time in Luanda is right in the middle of the rainy season. Nine degrees south of the equator, the air is as hot and humid as a Turkish bath. The temperatures soar to unbearable heights. On that mid-December summer evening they reached 90 degrees.

Hands

 'Hands' won second prize in the adult prose section of the Neil Gunn Writing Competition, 2009. 
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So you are convinced you're right. And it sustains you through nights with little sleep, when the dawn breaks on you like pale yolk pouring out of an egg and the air smells like nothing else you will ever smell again; a fusion of sweat and sulphur and delicious thin bread.

But of course you are right. And you are doing what you have to do. You walk the narrow alleys of the kasba in Hebron, sweat making your helmet stick to your forehead like Original Sin and the footsteps of those walking in front of you echo on the ancient stones in the crisp early morning. Advancing slowly, click-clack, click-clack. Faces dark, eyes narrowed in concentration, taking deep breaths, in, out, in, out.

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