The manuscripts

(The following is an excerpt from a longer work.)

CHAPTER ONE

I’ve been in the shower so long my fingers are wrinkled, but I’m too mad to turn off the water. Mixing with my hot tears, it swirls down the drain along with my supposedly happy life.

My stomach hurts as I sob, quiet moans punctuated with wails of anguish as the thought of each new consequence crosses my mind.

“What did I do?” I say over and over rocking back and forth trying anything to comfort myself. I have never felt so wretched, alone, and discarded.

I didn’t take my clothes off when I got in. I just needed to get clean. To cleanse myself of I don’t know what, Shame? Betrayal? None of this makes any sense, except that it’s not fair.

I glance towards the hall. The divorce papers that came earlier are now strewn on the hall floor.  I didn’t get past the first page. I dropped them like they were covered with shit. They might as well be, because that’s how I feel, the victim of an ambush. A shitty heartless one. Continue reading “The trophy wife: A jilted wife’s revenge”

The following is an excerpt from a longer work called Angel of Aleppo, a Story of the Armenian Genocide

Aleppo, January, 1916

I came south, by way of Cemesgerik. After a week, it felt like I had been on the run all my life. That was last year, around May. There was no warning at all. One day the soldiers were there, shouting at us, carrying off the prettiest girls, stealing everything.

They hung all the men of our village in front of us. We had to stand in the square and watch as the soldiers strung them up, one group after the next. Women were crying, tearing out their hair, scratching their faces. The soldiers shot the loudest of them where they stood. When the smoke cleared, my aunts lay dead and my mother was nowhere to be seen.

They came to our house and I ran out back to the house next door. I hid behind the vines and watched as a soldier came to that house and told the mother there he was taking the oldest daughter. Our neighbour had the little sister and brother hiding under her apron. The soldier pulled at the older girl’s hand. Her mama clung to her other hand, crying, screaming.

I was taught that God had a plan for all of us. Was this a part of God’s plan? Continue reading “Haykuhi’s story”

(The following is an excerpt from a longer work.)

Children who grew up on military bases are called Army brats. Asylum brats were those few of us who grew up on the grounds of state insane asylums where our parents, who worked there, had housing provided by the state. We weren’t shoved from base to base, state to state, country to country, so we couldn’t claim we didn’t put down roots. Instead, we were buffeted between the bizarre personalities among whom we lived, if we chose to know the lives of those mostly benign inmates — excuse me, patients — from whose lunacy our parents earned their livings.

My sister, Sally, ignored them. Not me. I got into trouble early in my life by making the acquaintance of so many of those twisted souls. My mother almost had had a heart attack when I wandered away at the age of four and showed up back at her door holding the hand of a huge man who wasn’t insane, just retarded. He had had the good sense to bring me home before I had gone too far away. For his good deed he was screamed at by my mother, who called the campus police, who hauled him away, tears streaming down his big, uncomprehending face. Continue reading “Crazy about you”