(Click on the title to view the whole piece)
 

Growing Up in Bali
 
I now know that her anger had much deeper roots in the anxiety of the world starting to crack, and part of that cracking the appearance of a pit in our back yard. Big enough to bury a family. An American missionary family.
 
Richard Lewis

 

Kafka on Everything
 
Any qualms I had about the key arrangement and about having to cross the road for breakfast were eased when I found the apartment apparently little changed since having been converted to tourist accommodation. It offered an opportunity to live as decades of inhabitants had lived, heaving their bags up the winding stone staircase, gripping the wrought iron railing and peering into its descending spiral, hearing footsteps and laughter echoing through the whitewashed hallways before disappearing behind the click of a heavy wooden door.
 
Tony O'Brien

 

Buffalo, Redux
 
Buffalo is steeped in its past because its present is bleak and its future bipolar, either the ramblings of developers promising silver bullet solutions—a new convention center, a downtown high rise, a casino, a Bass Pro fishing store-or the resigned cynicism of its diehards.
 
Micah Nathan

 

Memorial Day
 
For some reason, Bastogne had held a special place in the catalogue of his war remembrances. As a medic in the Third Army under General Patton (whom he caustically referred to as "the son-of-a-bitch") it was his job to go into the battlefields to recover and treat the wounded, quite a leap from his civilian occupation as a seventeen-year-old messenger boy.
 
Elizabeth Mack

 

Berlin, Alexanderplatz
 
There is no way. There are rows and rows of concrete blocks, rising from tumbling ground, reaching to my hips, to my shoulders, over my head. I turn, then turn again. There is Fay somewhere, and Erin, and there are others, couples, tour groups, school classes. We get lost, each of us in our own time and direction, in this monument. There are no words written on the blocks, no explanations given. There is not even an entry.
 
Dorothee Lang

 

Don Esteban
 
"But he was your father," I say. "So I am sorry." They hand me a Polar and I stand silently with them in the sun. "Entonces, a Don Esteban," I say, raising my bottle.
 
William Reese Hamilton