Christopher Allen's Blog, page 7

Vladi’s Castle by Nathaniel Morris

Soon after we had set off for Thethi, the driver pressed a phone into my hands.

“Vladi,” he said by way of explanation.
I had no idea what this meant, but one of the three German hikers seated beside me in the van explained that ‘Vladi’ was the young man who had organised their ride. I had randomly encountered the van near the market at six in the morning. Across from the rows of peasant women in white head-kerchiefs and blue dresses already sitting on upturned buckets, piles of soft brown tobacco laid out on sheets in front of them, I had asked a taxi driver about how to get up into the mountains, craggy and desolate, streaked with snow and wreathed with cloud that dominated the horizon. He had pointed out the three foreigners standing next to the van, which was headed for Thethi, gateway to Albania’s Dinaric Alps – the ‘Accursed Mountains’.
And now Vladi wanted to talk to me. A little reluctantly, I put the phone to my ear.
“So,” Vladi asked me in English. “You go up into the mountains? To Thethi?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“You like to go further? I am from mountains, and my parents still there, in place called Pecaj. You want to stay with them?”
“Err, well, what’s it like there?”
“More beautiful than Thethi.”
“Higher up?”
“Yes, even more high. And there is lot of space in my parents’ house. It is like castle, with mountain all around. We used to be noble family,” he added, somewhat mournfully.
“Well.” I paused, thinking. “Okay! It sounds like an adventure!”
“Okay! My mother go there in bus tomorrow. You meet her and go together.”
I passed the phone back to the driver, and everything was sorted. Next morning, in Thethi, I was woken early by the furious honking of a bus. Bleary-eyed and confused, I stumbled out of the house to find the driver drinking a coffee with my previous night’s host. “Toma,” said the driver, pointing to himself.
“What?”
“TOMA!” he shouted, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time. He seemed to have adopted the traditional English approach to communication with foreigners.
I stood there, puzzled, trying to work out what he was talking about. And then it clicked.
“Aaaah! Toma is your name!”
“Aaaah, ju quheni Naim!” said Toma in Albanian – ‘So your name is Naim!’
“Me? No! Unë jam Nat – I am Nat.”
“Aaaah, okay, Naim Nat!”
We climbed into the bus and Toma announced to the passengers that my name was ‘Naim’.
“Nice to meet you, Naim!” the predominantly elderly mountain folk told me, shaking my hand one after the other. “Mussilman?” they asked. “Do you speak Turkish?” After a failed attempt to explain that I was agnostic at best, I realised that in Albania, a country with one main ethnicity split between four different religions, this meant very little to anyone. I was now saddled with a new identity: Naim the English Muslim. I was the only one there with a beard, after all.
Together we clattered down the mountain road, which dropped away just a few inches from the wheels towards rapids several hundred feet below. After an hour or so we stopped, and the woman in front of me motioned for us to get out. I understood that this must be Vladi’s mother. But where were we? On one side of the road there was a rather nondescript little house. On the other side, a goat track and some trees. I frowned. Had I really come all this way to stay here? We were hardly higher up than Thethi. The views of the mountains were pleasant, but far from stunning. And where was the castle?
I shouldered my bag, while Vladi’s mother, after some complicated manoeuvres with a brightly coloured, hand-woven cord, managed to strap all of her various sacks and packages to her back. I insisted on carrying her cardboard box of tomato plants, and took a step towards the house. She smiled and shook her head, pointed up towards the trees, and, setting a brisk pace, began to walk the almost nonexistent path that zigzagged up the hill and disappeared around a corner several miles up. I smiled. Maybe Vladi hadn’t been exaggerating after all.
The walk up to Pecaj was beautiful. And difficult. At every turn I thought we would come face to face with our destination; and every turn revealed another path leading ever more steeply upwards. Far above us rose the white-capped peaks of the mountains, while the valley-bottom dropped steadily away from us, becoming no more than a thin strip of vibrant green and turquoise. Hundreds of melt-water streamlets ran through pastures speckled with daisies and a yellowy haze of buttercups, feeding gushing waterfalls that we had to cross by hopping from rock to rock to avoid soaking our feet.
And then, after four relentless hours, we came to the still-functioning water-mill that marked the entrance to Pecaj – a village of ten ancient farmhouses, perched on the green lip of the mountain. Beside a three-storey building of whitewashed stone blocks, Vladi’s father, Zef Zakuli Vladaj, a spry, silver-haired old man with a big smile and an impressively aquiline nose, was waiting for us. He took me by the hand, and in an instant I found myself sitting out on a wooden balcony that looked out over a field that quickly fell away into nothingness, and beyond towards granite peaks that shone white above the treeline. Zef vanished for a moment and reappeared with a shot glass and a framed photograph.
The glass was filled with delicious homemade plum brandy, and the sepia-tinged photograph was of a fierce looking old man in a turban, with a huge moustache, a dagger and a pistol on his waist, and a well-stocked cartridge belt slung over one shoulder. “My grandfather – the bajraktar,” he told me proudly. The bajraktar was the valley’s hereditary headman, and the ultimate local authority on the Kanun – the traditional Albanian code of law. Zef was himself now the bajraktar, and was still called on to help resolve the occasional blood feud. But the more positive side of the Kanun – epitomised by the maxim that “the Albanian house is for God and the guest” – was also well in evidence in Pecaj. Never have I felt so welcome in the house of a stranger. Brandy followed brandy, and then came a huge spread of freshly baked bread, homemade cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, a rich stew of fatty lamb cutlets with beans, and plenty of raw onions, which were devoured by Vladi’s parents with a gusto I had never before witnessed.
Later, with darkness falling, we again sat around the little electric stove to eat wonderfully flavoursome hunks of locally reared chicken, washed down with more brandy. And then Zef and his wife bedded down on the floor and ordered that I take their freshly made-up bed. I didn’t argue the point; it would have been a rejection of the hospitality on which this lively old couple so prided themselves. I felt as though, having finally reached these mountains, I had stumbled into some sort of strange pastoral fairy-tale. And I liked it.
____________________________________________________
Nathaniel Morris is a London-born, Mexico City-based writer, currently working on turning his doctorate on indigenous participation in the Mexican Revolution into a ‘proper’ book. He’s written about Mexican music, Roma culture and Balkan travels for The Wire, The Isis and The Sarajevo Notebook, as well as various websites.


Judge's Comment: An impromptu trip in the Albanian Alps, filled with quirky cross-cultural misunderstandings... 'I was now saddled with a new identity: Naim the English Muslim...' After a four-hour climb with our writer, an elderly  couple welcome us, total strangers, into their homes and their hearts. '...Zef and his wife bedded down on the floor and ordered that I take their freshly made-up bed.' Such magnanimity. 
 

The Heart of What Matters by Elizabeth Eidlitz

Nothing ahead is man-made. Behind us, sailboat masts are matchsticks at the Key West wharf. The bow of our catamaran creates a windy monotone as it crosses turquoise ribbons on a sea of royal blue. Cumulus clouds hang low in a sky with frigate birds, and flying fish jump like skipping stones.
 
Six of us are making a journey in silence and bleached sunlight to swim in the Gulf of Mexico with wild bottlenose dolphins, to meet them on their terms. Unlike captive creatures in concrete pools, rewarded for paying tourists any kind of attention, free roaming dolphins are neither impeded nor enticed. Totally present in their chosen way of life --traveling, fishing, loving, playing, resting, and teaching each other --they may choose our company, or not.
Plutarch wrote, “to the dolphin alone nature has given that which the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage.” Those who have experienced changes in spiritual awareness among these creatures are convinced that dolphins consciously heal us, support our full awakening to who we are.
That is what I, too, wish to believe. But my skeptical left-brain won’t get out of the way. I diminish these limited Cetaceans: I dismiss Tursiops Truncatus, though a mammal, as merely a fish.
A triangle of fin breaks the surface ahead. Then another. Those brown patches are not seaweed. The captain counts twenty dolphins in this pod. Two of them lift off from ocean, sleek bodies glistening as they arch in air to dive in perfect mental, physical, and spiritual balance.
The boat slows, eases forward. Wind drops to soundless air. Now we can hear flat tail flukes spank water and Bronx cheers exhaled from blowholes on dolphin heads. They are all around us. We gather by a ladder in the stern, put on fins and snorkel gear, ready, at the captain’s signal, to enter their habitat respectfully.
I slide into water saltier than tears. The ocean, amniotic warm, a centered world of open sea and vast silence, is conducive to rebirth into a more natural way of life.
Why am I anxious? Frightened of surrendering to the moment, like a novice skydiver staring into open space, but clinging to the doorway of the plane? I look below. Between my submerged face and starfish on the sandy bottom twelve transparent feet away, swim a pair of dolphins.
I long to write about looking into the eyes of my first free dolphin, recognizing a fellow sentient being, feeling love, understanding and certainty that at some evolutionary stage our pathways have crossed.
I would like to describe their creaky door sounds as they spiral round me, the initial tingles and sensuous soothing of their high-pitched squeaks. But I never make eye contact with the dolphins. I neither hear nor sense their sonar clicks. They pass beneath me without looking. I stare at their legacy of empty space, my underwater heart telegraphing them to turn around, come back, and give me another chance. Please.
They are gone.
From the boat, ninety feet away, the captain’s hand is signaling that to engage them I should have dived, to indicate my wish to play.
There is lesson here:
This is not the first time I have forgotten to ask for what I want. Nor the first time I’ve resisted letting go of foolish inhibitions.
Tomorrow, we six travelers in a human pod will return to obsessions with past and future. But today, critical selves suspended, we are profoundly connected by what we’ve been shown: how to be in the moment.
Before I am drawn back to an existence where love is conditional, where it matters if my tee shirt is inside out, I want memory to fix images from this wilder, more authentic world, where dolphins, with flicks of flukes, permanent slight smiles, joyful leaps, intuitively choreographed, bring non-obligating gifts--inquisitiveness, joie de vivre, altruism and a sense of play.
On the way to the harbor, I feel yearning and envy once again. In a boat anchored just offshore, sails furled, an uninhibited man sits in the stern, his head thrown back, mouth open, and fingers on guitar strings.
Though wind mutes his words, he is singing to his companion--a tail wagging, chocolate colored Labrador--and I apprehend the body language of unselfconscious pleasure.
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Elizabeth Eidlitz is a writer, teacher, and studio potter who lives in Concord, Massachusetts. She discovered that amazing and transformative travel is accessible close to home as well as foreign places, just as significant journeys are individually, not geographically defined. 


Judge's Comment: A dip into an 'amniotic warm' underwater realm in which dolphins reign: '...they may choose our company, or not.' But there is much more than that to this story of unconditional love: we are drawn into a mindful world in which we rediscover the value of 'unselfconscious pleasure'.

Photos from Key West Dolphin Encounters and Por el Planeta
 

A Glimpse of the Future Coming from Behind by Paula Veselovschi

Santiago de Okola
The strong August winds were swiping the barren fields of this tiny village on the Bolivian shore of Lake Titicaca. Don Tomas invited me into his house. Surely, he wouldn’t leave me sitting outside to freeze. Don Tomas, the organizer of my homestay there in Santiago de Okola, was trying to get a hold of Doña Lucia over the telephone. My host. For the next three days, I would be sharing her house, food and company.
“There’s one thing I forgot to tell you, though,” he said. “She doesn’t speak Spanish.”
“At all?”
“Well, a little bit. But you’ll mostly have to talk to her in Aymara.”
Oh.
Aymara, an indigenous language spoken in parts of Bolivia, Peru, Chile and Argentina, wasn’t completely new to me. A few years before, while reading a book, I had come across an unusual bit of information: this language, it said, sees the future as behind us, rather than in front of us. The strangeness of this worldview stuck to my mind and now, years later, I arrived in La Paz, contacted the Aymara Language and Culture Institute, and took some lessons. Spending three days with somebody who spoke only Aymara, though, took the challenge to a new level.
“Don’t people here speak Spanish as well?” I dared to ask.
“Some of them do. The young people in particular, but Doña Lucia is seventy-two.”
I moved my gaze across the room, trying to find an escape from my newly-found apprehensiveness, but in the austere-looking home of Don Tomas I found few things to distract my attention – a table, a gas stove, an old black radio, and Don Tomas himself, standing. He had just offered me the only chair he had.
“Don’t worry, she’s a lovely lady,” he said. “Her husband is dead, her son is in La Paz, so she’s thrilled to have somebody around for a couple of days.”
Santiago de Okola was desolate in the winter. Houses there were scattered far from each other, separated by distances rather than by fences. Two pigs and a woman sorting frozen potatoes in her yard were the only living beings in sight.
We found Doña Lucia in the kitchen, sitting on the ground, legs crossed under her ankle-long skirt. As she saw us, she rose slowly, greeting me with a beaming smile and uttering words which I didn’t understand. Don Tomas showed me my room. I dropped my backpack, and off he went.
I went back to the kitchen, a small windowless adobe hut crammed with old burnt pots, tins, buckets, sacks of potatoes, corn, beans, and a few vegetables on a shelf. The wind was blowing through the cracks in the walls and the door was wide open to let the light in. Doña Lucia was peeling potatoes in a plastic basin, and boiling some water on a small stove. My lunch.
I tried to recall what I had learned in my classes. Some words that sounded vaguely familiar, the conjugations for about ten verbal tenses I had no idea how and when to use, and countless rules for constructing a basic sentence.
“Nayax aymar yatikta,” I said as I took a seat on a piece of wood by the entrance. I had crafted this sentence beforehand and rehearsed it in my head for four minutes or so. “I’m learning Aymara.”
She already knew that. Don Tomas had told her. She replied quickly, as if she were talking to another villager. I didn’t understand a thing. But that was fine. The ice had been broken.
“Jumax phayta?” I tried again. This time I knew the phrase was incorrect, but I still hoped the message would get through. “You cook?” Doña Lucia was now washing some vegetables and I wanted to offer my help.
She somehow seemed to understand. She pointed to the bucket and said something. I understood “uma”. Water.
As I came back with the full bucket, I gained a bit more confidence and tried to name some of the objects around us. Potato. Cat. Beans. Tomato. Corn. House.
“Jumax,” I started, but I realized I lacked the vocabulary to finish the sentence – what’s “to eat” in Aymara? I dried my hands, rose up quickly and ran to my room, to bring my pocket-size grammar manual. Will you eat with me, Doña Lucia?
The second day, I told her about my parents. She showed me an old picture in black and white. It was her, with her late husband and her son.
“Qauqi?” she then asked, pointing at me.
Qauqi? What’s that, I thought.
“Maya, paya, kimsa,” she said.
Wait, Doña Lucia, I’ll get there. Maya, paya, kimsa are the numbers. One, two, three. She was asking me how many brothers or sisters I have. None, I am an only child. 
It always took me some seconds to break her sentences down into words, a few more to figure out if I recognized any of them, and reassemble them into a message. Most of the times, I simply didn’t understand. Some of the times I did. Our conversations were slow and bumpy.
That evening, Don Tomas dropped by to check if everything was alright.
“Are the two of you getting along?” he asked me.
“We do. I just wish I could understand what she says and talk to her,” I said. “It’s been tough.”
“Don’t worry,” he interrupted, “Doña Lucia told me she adores you!”
“Really? How come?”
“You speak Aymara.”
In Bolivia, a country where most of the population is indigenous, Aymara is one of the four official languages, the mother tongue of some 1.2 million people in the high Andes plateau. However, this number is decreasing. Schoolbooks in Aymara are rarely available, despite the country’s objective of having education in indigenous languages. And speaking Spanish is a must, if you want to find a job. As a result, an ever rising number of indigenous families, especially from the urban environment, now choose to raise their children only in the country’s lingua franca.Santiago de Okola was no city, but even there, Don Tomas explained me, it was mostly the adults and the elderly that used Aymara in their day-to-day conversations. What is now a living language may, in a few generations, become silence. But we don’t know that for sure. The future, in Aymara, is behind us because we cannot see it.
The fourth morning, it was time to say goodbye. I needed to catch a ride to the main road to La Paz. Doña Lucia offered to help. We walked to the main square. I dropped my big backpack and leaned it against a wall. It was a sunny day, but the air was crisp. The August winds were still swiping the barren fields of this tiny village on the shores of Lake Titicaca.
A young girl came in our direction, carrying a bag of envelopes. The postwoman, I thought.
“Kauks saraskta?” Doña Lucia greeted her.
“No, no, no, I’m sorry, I don’t speak Aymara, no entiendo,” she replied.
“She’s asking you where you are going,” I translated Doña Lucia’s words to the girl. Then I waited for her to answer.
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Paula Veselovschi is a traveller from Romania, passionate about discovering the intricacies lying under the skin of the places she visits. In love with all things South American, she has been travelling and living on the continent since 2012. Her current home is Colombia. 

Judge's Comment: This story turned my vision of the world and of communication upside down. The author describes Aymara, an indigenous language spoken in several countries of South America, a language which '...sees the future as behind us...' The future behind us...what a comforting idea. 
 

Unaccompanied Baggage by John Philipp

Not until I’d slumped into the United Red Carpet Club armchair at 6:03 a.m. did I notice two weathered brown leather suitcases and an equally worn black vinyl valise piled atop each other on an otherwise empty counter against the back wall. I scanned the clubroom. Save for the lingering odor of Eau de Pledge, I was alone, apparently the only person who believed United when it said be at the airport two hours before flight time.


Traveling by oneself has its advantages. Better than having my wife to harp at me for being a stickler for detail — or her mother, Mona, who’d use more direct language. Alone, I had quiet time to review once more the presentation I was to give in Denver. Then I would relax, get a cup of half-decent coffee, and watch CNN repeat the morning’s news ad nauseam. Or, maybe I’d finish reading From Russia, with Love and discover if James Bond wins the game of cross and double-cross.
I double-checked I had my ticket and driver’s license. (I did.) I placed those boarding documents in my inside jacket pocket. A moment later, I removed the ticket to confirm it had today’s date (It did), and that my name was spelled the same as on my license (It was). I selected a Ziploc baggie from my briefcase and dumped into it any objects that might trigger a metal detector: loose change, a foil packet of breath fresheners, car keys, and nail clippers. I scrunched the seal tight, put the baggie away, and proceeded to the serving counter. I poured a cup of black coffee, added one-and-a-half packets of Sweet & Low, snatched a banana with no brown spots from the open bowl, and confiscated eight airline-size bags of trail mix.
I returned to my seat and picked out the almonds from the eight snack-packs to create one free bag of travel nuts. As my fingers pushed aside tiny pieces of dried mystery fruit, mini-pretzels, and something off-white and greasy I wouldn’t put in a bird feeder much less my mouth, my peripheral vision scouted the suitcases. Triggered by some Pliocene gland still embedded in the reptilian remnant of my medusa oblongata, a primal instinct surfaced and screamed DANGER! (I had learned those fancy terms in Anthropology I and wondered if their use now might retroactively improve my grade.)
What triggered this feeling of danger? I heard nothing except a muted CNN announcer babbling over a celebrity snafu, smelled nothing except a hint of French toast overtone to the fading Pledge — perhaps the restaurant next door — and noticed nothing except the clusters of empty chairs between me and the suitcases. Empty chairs! Airport PA system announcements played back in my head. Senses ratcheted up to Red Alert. My head whirled around. The club was like a morgue. I gritted my teeth. I was alone and face-to-face with … unaccompanied baggage!
I evaluated the situation. Just because I couldn’t see anyone, didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone around. A woman at the club entrance had checked my member card, and someone had set out the morning coffee service. My mind departed reality and traced those suitcases back to their imagined original owner, a swarthy, bearded man who had picked the Red Carpet Club lock last night after the cleaning crew had departed. I knew I was profiling, but counseled myself this could be a national emergency. I imagined the terrorist entering through the club kitchen, gingerly placing the suitcases on the counter, and setting the timer.
TIMER! My fingers tapped a rapid staccato beat on the side table, my chest tightened, my breath quickened, and my stomach overpowered my morning Prilosec. There must be a timer inside one of those suitcases! I considered opening them to see how many minutes were left in the countdown. Like James Bond, I would stare down at a panel of devil-red descending digits.
Suddenly, I had a discomforting thought, bolted upright, and dumped a lapload of dried fruit and mini-pretzels on the floor. What if the suitcase is booby-trapped, and I’m the booby? Terrorists did that all the time in spy novels to foil would-be spoilers. I knew in my heart myterrorist had read the same novels. I entered into a conversation with myself.
He’s onto me.
Who?
The bearded guy.
What bearded guy?
God, I’m talking to myself!
My undershirt was blotting sweat. After it dries, I thought, it’ll have to be surgically removed. Assuming my chest is in one piece.
I know I’m profiling again, but I go with Mustafa, an archenemy well seasoned in terrorism.
But my heart is pure and my cause is just, so…
Jesus, John, get a grip! First things first. If those are explosives, this is NOT a good place to be. Grab the briefcase, forget the free nuts, and get the hell out.
Then what?
I imagined my mother-in-law sitting across from me, whispering to her daughter. I couldn’t make out the words, but I knew what she was saying: “Whatta wimp.” Mona had first used the term after I’d chosen to ignore her midnight announcement she’d heard a noise downstairs (She was visiting); she used it after I didn’t complain when the restaurant overcooked my steak (I was buying); again when a large man butted in front of us in the movie line waiting for tickets to How to Be Single (I’d been outvoted).
Though faced with an imminent explosion, I couldn’t leave until I answered one more question: What’s my endgame?  What do I do once I'm safe? A memory wrestled into my consciousness, the comedian Shelley Berman describing how he once looked out a plane window, saw the wing on fire and said nothing because, “I’d rather die than make an ass out of myself.” Like Berman, I found myself square on the horns of modern man’s dilemma: the fine line between Hero and Ass.
I inhaled a deep breath, pulled in my stomach, and stuck out my chest. I jutted what little chin I had into its full-forward position — and made my decision. I chose people over pride, country over cowardice, and fame over fear. “Ballad of the Green Berets” swelled in my head. I rose and marched to the reception desk. An attractive Asian woman looked up from her open newspaper. “How may I help you?”
I spoke in a quiet, steady voice I dropped an octave for effect. “I think you should know there’s unaccompanied baggage in the back alcove.” As I waited for my reward, I imagined my mother-in-law in her Sunday-go-to-meeting brown wool suit, beaming as the president pinned a medal on my chest, flash bulbs popping everywhere.
“Oh, sir, that’s art. Interesting, don’t you think?”
Once again, I blessed myself Mona wasn’t standing at my side, and thought, but didn’t say to the attractive Asian woman: I'll tell you what I think. I think they should have little plaques on anything that isn't a bomb — and I should be awarded a ramekin of warmed Fancy Mixed Nuts, the kind they give you in First Class.
__________________________________________
John Philipp writes a regular humor column for six local Marin newspapers and has won awards for his fiction, humor, and memoir writing. He is currently revising his first novel. Everything he’s ever written has been published if you include his mother’s refrigerator door.

Judge's Comment: We enter the writer's mind in a Woody Allen-type romp around an airport lounge, in which his OCD tendencies escalate to sheer panic: 'Senses ratcheted to up to Red Alert. My head whirled around...I was alone and face-to-face with...' And then...wham bump tumble crash down to reality. Superb.

The Great Out-There by Jonny Blostone

The story starts at the end. I’m on a Kuwait Airways flight from New York to London sprawled across an empty row on a Boeing so old it sounds in pain trying to stay aloft. I’m half asleep but cold from the air conditioning. And nervous, and sad, after everything.

I’ve been travelling the world for a year. Last August I upped sticks for Beijing suddenly, leaving my City job and my confused, heartbroken girlfriend in a cloud of quarter-life-crisis dust.

The language barrier proved almost physical in China. Non-communication leant oppressively on everything, complementing the grey Soviet-style buildings; and Beijing’s humid avenues are so wide, so filled with smog, that I rarely saw the other side of the road. Catching the right train, or finding the few remaining alleys of traditional Chinese character, is physically and mentally exhausting. But oddly I, standing a foot above the suffocating but ever-curious crowds, had never felt so free.


I edged down the coast to Qingdao where pollution makes the beach orange and the sea black. Breathing was difficult. Rotting fish and exhaust fumes cloyed at my lonely self. Outside the Tsingtao brewery, supping unpasteurised beer from a shiny bag, locals relentlessly and unashamedly took my picture. I wondered about doing this trip alone, and about home.

Next, the canals of Suzhou, down which an old lady punted me while singing, and the twee wooden charm of old China glided by.

Then Shanghai, big and brash with spots of colonial familiarity down by the water. Locals were confident and fashionable and in the streets steam from Sichuan hot pots blurred neon signs above, which said ‘look at us, we’re the future’.

The metroscapes gave way to the pepper pot mountains of the Li River. Snack and beer vendors on the dusty bank were laid back, and a bamboo raft took me down towards Vietnam, where things were suddenly quieter, and there was blue sky.

I’d shed 15 pounds in China and barely spoke, but good food and company were easily come by here. Unspoilt tropical communities and beaches balanced perfectly with a loose tourist infrastructure that made it easy to get around. Things were cheap, companions from hostels surprisingly unpretentious, and the weather was glorious. I was relaxed, carefree and things from the life I’d left behind were stacked at the back of my mind, in a room I rarely visited.

Limits and concerns fell away as I tourist-crossed the jungles and the Mekong into Cambodia. This place was laid back and friendly. But one needn’t step far from the bars and imported hedonism to see deep scars. I thought about my own scars, how lucky I was that they couldn’t begin to compare. Bullet holes in masonry, shallow pits in fields, and a thread of uncertainty through everyone, unsure who they really were, and where they’d really come from.

In Thailand the noise and optimism of the gap-year crowd leaked into almost every place, but the country’s beauty wouldn’t yield. After the head-pounding booze-blur of Bangkok, I moped-pootled through Ko Pha Ngan’s lush forest, to emerge at the brow of its highest hill. Golden sunset lit the ocean and white sands below. The last residue of work-based hypertension took off on the breeze, past an elephant plodding by in the other direction.

I pushed on to Kuala Lumpur – a now familiar East/West collision of temples, noodles, glass and steel – from where I flew to Australia.

Melbourne was a flat San Francisco with a double shot of Britishness. Over-cool students and twenty-somethings with a good sense of humour rattled around a tram network being naïve and progressive. It was squeaky clean. Swanky coffee was everywhere, good and expensive. The weather and my mood were very changeable. Why had I left her? What was she doing now, and with whom?

Feet itched. I drove a clapped-out Ford from Adelaide to Brisbane, via the Great Ocean Road, Canberra, the Blue Mountains and Sydney, with a couple of 20-year-olds – one unsure about everything, but happy; the other sure about everything, because he said he knew Jesus. I felt old. The coast became less beautiful, so I went inland, and saw kangaroos on Christmas Day drinking from the Mighty Murray.

I flew across the sea, and back fifty years, to New Zealand. Among the fenced-off ruins of quake-struck Christchurch my heart was sore and I felt the creep of melancholy, wondering about her, about who I was and where I was going. I took almost empty buses round both islands. At the Pacific the sky was grey and the little roads empty. I had fish and chips in a pub to avoid the rain. The mountains were breathtaking. I walked on the surface of a glacier, battered by a biting wind.


At Queenstown, nestled between imposing crags and peaks, amid fresh lake air, noisy bars and extreme sports clubs that dripped with youth and desperation to seize the day, I realised I had run away as far as I could. Unless I floated off into space, to move on now could only mean to start heading home.

I crossed the dateline and touched down in Vancouver scantily dressed in late spring snow. Cycling through Stanley Park, a clarity matching the mountain air bathed my brain. I had to go back to her. She was what I’d left, but not why I’d left. The thought of returning to a life without her induced a sudden panic.

But people, rightly, don’t hang about when you self-indulgently introspect at their expense. As I bussed down the coast, through rainy Seattle, dreary Portland and snowy Tahoe, I saw signs at a distance that she was moving on. The desert-mountain-ocean roads of breezy California were lost on me as a vague desire to see the USA fell away in favour of an acute need to get back, and win her back.


Three days on a Greyhound from Vegas to DC. Unnerving occurrences, from an alcoholic soiling himself in the next seat, to a wide-eyed junkie trying to sell me the jeans he was wearing at a 2 a.m. service station stop. The scratched and scabby underbelly of the American road mirrored my fevered, sleepless desperation to re-London, tell her I was wrong, that I’m sorry. Recalling the comfort of an office schedule, sharp suits in cocktail bars, weekend visits to parents in the country, shared slumbering Sundays… Oh to learn the loveliness of what I had by throwing it all away in a catapult around the globe!


I’ve always wanted to see New York. Surely the only place to rival London as a place to maybe live. But by the time I arrive, and as the shaky plane lifts above the skyscrapers, reflecting new summer light across Central Park, I feel I’m rather done.

I’ve asked her to meet on Millennium Bridge. I can’t imagine why she would. I deserve her not to, but there’s always hope. To appreciate what you had and where you were by leaving it all behind to see the great out-there. The world stretches out before me, London hones into view through the window, and hope holds that the story starts at the end.
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Jonny Blostone, 30, grew up in Essex, England and now lives in London with his wife Rebecca. He works in financial PR and writes for fun. He'd like one day to say he's visited every country in the world, mainly to impress people. He'll probably do the most dangerous ones last.


Judge's Comment: In this whirl around the planet, we soul-search with our writer, who learns so much about himself and the world on his travels. 'I thought about my own scars, how lucky I was that they couldn't begin to compare.' We root for him as he flies home, that his story may start 'at the end'...and we look forward to the sequel. 
 

Bronze! Bronze! Bronze!

I won! I won! Well, not really. I won third place. And I'm thrilled and honored to have received bronze. Here's why: It's rare that writers are paid for their work. We publish and publish and publish. We publish in cool places that accept .0001% of subs. We tell our partners this and they still say "How much money did you get?" And we bow our heads and say, "Point zero zero zero one percent."

I have a thing for bronze medals actually. In high school I won a bronze medal for pole vaulting. Yes, I did. I have no idea where the medal is, but I won it. I had my own style when it came to pole vaulting. I was the crazy kid--all legs and arms--who was lucky not to impale himself on the standards, so I'm so glad the bronze medal exists.

Competitions that spread the love around deserve a hand. Yes, I would have loved to win first place ($1000), but I'm thrilled my story was included on the podium. I can smugly tell me partner now that "My Little Cuckoos" made money--and you can bet I've said it a couple of times.

I hope you'll stop by Literal Latté and give the story a read.

My Little Cuckoos

I must be off,
Christopher

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Christopher Allen is the author of Conversations with S. Teri O'Type (a Satire), an episodic adult cartoon about a man struggling with expectations. Allen's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Juked, Eclectica Magazine's 20th-Anniversary Speculative anthology, Indiana Review, Night Train, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and over a hundred other great places. Read his book reviews in [PANK], Necessary Fiction, Word Riot, The Lit Pub, and others. His creative non-fiction has appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul, Bootsnall Travel, and lots of other fine places. A finalist at Glimmer Train in 2011, Allen has been nominated for Best of the Net, the storySouth Million Writers Award, and the Pushcart Prize. He is the 2015 recipient of Ginosko Literary Journal's award for flash fiction and in 2016 took third place in the K. Margaret Grossman fiction award given by Literal Latté. Allen is the managing editor of SmokeLong Quarterly.

The Good Times Roll by Maggie Downs

It’s just after 11 p.m. when the bartender tips my bottled beer into a plastic cup and shoves me out the door. I’m startled, and so are my new friends, some other backpackers I met a few days ago on a bus through the Laos countryside.

This is the night we learn that all businesses in Luang Prabang must close by 11:30 p.m. Doors are boarded, windows shuttered. Curfew begins at midnight, turning the dollhouse buildings of this picturesque town, a UNESCO World Heritage site in northern Laos, into more of a ghost town.

When the streets are nearly empty, that’s when the men appear. They slither back against the doorways, skulking in the shadows like Laotian Deep Throats. I walk a mile to my hostel with my friends, one American guy and a couple from New Zealand, and the men try to lure us in with whistles and whispers.

“Psst. You want bowling?” 
“Come get bowling.”


Their voices are husky, secretive. My friends and I agree, “bowling” is obviously code for something. Probably “opium den.”

We decline and stroll away in our flip-flops, making our way down a quiet dirt road. Other than the men who promise us bowling, Luang Prabang after dark is placid and serene, ruffled only by chirping insects and the shimmy of a breeze in the trees. We see the city by the glow of lanterns, illuminating colonial villas, gold-edged temples, and gentle green hills. 

A few days pass, and my friends and I are out in town again. After a particularly rousing evening of watery beer and board games, we’re having so much fun that we want the night to become elastic, to stretch even just a couple hours longer, to go as far as it can possibly go. The closer curfew creeps, the more determined we are to maintain this merriment. We can’t possibly return to the quiet hostel, not yet.

When a man pops out from behind a jasmine tree, we take him up on the offer. “Yes, we want bowling!” I reply, and he exhales with a long, low whistle to his buddy in a nearby cab.

The vehicle hardly looks road-worthy and smells musky, like mold and sweat. We clamber inside anyway, and the man ducks behind the jasmine tree once more. The driver turns up the Mariah Carey song on the radio, then steps on the gas.

The cab speeds outside the city limits, and I realize I have no idea where this steamy, summer night in Laos will take us. I’ve been backpacking for nine months at this point, solo and far from my home in California, and the dull hum of fear never leaves me. While people are vulnerable everywhere no matter where they go – that’s just the nature of being human – in this cab I’m acutely aware of it.

I keep my hand on the Buck knife in my pocket. If necessary, I can flip it open one-handed. I’ve practiced. There’s also a whistle clipped to my bag, though we’re so far outside of town, the roads are so empty, and we’re long past curfew. Who would ever hear it?

Twenty minutes later, the cab screeches to a halt in front of a dark, warehouse-like building. We pay the man, and he drives away. Our only option is to go inside.

The American, Nick, strides up to the door with an authoritative walk and pulls it open.

“Oh,” says my friend, Rose, the woman from New Zealand. She lets out a loud exhale, then laughs. “A bowling alley is the one thing I didn’t expect.”

Before us are 12 gleaming lanes, glossy balls, falling pins, the whole bit.

This, it turns out, is the epicenter of nightlife in Luang Prabang. While the government-enforced curfew keeps people off the streets past midnight, it can’t stop them from letting the good times roll.

The place resembles every bowling alley I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s the satisfying smack of the ball making contact with wood, the clatter of pins, the smell of cigarette smoke mingled with acrid socks. People are laughing, and the music is loud.

There’s only one major difference. Though the front wall is lined with garish green, white and red bowling shoes -- they’re adorably ugly in Laos too -- everyone has kicked their sandals off, and they’ve taken over the lanes with bare feet.

The drink menu is just two selections long. A bottle of beer is 20,000 kip ($2.60) or a full-sized bottle of whiskey for 30,000 kip ($3.90). Easy choice. The whiskey is called Tiger, and the label boasts that this was “Finest blended SUPER Tiger Whisky Smooth and Mellon.” While I wouldn’t say Tiger is a smooth sipping whiskey, it’s the kind of whiskey one might pour into a car as a last-ditch effort when the gasoline tank runs empty.

Pop music blares from speakers, and all the Laotians sing along. I do my best to chime in, and some guys in the next lane over poke fun at me. I smile and sing louder.



It’s all good fun -- the drinks, the music, the terrible frames peppered with gutter balls. It reminds me of when I was 17 years old, defying all the rules set by adults. My friend Karen and I slipped out of so many slumber parties, hearts pounding, running through the neighborhood in our pajamas, willfully breaking curfew not for any real reason but to stay up late, laughing.

We don’t leave the bowling alley until it’s almost morning. Our cab has returned and is waiting for us. 

The city is dense with mist, slinking through the trees and draping the hills in a kind of lace. The monks are sleepy-eyed, just heading to the road in saffron robes to begin the daily alms walk. This place is beautiful, made even more magnificent by the kind of breathless night that seems to stretch forever. 

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Maggie Downs is a writer based in Palm Springs, California. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Roads & Kingdoms, BBC.com and Smithsonian, among other publications. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert.  

Judge's Comment: Laos: a laid-back little country off the beaten track, where barefoot saffron-clad monks gather alms on the banks of the Mekong. But no, here we are drawn into something different, darker: the unknown 'underworld' of breaking curfews in Luang Prabang...ending up in...nothing more sinister than a bowling alley! Great suspense, great humour. 
 

A Day Out on the Death Railway by Toni Marie Ford

‘This is the start of the Death Railway’, says Pai and I look back at Nong Pladuk station as we chug into motion and leave it behind. Sun-scorched yet saturated with colour, it’s a station in miniature. The walls shed snowflakes of blistered paint and clutches of jasmine and frangipani drip their scented sweat onto a sea of potted plants. It feels wrong that it should be so pretty; I mean, what have potted plants got to do with death?


The train is 3rdclass and the only respite from central Thailand’s suffocating humidity are a few pitiful fans that blow air, warm as breath, around the carriage. Pai says everything twice, once in German for the brothers sitting in front of me and once in English for me. ‘Each railway sleeper* from here until the end of the line represents one life', says Pai and the brothers nod in sync, as if they knew that already. I put my head out of the window and watch thick wooden sleepers flash by underneath, thinking something must have been lost in translation.
Pai goes on, ‘The Empire of Japan built the railway during the Second World War. The railway is 415 km long and stretches from Ban Pong in Thailand to Thanbyuzayat in Burma. Over 100,000 people died during the building of the Thai-Burma railway.’
Pai’s nodding as she talks, as though she’s trying to convince me that what she’s telling me is the truth and I know that it is but I also know that my expression betrays me because how can you believe in something that you can’t imagine?
We fly through the tropical landscape that looks beautiful to me in the way that only something alien can and the hours slide by, unhurried. Every now and then the train guard makes a loudspeaker announcement in Thai that makes everybody laugh and I laugh too because laughter, like cruelty, is infectious.
Explanations offered for the behaviour of the Japanese Imperial Army during the building of the Death Railway: 1) That Japanese soldiers were brutalised by the harshness and violence of their own military training. 2) That soldiers were raised to believe that following orders was not only more important than their own morality but than their own lives. 3) That during wartime, killing is so normalised that it loses its taboo completely and becomes not just the only thing to do but the right thing to do.
Banal rather than evil, stupid rather than sadistic, the Japanese Army internalised the clichés of the regime they had been raised under and suspended their own morality for as long as it took to get the job done. Could it be as simple as that? In certain situations and given the right incentive to do so, are we all capable of inflicting torture? Yes, said Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, the Yale and Stanford psychology professors whose experiments, they once said, revealed the dark heart in us all. No, I think. No.
The train snakes around bends in the track reaching an ascent that forces the driver to slow to a crawl. As we shudder our way up the mountainside the view opens out into an expanse of rice paddies that seem to throb with a vibrancy only living things have. Someone once told me that no grass grows on the ground at Auschwitz and no birds fly overhead. It’s a comforting thought, that the earth has memories and keeps a record of the atrocities we inflict on one another because if the earth could remember all that then we wouldn’t have to.
We arrive at the bridge that spans the River Kwai and step off the train directly onto the tracks. It feels dangerous, like climbing over the barrier on a balcony or wading into water where the current is strong. I look around for someone to stop me but no one appears. Tripping on the metal beams of the bridge that were not built for sightseeing tourists, I try to get away from the crowds but there are too many bodies around, battling for the best photo position. I ask myself what I’m doing here and I mumble a response I can’t quite hear.
The final stretch of the railway is uneventful and most people doze through the intense afternoon heat with their heads bobbing at angles that will pain them later. The end of the line is Nam Tok, home of the Sai Yok Noi Waterfall, a cascade of water filtering down into an idyllic network of freshwater streams where children splash and adults picnic. A few hours of respite here, away from the confines of a metal box on wheels, away from the other passengers, away from the Death Railway.
I’m terrified of slipping on the moss covered stones at the bottom of the waterfall, breaking my neck and being left there to drown so I sit down in the pool. My denim shorts soak up the freezing water and I splash my arms with the crystal-clear salve that should make me feel clean but doesn’t. I fall into a deep sleep on a wooden bench and by the time I wake up my clothes are bone-dry and the train is snorting steam and signalling in a high-pitched shriek that it’s ready to leave. 
The itinerary for the way back is sparse, just one stop at the Death Railway Cemetery at Phanthamit Place. Only we’re running way behind schedule now. The train pulls up to the stop but there isn’t time to walk to the cemetery so people rush at the refreshment stand as though the cartons of juice and tiny chocolate bars are the last on earth. Everyone files back onto the train without encouragement, dirty and irritable, desperate to get back to Bangkok.

Later, from the comfort of an unnecessarily large hotel bed, my body temperature perfectly controlled with a mixture of air conditioning and fluffy duvet, I ask myself again why I went to the Death Railway. Am I a gruesome ‘dark tourist’, stepping on human bones in Cambodia’s Killing Fields, collecting my identity card with relish at DC’s National Holocaust Memorial museum, gripping my Geiger counter with glee as I wander the ghost towns of Chernobyl? Again, I mumble an answer I can’t quite catch.
The more I read the less I understand. The Death Railway was completed in 1943 but only performed its role of supplying Japanese forces in Burma for a year before it was bombed by Allied troops. A railway to nowhere built over seventy years ago, the Death Railway is a relic of a tragic time in history that has nothing at all to do with me, so why is it that I can’t sleep? I ask myself, will the future be better than the past? In the same situation would I act differently, would I be better, could I sacrifice myself to save someone else? I ask myself these questions over and over throughout the night and refuse to answer at all. 
* Railroad tie (North American English)
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Toni Marie Ford is a freelance travel blogger and writer, cinema lover and slow travel enthusiast from the UK who has been enjoying a nomadic lifestyle since early 2014. Visit her blog, www.worldandshe.com, or follow her on twitter @worldandshe or instagram @tonimarieford.

Judge's Comment: This is so much more than an account of a dark episode in history. With sparse writing, the writer grabs your guts and makes you question everything you once believed: 'In certain situations, and given the right incentive to do so, are we all capable of inflicting torture?'
 

A Thousand Cranes by Mandy Huggins

As we emerged from Hiroshima station a man on a bicycle cut across in front of us, wobbled perilously, and sent a bag of leaflets fluttering across the station forecourt. He quickly dismounted and swooped down on them like a bird of prey, apologising profusely as we went over to help him. After we’d returned the leaflets to his bag we asked him for directions, and after pointing us towards the Peace Memorial Park, he disappeared again into the blur of morning commuters.
 
We left the station and headed towards the river, and as we reached the A-bomb Dome a hesitant sun appeared above the skeletal roof, showcasing stark metal against blue skies. The building partly survived the 1945 atomic blast because of its position directly beneath the epicentre, and now the poignant ruin is frozen in time amidst high rise blocks. We stared in silence, listening to the chime of the peace bell across the water.
At the park we were greeted by a flock of origami cranes. The strings of birds flew across the path in a gust of brisk autumnal wind, landing at our feet in a slalom of colour. I reached down and pocketed one that had broken free – tiny, bright and fragile, like an iridescent hummingbird.
A group of schoolboys snatched up the strings and solemnly placed them around the Children’s Memorial, before politely cornering visitors to help with their school assignments. A serious-looking boy with a glossy fringe greeted us in English before holding up his question, carefully handwritten in neat, rounded letters. He wanted us to suggest what the world could do to achieve lasting peace. Thrown by his unwavering gaze, I scribbled a quick answer, knowing that whatever words I offered they would not be adequate.
In front of us, a young girl and her mother arranged their own paper cranes around the memorial to Sadako Sasaki. Sadako was just two years old when the atom bomb fell, and died from leukaemia ten years later. She was attempting the challenge of folding a thousand cranes, the number needed according to Japanese lore to ensure that a wish comes true. Since then countless birds have been folded by children all across Japan and sent here as a constant symbol of hope for world peace.
I glimpsed a man watching us as he hung his cranes alongside the others. They were different to the birds folded from traditional origami paper; these were crafted from some kind of information leaflet, and when I saw them I realised it was the man from the station. As we turned towards the museum, I was aware that he was watching us as we went inside.
As we walked from room to room, it was the simple personal objects and haunting snapshots that resonated the most. There was no doubt that these scattered fragments of ordinary lives spoke the loudest about what happened on 6th August 1945. There was a watch that had stopped at the moment the bomb fell, a twisted tricycle, the tattered remnants of children’s clothes, a wall streaked with black rain, a charred lunch tin, a bottle that had melted in the intense heat. And the dark shadow of a man, burnt onto the steps of the bank, where he had been sitting, waiting for it to open.
When we stepped back outside, we blinked in the bright sunlight. The man was stood at the door, bowing to departing visitors as he handed out his leaflets. As soon as he saw us, he indicated a bench nearby and asked us to sit with him, finally introducing himself. Hitoshi was a local school English teacher, and a man with his own story to tell about Hiroshima; one that he wanted as many people as possible to hear. He explained that his mother, Mitsuko, was hibakusha -- a survivor of the bomb -- and consequently she suffered discrimination throughout her life, often finding it difficult to get work. A small child when the bomb fell, she lost her father and brother, and her mother and aunt suffered from severe radiation sickness and subsequent illnesses. After the war, misunderstanding was widespread, and survivors were thought to be bad luck and even contagious. Hitoshi recalled the hostility from neighbours and the consequent need for them to move home several times. He remembered his childhood as a time of insecurity. He told us that he handed out leaflets to Japanese visitors and students in the hope they would understand their own history better through a personal story.
As we said goodbye to him and left the park, we once again passed by the tangled strings of paper cranes around Sadako’s memorial. My hand closed around the tiny green bird in my pocket, and I paused for a moment to place my own hope for peace alongside the others.
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Mandy Huggins’s travel writing and short fiction has appeared in anthologies, newspapers and magazines. She has won numerous writing competitions and been shortlisted in many others, including those run by Bare Fiction, Fish, Ink Tears, English Pen, and Bradt Travel Guides. She won the BGTW New Travel Writer Award 2014.


Judge's Comment: Delicately folded paper cranes: what could contrast more starkly with the horror of Hiroshima? A bag of leaflets scattered on the ground brings our writer into contact with Hitoshi, who relates the story of how his family was affected by the bomb. His message is one of peace, echoed by the writer in the final sentence. '..I paused for a moment to place my own hope for peace alongside the others.'
 

Wild Encounter by Graham Mercer

When I was about five my Aunty May took me to the theatre to see Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I came away with a doomed infatuation for Goldilocks (I was short-sighted and from the stalls, in her short skirt and stage make-up, she must have looked like Degas’ Dancer with a Bouquet of Flowers, minus the flowers) and with a longing to see a bear. A real bear. In the wild.


Original Photograph by Guerin NicolasWhich is why, half a century on, I am leaving The Garden of Heaven, our houseboat, soon after daybreak and crossing Srinigar’s Dal Lake in a shikara. With my Pakistani wife Anjum, our friend Patricia and a young Kashmiri, Farouk.
Farouk is one of those men, not uncommon in India, who attach themselves to you as serendipitously as dandelion seeds on the summer breeze. He is good-looking in a swarthy way, with the effortless, glib-tongued charm often associated with Irishmen but that attains its apogee in the Kashmiri male. He is our self-appointed Mr. Fixit. I had told him that we wanted to go to nearby Dachigam National Park. To see a bear.
Why anyone would want to leave a comfortable houseboat just after dawn to see a bear is beyond him. But he sits back resignedly under the canopy of the shikara, picking his teeth with his thumbnail. A fine rain is falling, stippling the still waters and whispering among the leaves of the lotus gardens. Behind us the peaks of the Pir Panjal are shawled in cloud but across the lake to the east, where we are heading, the snows on the Himalayas shine with an opalescent pallor.
We alight by the Boulevard where a taxi, summoned by Farouk, awaits. It looks incapable of driving beyond the Boulevard let alone into the Himalayan foothills. But this is Kashmir and Patricia, who has a soft spot for Farouk (and for clapped out old taxis), smiles with feigned impertinence as Farouk opens the rear door for us.
We squeeze in. Farouk sits next to the driver, whom he introduces as Kiran. “It means 'ray of sunshine'." Anjum tells us. I examine Kiran’s raddled, hatchet-faced features in his rear-view mirror as he draws on the stub of a cigarette with the intensity of a man about to face the firing squad. Anything less like a ray of sunshine is hard to imagine. And no wonder. What taxi driver, at this hour on a showery Srinigar morning, would want to ferry two firangiand an unconventional Pakistani lady into the Himalayas to look for bears?
The car’s engine hawks and splutters into life and we shimmy down the Boulevard. As we pass the Shalimar Gardens, pride of Emperor Shah Jehan, Farouk says, “Shalimar Gardens” with the joie de vivre of a Southern Rail guard announcing Clapham Junction. If he is hoping that we will change our minds and go there instead he is to be disappointed.
Soon we enter the Dachigam Valley and climb into the foothills. Our arrival at the national park coincides with that of the sun. Kiran stops so that Farouk can pay our dues. Farouk returns with a middle-aged park ranger. “Ali Mohammed”, he announces. “He will guide us.” Ali Mohammed squeezes into the back and we drive on.
The metalled road soon ends and Kiran stops again. “Road finish”, says Ali Mohammed. “Now we proceed on foots.” Farouk and Kiran exchange looks of suppressed alarm but Ali Mohammed eases himself out and Patricia and Anjum and I follow.
Farouk and Kiran remain seated, gazing apprehensively up the dirt track. They have heard about black bears. And this isn’t all, for Ali Mohammed, seeing Anjum’s sandals, says “Madam, you must wear prapper shoes. The farrest is full of wipers.”
Anjum, being Anjum, says that vipers don’t bother her. Farouk, being Farouk, exchanges further meaningful glances with Kiran before confessing that their shoes also are far from “prapper” and that he and Kiran will stay behind “to look after the car”. Patricia snorts and chides him for being “a wimp” but Ali Mohammed is moving off and we hurry after him.
The woodlands are beguiling. After the rain they exhale a mouldering, mushroomy decadence, through which the fragrance of wild jasmine trails like an invisible wisp of smoke from an incense stick. Among the ferns that sweep between the oaks, chestnuts, walnuts and wild cherries springs a plenitude of other flowers. Many in the Vale of Kashmir believe in fairies and here, in these enchanting and enchanted foothills, who wouldn’t?
The crack of a breaking branch snaps us out of our trance. “Black bear!” whispers Ali Mohammed. Gesturing for us to follow he slips silently into the forest. Heedless of vipers we hurry after him. When we catch up, breathless in the mountain air, he is standing beneath a huge oak, staring into the middle distance. “Bear is gone”, he says. “He is hearing us coming.”
“But look!” he says, pointing through the trees. We look, and see not a bear but a group of watchful, grey-brown deer. They remind me of the red deer hinds I have seen in Scotland. And then, in a flurry of hooves, the deer are gone. “Hangul”, says Ali Mohammed.
We are thrilled. We have seen the hinds of the Hangul, the rare Kashmir Stag. And more. We have seen this prepossessing valley, inhaled its very breath, marvelled at its forests and its flowers. High in the oak above us a golden oriole is pouring out its melancholy, fluting call. And its heart. We are content.
Pleased that we are pleased, Ali Mohammed leads us off downhill. We go with good grace, counting our blessings. Anjum, happy when I am happy, strides ahead. Patricia, alone with her thoughts, is behind her. Ali Mohammed and I bring up the rear, he apologising for not having shown us a bear, I insisting that it doesn’t matter.
Then there is a cry and a serrated, explosive snarl, like the momentary bite of a chainsaw ripping into teak. Anjum is running back towards me. Patricia stands transfixed. Where Anjum would have been is a bear. Standing upright, big and black and menacing. I catch a glimpse of a cub scurrying into the undergrowth.
There is no time for fear. No time to reflect upon things I have recently read: that the Himalayan Black Bear is "a savage animal, sometimes attacking without provocation, and inflicting horrible wounds…some victims having the scalp torn from the head...” That the she-bear, especially with cubs, is more dangerous than the male. That such a bear can “break the neck of a full-grown water buffalo”. That “you should never get closer to a black bear than the length of a football field”.
But Anjum’s cry was inspired by excitement, not fear. “Look! Look!” she is shouting, as if I cannot see a bear from fifteen paces. The silky blackness of the fur, the buff-coloured chevron across the breast, the great round face with its tiny eyes and prominent ears and its gaping jaws…
And then, like the deer, she too is gone. And time remembers to tick and hearts to beat. And I stand consumed with joy. I have seen a bear.
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Graham Mercer was born and brought up south Lancashire, England. He spent nine years in Royal Navy before becoming an elementary teacher. Mercer lived and taught for 34 years in Tanzania, East Africa where he met his Pakistani wife, Anjum. Now they live in north Cheshire, England. Interests include wildlife, writing, travel, reading, photography, cricket, the company of young people.


Judge's Comment: One of the many strengths of this story is the minimalistic characterization: the 'fixer', Farouk, is the type who clings to you 'as serendipitously as dandelion seeds in the summer breeze', and the driver, Kiran, smokes 'with the intensity of a man about to face a firing squad'. Great humour, great suspense, and the ending could not be more satisfying, nor more economically stated.