Multicultural Short Stories by Anne Hart CreativeCommons [2/1]

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Five multicultural and/or historical short stories written by Anne Hart. Five Multicultural Short Stories by Anne Hart. © By Anne Hart. 2007. For further information, read Anne Hart’s books of short stories and instruction in short story writing titled, Who’s Buying Which Popular Short Fiction Now, and What Are They Paying? How to write, customize, and sell tales online or on paper. ISBN number: 978-0-595-47252-9. Published 2007 by iUniverse, inc. (http://www.iuniverse.com). Also read Anne Hart’s paperback novel titled, DOGS WITH CAREERS (ASJA Press imprint, iUniverse, inc. 2007). The novel titled, Dogs with Careers contains an entire novel under one cover as well as numerous short stories. Published 2007 by iUniverse incorporated. See the Web site www.iuniverse.com. The author’s web site is at: http://annehart.tripod.com. And now, here are Anne Hart’s five multicultural and/or historical short stories, an excerpt from among numerous stories from the two books. Five Multicultural Short Stories by Anne Hart. © By Anne Hart. 2007. 1. The Incendiary Client. “Every wife is a mirror of her own husband's failures, and every husband a victim of his wife's success.” The Incendiary Client. Beirut’s winding alleys led me to the Antiochian Orthodox quarter to make a documentary video with client #9 on teenage rebellion faced by grandparents raising grandchildren in war-torn Lebanon. My client’s issue focused on being a rebellious only grandson. We agreed not to use any names—only client numbers to communicate with one another. As a traveling documentarian, finding creative solutions to problems of war focused now on incendiary star-crossed soul mates from past lives that married again in this life. I'm a videographer acting as a catalyst, bringing people together with the goal of obtaining measurable results for couples and families in distress. My first documentary production experience in Beirut dealt with Client #9. "Do you want to know how violent groups infiltrated the international UFO scene?" Client #9 complained in her loudest Aramaic accent as she pushed a publication under my nose. I noticed she didn’t speak to me in the vernacular Arabic but resorted to Syriac/Aramaic dialects to see whether I neatly fitted into her private circle of friends that had migrated to a place in Michigan that probably has more first to fourth generation Lebanese immigrants than urban Beirut. Client #9 slowly opened the door. I peaked inside. She beckoned me to follow. "I'm not deaf," I laughed in her rare dialect of Christian Syriac/Aramaic as I blocked her flying spittle with my business card. "If you hired the hate squad, habeeby (dearest), this time you’re looking at the love squad, and the camera is rolling." “No,” she said emphatically as she handed me a mignonette of jasmine. “I wanted you to document on video my son’s connections.” The men who came to strangle Client #9 were shrinking her world like the most delicately tinted of bubbles, shrinking in ever narrowing circles from the upward gush of her own infancy. Her room was empty. Client #9 sat on the unmade bed, a wreckage of blankets. "You've got to be crazy to see a psychiatrist," I told Client #9. Why on Earth did you call a 70-year old recluse with an expensive video camera and zero connections when you could have called my son, the psychiatrist? Well, you probably asked for me because you’re a retired chef. So you must have good taste. But don't call me if you're gnawing on a bad day or caught fava bean fever, and all you want to do is have a discussion over a bowl of fatoush. I'll call you." "Girgis's room..." she puffed on a cigarette. "Like I told you on the phone, curiosity skilled the cat but turned the rat into kibbee nea (chopped meat). Client #9 yanked a pair of electrical outlets from the wall. "Anyone can buy these from surveillance stores in your country’s shopping malls. But here in Beirut, we need contacts in the American media, like you, Missus American Greek lady. Your doctor friends ought to use the media wisely to prevent malpractice suits or accusations." She plugged an appliance into the socket to show me how her own “spy camera” camera is built to operate from the tiny hole in the middle, even when the socket is plugged. "I know." I laughed nervously. "I'll show you my night goggles if you show me yours." Client #9 showed me how her own tiny camera was built at the back of the electrical socket so it could video record or photograph anyone in the room from any angle, like a third eye. It fit inconspicuously into the wall in the center of an aquatic mural, hidden by an angel fish. "Only in black and white for now," she said. "My husband, Client # 10 has spy cameras imbedded in the electrical outlet sockets of every room in our house. He's keeping an eye on my grandson, Girgis." On top of Girgis's bed were European 'girlie' magazines with nearly nude centerfolds. She picked up her grandson's magazines and peered. Client #9 shook her head, annoyed. Then she tossed the magazines neatly into one of her twenty-two-year-old grandson’s dresser drawers. Client #9 asked me to follow her downstairs, where she grabbed an electric drill from the utility room. She ran back upstairs to her own bedroom. Client #9 tossed an old family portrait from her bedroom wall. Her room adjoined her grandson's. She drilled a hole and then stuck a darkly painted camouflage band-aid over it. Client #9 peered through the hole, blowing away the powdered plaster and drywall. "What'd you do that for?" "You want to observe Girgis, don't you?" "No, not that way. You’re the one who wants to spy on your grandson. How come his mother and father are in America and he’s living with you and your husband, here in Beirut?" “His parents are trying to establish their medical practice—to save money and bring him over. They can’t have any more children. It’s difficult for immigrant doctors to pass those state exams in a new land. Was the woman a victim of elder abuse? I wondered. At that moment, Girgis did walk through the front door downstairs. We heard him come in alone. Client #9 rushed downstairs, frantic. "Where the hell were you last night? You weren't in your room this morning." "Why do you always want to get your own way?" Girgis yelled back. "What sacrifices a grandmother has to make for her grandson's education," she whined. “He’s twenty-two and should be finished with college by now.” I asked Client #9, widowed only two years prior, why she recently married Client # 10, her second husband. Before she could reply, Client # 10 walked in. "My wife marries men for their shock value," he answered for her. “All my children immigrated to Michigan,” she said timorously. “In Beirut, an invisible woman can get desperately lonely for conversation at my age.” "Client # 10, you're my dad reincarnated," Client #9 shot back. "You're not my Client # 10. Some shaytani, some devil's got into you. No, you're not the Teddy Bear I married." "Maybe you two are just incompatible personality types," I interjected as I watched Girgis run up the stairs to his room and bang the door shut. Client #9 shuddered at the noise. "If the neighbors hear you howling, bitch, I'm going to give it to you upstairs," Client # 10 said. "In front of the documentarian?" "How does she know what I'm going to give you?" Client #9 blushed. "You are my father reincarnated. When I was born, the doctor phoned my dad at two in the morning to tell him my mom had a girl. He told the doctor to look twice. 'Are you sure it's not a boy?' he asked." "Shaddup, shaddup, you slut, you sharmutter. The neighbors will hear you." Client # 10 barked. "You're going to make me kill you." Client #9 ignored him and looked me straight in the eye for sympathy. The more sympathy she could get from me, the more she manipulated him with pity. Client #9 tried to force even more pity on each family member so I'd give her a ride someplace or offer a job referral. She said she wanted financial independence so she could leave, but did nothing to create it saying she was alone and nobody wanted to hire her. "Why do you speak to me only in commands," Client #9 sobbed. "How else can I get work out of you?" Client # 10 usually answered a question by asking one. "Isn't it funny how our marriages always turn out to be like our parent's no matter how far we travel in space or time and try to be different?" I said. Client # 10 went upstairs to the bedroom he shared with his son. It takes quite a man to give up the marriage bed to his son, and quite a woman to give it up to her absent niece’s daughter. The home was strictly sex segregated. Client # 10 and Girgis shared twin beds placed at opposite walls in one room that adjoined the room Client #9 shared with her widowed niece’s nine-year old daughter. Her niece had left the country hoping to bring her daughter to America when that niece’s older brother in Michigan could find steady work, save up, and afford it. No matter how bad client #9’s new marriage went, those two types—her and her new husband, Client # 10, would be hardest to separate. In their mood swings, they could kill each other. My reclusive clients as a couple were so star-crossed in personality preferences that they behaved like photographic plates, stamping each other with a compelling tattoo of put downs to pick themselves up, fault-findings, and criticisms. “Timid men make the most violent wife beaters,” Client #9 whispered in my ear, away from both of our rolling video cameras. Every member of this family had a video camera, and each recorded every word and movement of every other family member when they could. Not only had the phone been tapped, but the walls had holes with spy cameras in every room, even the room with the Turkish toilet—two painted footprints on the floor with a hole in the center of the floor. They observed everything and turned it inwards, putting themselves down, calling the partner a loser, and finally, bursting with violence when they cycled into a depression. When bored, the royal game of Ur circa 3,000 BCE came into play, a chip off the ancient Egyptian game of Senet. Girgis marched down and joined us in the largest room. "How come tonight is backgammon? Why can't we go bowling anymore?" Girgis asked. "Because my next door neighbor says she too old to bowl," Client #9 said sarcastically. "If it isn't backgammon with the elderly widows from your do-good club, it smells like fried onions for dinner with your old lady friends," Girgis added. "They make me feel so young sitting next to them." "Why can't we go to America? Why can't I play computer games?" "You're needed to help us carry the heavy packages." It was obvious Client #9 controlled Client # 10 with an iron hand inside of a velvet glove. When he was free of her a few hours a day, he went way over the limit. "I like you Girgis," I said meekly. He exploded. "I hate this big, book lined room where you play. I hate the big, cold fireplace, and your stupid potted plant. I hate everything in this room. I want to go to America so I can become a television newsman." "Girgis. Don't do this," I said with conviction. "You're coming to live with me and my documentary production staff to see how it works out. After all, I’m paying for your film school training so you can learn travel video production from my team. What else can I do to help people after I’ve reached this decade?" "I hate everything in this room, from the copper cauldron that holds the kindling you never use to the dumb statue of a cat that has a history I've heard a thousand times." Girgis ran to the mantelpiece and tossed everything to the carpet. He took a vase with a candle in it and threw it in Client #9's head. Client #9 ducked, but the vase flew through the window. "He's being ugly," she whined to me. Girgis ranted on in his own dialect. "Last time it was the two deaf ladies from the senior club with whom I had to play cards. I'm so lonely; I could die if anything comes between me and my goal of being a highly-paid television journalist—an international correspondent working around the world." Suddenly he was ashamed of what he'd blurted out. Girgis looked at me shocked that I'd see inside him. Client #9 poured some orange juice into several glasses and handed me and him a glass. "Please, let's all cool it,” I sighed. The juice stood on the table untouched. "I hate the two, long, watery juice drinks that have to last through the night," Girgis teased, twisting his mouth. "I hate the phony smiles in this room. You're all laughing at me. I'm sick of the fake formality you go through after every backgammon game." "You've done pretty well tonight helping him to talk, to open up like a woman," Client #9 complained. Everyone’s camera stilled rolled and recorded every nuance of foresight, insight, or hindsight. “Here are some pitfalls to avoid,” I began. But Girgis cut me off in mid-sentence. "All I see are phony, stapled smiles, like costumed belly dancing dolls," Girgis continued. "Two red dots on each cheek." Client #9 couldn't show anger. "Maybe if you had to go out and work for a living instead of living for the moment," she admonished her grandson. "What about you--smoking five packs a day?" He shot back sarcastically. "You worry me so, I have to smoke," Client #9 cried. "It's a stimulus barrier to the pain you cause me." Girgis took up his orange juice glass. "Shove your guilt trip. I want something of my own." That was the first faint surge of triumph he'd felt all evening. "Nothing makes a grandmother angrier than to have her teenage grandson argue like an old hen," Client #9 said. "Tonight I'm ready for a fight," he said. "You control every facet of his life. Why doesn't he date girls his own age?" I asked Client #9. “That’s your American way. Here in Beirut, we don’t date the same way as you folks do in America,” she replied. "The little bastard's ruined my whole evening," Client #9 said. "Why won't he allow me a life?" "Allow?" I hesitated. Client #9 broke out in tears. "Does he expect me to say 'My dear little baby, don't grow up?'" "Client #9," I said. "Girgis is asking what abused children always ask." "What's that?" Girgis walked toward his grandmother. She put her arms around him. "If I die, then will you love me, mommy?" He whispered to her, and then repeated himself facing the rolling video camera, my camera, not hers. Girgis broke down in tears. "Tell her, Client #9. Tell her." Client #9 blew a long sigh through the serrations of her lower teeth. "We just found out today. Girgis has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis--M.S." His face wrinkled, squeezing his eyes shut as he crumbled, sobbing at my feet. "I don’t want to hop off the railroad at this stop,” he sobbed. “I'll never be a man." Client #9 poured the glass of juice over the back of his neck. "You wimp, you mamhoul, get up. Thousands of people run businesses with M.S. You must be a man." "I'm going to end up in a wheelchair." “How would you like to make me a list of international Presidents who ruled from wheelchairs?” "My brother has been in a wheelchair since birth, and he's working on his life-long learning and career just fine," client #10 interrupted. "It must take a lot of doing to win all that strength over into your own corner and then go on eating at the same table, living normally day to day," Client #9 told me. Girgis rose and looked at me. "You're too damned good at everything, like my grandma is--hitting a tennis ball or running a documentary production company or cooking dinner for twelve." "You should be proud of everything like that. Tell me about your mom in America, Girgis. When I was your age, talking wasn't an option," I said. Like a thorough bred horse, Girgis couldn't resist the challenge. Before Girgis could open up to me in front of Client #9, she interrupted and cut him off in the middle again just as Client # 10 did the same to her. "You're emotionally absent just like your old man, the sonofobitch." Girgis shut down. "Where's daddy, where's the sonofobitch?" "The sonofobitch is gone." Client #9 laughed. "What are you thinking, Client #9?" I asked. "About my father who always chased me yelling, if I catch you, I'll cripple you. Now I got a crippled grandson." I tucked my business card into her top pocket. She twisted her mouth into the same grin Girgis used. The cameras kept rolling. "You notice that crooked smile on your new husband?" I pointed it out to Client #9. She giggled. "Oh, that. Girgis taught him that. He saw it on Tony Perkins in ‘Psycho’ in the dubbed rerun over here at the theater. It's so weird, that it's funny. You don’t get those foreign movies here in Beirut very often." Client #9 motioned with her head to leave the room. She followed me downstairs to Girgis, who had fallen asleep on the sofa. "I got another bomb to lay on you, besides finding out about Girgis's M.S.," she announced in the tiny, threadbare kitchen. “You have to save your own life.” How could I tell her that she had to really love herself and respect herself to deal with all the stress? How could I treat this war on a family level when a bigger war was going on outside the door, a war of hatred between the haves and the have-nots, the culturally different, and even the planets? As much as war stank, it was responsible for the evolution of technology. That bothered me a lot. The last time Client #9 and I did lunch at a posh hotel at my expense, with the camera rolling of course, an old lady got ahead of her in line as we waited in the hot sun for a seat. It was in one of those fancy business lunch places in Beirut where men in black suits closing deals are given preference over two mature ladies in wide-brimmed hats made of wheat stalks. Client #9 grabbed the lady who cut in front of her and screeched, "Get out of my way before I push in your face." All that inner rage exploded. At home, Client #9 was incapable of showing anger. Instead, she'd make you feel guilty by prying your sympathy at how sick she was. With a total stranger whom she was sure of never seeing again, Client #9 pinched, shoved and stepped hard on toes. All the anger she banked for years was suddenly spent on a stranger. Client #9 lighted a cigarette, and I pulled it out of her mouth. "Quit now." She changed the subject. "We're placing power in sick hands. Half the men I know who earn a lot of money have slapped their wives around or worse. The poor half does the same sometimes, but the wives don’t speak up. The wives of the powerful men speak up to me.” “Architects create domestic violence by creating cages too small for a couple to hide in. Everybody knows two monkeys in a cage bite each other. So do two people in a 600-square foot residence,” I said sheepishly. Client #9 was a little doll face with blood-red lips. "Do I have to drive a stake through his heart to stop him from bothering me?" She always asked me this kind of a question. Then she answered it herself with a 'but.' "Would you want to have your daughter marry a man exactly like the man you married?" I added. "Just walk out with your own kids and don't turn back. Girgis wants to come live with me and learn the television journalism and documentary production ropes." Client #9 choked on her ice water laughing so loud, so strained, and so fake. She pleaded with me to spend the night. "I'm afraid of Girgis," she sobbed. "He's cruel--like my first husband, and just as penny-pinching. No matter how far I travel to find a nourishing, slow-to anger man who’s different, I end up marrying a disgruntled cheap skate just like my own wife-beating step father.” The guest wing provided me with Client # 10’s movie studio affects. There was that gaping hole in the wall covered by a portrait or mural between Client #9's bedroom and Girgis's. And in my room, the same hole had been filled by the lens of an industrial-quality video camera. Whoever inserted the camera had mass duplication on his or her mind. They wanted me to see, and probably, the public, most likely the international news networks. Late that night, all was quiet. I awoke around 3:00 in the morning from too much sugary pomegranate juice and curiosity on the brain, and peered through the lens into Client #9's room. That cat woman of a 75-year old invisible grandma undressed slowly in front of the camera, knowing I could be watching, perhaps hoping. I wasn't quite sure yet of her motive. I could only assume she wanted me to watch and video record how Girgis treated a lady, his grandmother. Client #9 was made up to look like a cheap, aging whore. Her black satin pushup bra and lace bikini panties dug deeply into her flabby, cottage cheese textured thighs. She looked like a comic caricature of her grandson’s foreign girlie magazine centerfold. The makeup she slapped on her mature face looked like a clown, like the character, Sweet Charlotte in a 1964 American Betty Davis film about a child star grown mature. Her brassy pink and orange-hennaed white hair flopped under the mirror lights. Black eyeliner ran down her lower eyelids into the creases in the bags under her eyes. I pressed my finger on the red 'record' button, and the camera rolled feverishly under the blaring light bulbs capturing the eye liner melting into the creviced bags under her eyes. Across the wall was a second camera. I ran to peer through that camera, and started it, also, when Client #9 left her room and began banging loudly on Girgis's bedroom door. The second camera's wide, fish-eye lens peered through a hole in the wall in Girgis's bedroom. Most certainly Girgis knew I was here, and the cameras were here, and I would edit the video. Client #10 tapped every wall, every room, every place in the tiny, decrepit flat; cameras rolled everywhere, except inside the toilet. I wondered why the hell each adult family member wanted me to tape him or her in each person’s room for an obvious network news broadcast? There was no sign of Client # 10, who shared the twin bed on the opposite wall with Girgis. The niece had been sent to spend the night with other relative and their same-age children. I noticed none of the bedrooms or the bathrooms had locks. The video tape rolled as Client #9 pushed open Girgis's unlocked door. He growled. "What the hell do you want?" Client #9 touched him on his bare shoulder. He looked up and ran to close his night stand drawer. As I peered through the lens, taping his grandmother’s communication attempt (we had discussed in therapy), something went chaotic. Nothing can be planned to go a certain way. There are always the laws of chance, the unforeseen, or the unstable. There's always something going awry on the fractal curve of life's number game. Girgis had a packed suitcase on the bed. Girlie magazines lay sprawled and open across his comforter. Client #9 looked down at the centerfolds. The camera picked up one magazine whose cover depicted a bruised, nude, beaten-down girl chained eagle spread to four bedposts wearing a Swastika armband and a nipple ring. The image of torture sent chills of revulsion up my spine. What's so sexy about pain? I thought. Love isn't supposed to hurt, but this wasn't love. Client #9 grabbed the girlie magazines from Girgis's hands. She quickly thumbed through the photo layouts. "Girgis, this is sick. Why don't you get yourself a real girlfriend, a best friend?" He moved backwards, tearing the magazine from her grip, and flinging the pulps into his dresser drawer. He slammed the draw shut with vengeance. "Do you honestly think these pictures will give you back your manhood?" Client #9 laughed at him. "Only my disability stands between me and my manhood." He reached out to touch her, but she jumped away. Girgis took her in his arms and shoved her against the wall, forcing her bony, frail body back as if she were a crumpled, rag doll. She had some feistiness in her yet and pushed him away. "It's wrong. So terribly wrong," she said sarcastically. Hopelessly, raised his fist to belt her in the kisser, but decided to push her away. She bounced on the bed and backed out his door. "You're a bitter, old bag,” he ranted. The words "old bag" ticked her off. Client #9 exploded in anger. "What have you been doing with those hate groups? And now you buy that foreign garbage that puts women in chains and gets off on their pain. The price of that magazine could have been spent on your college education during these past four years.” “I’m without any money of my own,” he yelled, turning to leave the room, but she blocked his path and grabbed his shoulders. "Why can't you look me in the eye? Why can't we talk anymore? You're not my husband. You’re my little baby grandson. We can talk. We can be friends," she demanded and manipulated with a dominant tone in her voice. He began to wash his hands in his bathroom sink. “You forgot to use soap,” she snapped. That mothering command pushed his fury icon. He flung her into the wall, and her head knocked a portrait to the carpet. He looked up in surprise to see the hole she had drilled in his wall leading to hers. Girgis ran over and poked his finger through. "You old bitch," he ranted. "You spied on me all this time. You were always watching me." "Since my new husband and I were married, I drilled holes to watch you--and him. I watched you howl with pleasure over those magazines, and when you were away, I watched my new husband and you together, looking at the girlie pictures. My husband wouldn't look at me if I stood naked in front of him, of course. He told me my fat stomach squeezed into lace corsets made him want to puke.” She sobbed loudly. "Shut up. Shut up you filthy sharmutter." "You wasted yourself on those paper dolls just like my new husband throws himself at his sickening whores and flicks. He only wanted the little money my first husband left me. And to think I went under the knife for him. I had two facelifts to look twenty-eight forever, and none of them worked. I look worse at seventy-five than before I spent my old age savings to look young for my husband. Don't you ever marry for money.” She put her arms around him, but Girgis wrenched her wrist, twisting it so she dropped one of his girlie magazines. She grabbed another from his drawer and backed further away from him, laughing, teasing, and poking fun. Sobs convulsed Girgis's shivering body. "Your irritability,” he whined. “It’s the first sign of dementia.” “My husband calls me a loser. Look at you, both of you.” “You’re full of the old timer’s diseases in your own head.” She retreated at his words, but he followed her, unaware of the sash weight lying on top of a magazine he had taken from his open drawer. The back of Client #9's knees brushed the side of his bed. Client #9 crouched there, cowering beside his bed, her eyes wide with fright. Drunken gibberish spilled from the twitching corners of her white-lined lips. The sounds angered him. She wiped the white foam from the corners of her mouth. She lifted her leg toward the sash weight to high kick it from his hands, and missed. He stalked her. "I hate the way women smell," Girgis hollered, "like rotten fish." "You want to know how women smell, you bastard," Client #9 screeched. "Well get a load of this." She ripped off her sanitary napkin and dragged the bloody rag under his nose. “Smell what estrogen and progesterone hormone replacement therapy does to a seventy-five year-old woman. You never stop your period after menopause. Why do I have to do this routine to look young for my new husband?” “You’re crazy with elder rage,” the young man shouted. Anger fired from his brain. Girgis lunged at her like a wounded carnivore. Client #9 sidled away, and tripped, tumbling across his bed. She struggled upward, clawing at his face with razor-sharp acrylic nails. She pushed past him, and he grabbed her by the shoulders and squeezed her head between his knee and the wall. His thigh was crushing. In the wide, fish-eye view camera lens, Girgis's face looked like a moon in black water. I got a close-up shot of Client #9's wedding ring. Cold light clung to her arms like fireflies. No way was I going to interfere in this network news shot. No way was I going to open that door at this wee hour and announce I've been taping for public broadcast in a future court room. Client #9's leg shot out, and Girgis kicked her at the base of the spine. "Scum," he shouted, and she flew forward. It could have happened in a public train or a bus. No one would looked up in a public place nine times out of ten. I held my ground behind the video camera like the objective observer of nature. Survival of the fittest. Let nature take its course. He yanked off her pink and orange hennaed with white hair frosted wig and rubbed her face along the white comforter so the dark eyeliner and gray shadow smeared off. "Stop trying to look like a movie star, grandma" he begged in a loud, shaky voice. Girgis pinned her down across his bed. She slapped him hard across the cheek. Without conscious volition, I guessed, the sash weight plunged harder and harder across her skull. Girgis was unable to stop. He dropped the sash weight on the bed. Then he fell across his stepmother's body, crying and begging forgiveness. He looked at her a long while, and soon realized she was beginning to stir. Girgis rose, and put the pillow over her face. That's when I stopped the rolling tape, and flew into his room with a 22.caliber revolver hidden in my purse. Girgis cringed next to the bed, unable to look at her. I walked over to the bed and removed the pillow. She groaned and began to cough. Thank goodness she survived. Girgis ran past me into the bathroom and turned on the water so I couldn't hear him sobbing and retching loudly, but I heard him. He locked himself in the bathroom and became silent. I dialed an ambulance and asked Client #9 to let me examine her. "Do you believe me now that he'll kill you if Client # 10 won't? Will you get out now?" I asked. Client #9 groaned. "Do you have it all on tape? Is the evidence admissible in court? Can we get Client # 10 to give me back all my money he lost and took from me when he managed my income and the little money my first husband left me?" "Yes. I’m here to help, but I can’t understand why you required me to wait this long. I almost let him kill you to get this tape. And only because you insisted I record you this way." "I don't care," Client #9 sobbed. "Client # 10 stole all my money. I'm broke and I can't pay you anymore as my documentarian. My grandson is a parasite living off my inheritance. I want him to get an education, a job, a wife, and his own place." “He’s not fit to marry and raise a family. He’ll beat them and start the cycle all over again….just like your first husband and your second husband. He needs help…to understand that in a family, no one hits a woman, and a woman doesn’t hit anyone either. Don’t you think I care about the future?” "Yes you care—about your network news broadcast as a foreign correspondent. You wanted the scoop, but I keep the rights to my life story as a film in international cinema,” she insisted. “When you start to respect yourself again, you'll call me again.” I said. “I can show what makes your whole family tick in a sound bite.” “I bet you can.” I wondered what I was going to do about Girgis. What’s next for him? “I want to come with you alone to America,” Client #9 demanded. “I want to live in a luxury condominium where the weather is mild in the winter among other people my own age. I don’t want to be married to a man who is not slow to anger. My grandson can go live on his own or with his mother in America, but in another city from where I will be enjoying the serenity of my golden years. Why not? I speak seven languages. Now’s my chance to use those words… Inshallah,” she added. “Khallas,” (Finished!). I’ve raised my children. Now is my time for travel, fun and games. Give me my camera. I also want to be a documentarian,” said Client #9. I handed her my best video recording devices and headed home to Berkeley, where I belonged. We all marry our mirrors, someone who reflects how we feel about ourselves at the moment. My auntie always told me that, “Every wife is a mirror of her own husband's failures, and every husband a victim of his wife's success.” # 2. Time Traveling the Ancient Mediterranean with Paul of Patmos and his Dog, Xanthe The Antikythera Device: The Day St. Paul of Patmos Taught Me to Pray for the Gift of Being Able to Trust in a Power Higher Than Human Who Doesn't Think of Me as a Snack.... More than two-thousand years ago my present mitochondrial DNA inhabited a woman named Calliope of Patmos, whose family invented, owned, and gave up to the sea, one of the rare, Greek Antikythera celestial navigation gears used for nearly three thousand years by Greek and later, Roman sailors. The antikythera device served as a mechanism of complicated gears physically representing the Callippic and Saros astronomical cycles. It's not only gears I wanted to mesh. So let me take you back there again for a few hours to peruse the human condition. Some of my distant Greek family members still carry the ancient Greek name of Photiades. For clarityPhotia, could mean "source of light" as in "light an oil lamp and walk out of the darkness," or the enlightened' one. Intimate glimpses of the human condition may be found in numerous art galleries. In the many incarnations of my ancient DNA, the molecules lived in many bodies of generations well before the "common era" on the small Greek island of Patmos, , surrounded by the Aegean Sea at the time white-haired Paul of Tarsus once sought a bowl of broth at my family tavern of sustenance serving food for the sensibilities. My beliefs there on Patmos emphasized good deeds rather than complex creeds. I had been a builder of dreams seeking practical applications, but so far ahead of my century, that I actually found time-travel a gift of destiny. For me back then, the daughter of a proper Greek widow who could write well. My mother copied numerous scrolls and letters that Paul of Tarsus on Patmos brought into the tavern. As a follower, mother would give me copies of some letters. My windowed mother, Xanthe committed herself to faith, keeping the family together in spite of all odds, and putting bread on the table. Here on Patmos, the family goal focused solely on commitment. We all followed Paul's when he came near our tavern for his bowl of broth and a listened to the whisperings of his talks and writings. And yet I longed to be an explorer and observer of comparative thought in faraway places and future times. As girl of sixteen alone in the world, and having arrived as the new tutor in a wealthy Roman household villa in the far westNeapolis, the only way I could study the human condition consisted of gawking at works of art where I could reflect. I kept a treasure hidden with methe prized antikythera navigation gears. For it is written: Five hundred years before that time of Paul, my father's father-fourteen generations removed, invented the antikythera celestial navigation device, and in those years, it served well as my treasure. Not only had I been granted Roman citizenship because of the treasured Greek family name appearing in writing in three languages as the celestial navigation gear's inventor, but now, on my first job as Greek language, poetry writing, and history tutor to a child in the wealthiest Roman family in Neapolis, where many people also spoke Greek. The older child had a separate mathematics tutor, and a tutor for engineering and building bridges. But I was assigned to teach the five-year old to read, speak, and write poetry as a healing tool in Greek. So begins my proper passage at sixteen from adolescence to womanhood as a tutor in ancient Rome, the last outpost of civilization to my senses. See any similarity in this holistic adventure to a timeless search for the perfect nurturing mother? Look at your deeds, I heard my mother once say to Paul of Tarsus when he lived and wrote on Patmos, the island of my birth. I told Paul that our art shows us the human condition. And peace in the home feeds the growth of consciousness. Now, I found myself in Rome, hidden in villa gardens so far from my family. Yet my letters to Paul where still sent as often as my letters to my own mother whose life focused on commitment to family and faith. Often, I wore that plain iron ring and carried the scrolls that set me apart from the denizens of slaves who also served as tutors. Because of my citizen-ring and the signed papers, none of my father had ever been slaves of the Romans. Look at me at sixteen, a Roman citizen with signed deeds to my antikythera invention attributed to my family and me as the only heir. Yet as a proper Greek girl, and not a slave, invitations abounded to dine as the daughter of the long missing-at-sea Apollodorus. There were no more men left in my family to work as well-paid Greek architects contracted to draft the plans for villas in Neapolis for the wealthiest aristocrats as there had been for generations. I passed the precious time writing letters to Paul of Tarsus on Patmos as he wrote letters of his own that one day I would read. And I, never really alone at sixteen with my mother's copies of Paul's letters nearby, spent a few nights on special feast days at the house of Salonius, a wealthy Roman and distant relative of the prosperous Cornelius family. His vast fortunes came from building many summer villas for still wealthier Romans in Neapolis overlooking the sea. Salonius, with wife and children shared this large villa. At those times of my first few days on trial for employment as a tutor to my five-year-old playmate, Octavia, I lied awake, well protected, I thought, close to Octavia and to her rotund mother, Velia, an Etruscan who married into the old Latium family of Salonius Cornelius. As chaperoned children, we slept in the roped, rutted wool and feathered torus next to Velia. "What's that you're holding?" Velia asked me. "My Antikythera device," I said timorously. "It's a navigational tool for Greek sailors." "Give me that!" Velia quickly removed it from my tiny fingers and pocketed the device. "But it belongs to my father. It's been in our family for four hundred years." I quickly grabbed it back from her hands and placed it inside my goatskin purse. "Well, now it's mine. Give it here." Pursy Velia huffed, pulling the gears from the sack strung around my waist. "Go ahead keep it then," I sighed. "If you don't know how to use it right, there's the danger that any ship that misuses it might sink. I must not lose this. It's all that stands between my freedom and slavery. My Roman citizenship scrolls would be worthless without proof that my family line invented the device." "Then I'll sell it so you won't envy this evil eye in front of me," Velia teased. I used my own family members as models by memorizing the fruits of our family slogan of deeds, not creeds. I jostled the words to Velia without understanding their impact. "Our Greek family travels only to study and understand the human condition for inner peace. And you can only learn about the human condition by studying what is in the art galleries of all peoples. Our goal is peace in the home. You have to practice it in every room if you ever want to grow world peace. That's why you must return the antikythera to me or my mother or our friend, Paul of Tarsus who is now living on Patmos. The gears point the celestial direction of navigation. It belongs on a ship. Our family invented it for the purpose of growing peace." "You grow peace, like a vine or a tree?" Velia looked up in surprise, grinning crookedly, but not smiling with her eyes. "That's right," I told her eagerly. "You heal yourself into peace in an art gallery, not in a pantheon. Otherwise you're talking to yourself. Don't you know that the purpose of life is to understand the human condition?" "You certainly can't do anything about it." Velia squealed with impatience. "You're just a crupper, a strap holding a riding saddle steady," Velia said impatiently. "I've heard about Paul of Tarsus. And I know all about your poor, widowed mother. You know what you are? You're trying to steady yourself on what Paul has taught you. I heard him speak on Patmos." "So you know his followers." "I've heard more than you understand about the oral traditions," Velia smirked as she retraced the sign of the fish by dipping her ring finger into a goblet of wine and tracing the x-tailed fish on the shiny edge of a platter of black figs.” “You're only a sixteen-year old girl a very wealthy and smart girl for a foreigner,” Velia continued. “Luckily, you are not the slave of our oldest son's tutor. He's from Attica. Maybe you can fix some of the broken furniture around this house. What's more of a human condition than that torus I sleep on arriving back from repair full of vermin?” "My friend, Paul of Tarsus told me and my mother ten years ago that the purpose of life is to take care of one another. That’s why Paul of Patmos gave me his little dog, Xanthe as a present when I sailed west." "So that's how you repair what's broken," Velia laughed, admonishing me. “You take care of that filthy wolf cub. Romans prefer cats in the kitchen, not predators. Keep that dangerous wolf-dog in the atrium.” “My half dog half wolf puppy will guard me well. I’ll put her in the garden house for now, but she is loyal and bonded to me. Look how beautiful her brushed fur is, like the silver rays of the moon.” "That's a lot of strange information about she wolves and dogs from a Greek young woman. Learning architecture might not be a useless plan after all for a Greek woman nowadays. Times are changing for women here in Neapolis. Women have more freedom here than in Rome. Have you heard about the new changes in property inheritance laws for women? Probably notI bet all you can teach my five-year old daughter is the purpose of life. Well, what is the purpose of life? I suppose all you can do is spout ideas that can't be applied to real work around my house." "My own tutors from Alexandria told me the purpose of life is to repair. But I wished Paul would have been my tutor." "Paul is busy with more important things than being your tutor. So what did your tutors from Alexandria teach you about repairing the stench of life? My solution is to give the world our most practical Roman giftflush toilets and underground pipes for warm baths." "We had flush toilets and pipes underground to warm water before you did." "Why don't you repair your own world with those healing unguents or spices your tutor brought you from Alexandria? I know you have brought them to Neapolis with you. What's in that sack?" I opened the bags with the air holes first. This first day with my new employer as a tutor began to feel as grey, tense, and tedious. "Watch how the she wolf dog stretches her body in a dance." Paul’s gift of Xanthe, the wolf-dog puppy that I pulled from a perforated goatskin pack leaped from my hands, scattering across the mosaic floor. "Your five-year old daughter, Octavia will find that puppy is a good listener. The wolf dog is nearly twelve weeks old and is tame because Paul and I have cuddled and nourished the animal since she was five days old. Even her wolf mother was tamed. And this dog’s father is a Roman army Mastiff that served well on ships with the centurions." I watched the slaves overstuff Velia's torus with swans down. They placed it upon the lectus so it would be high enough from the flagstones to be free from vermin and covered it with goat hide. Velia had coarse, yellowed linens that scratched my arms and made me itch, and her bleached wool coverings reeked of the urine used to bleach it. The stench of sweat, roses, and myrrh still couldn't mask the bleaching with stale urine, no matter how many times the slaves beat the fabric underwater. Even when dried in the sun, the damp coverings smelled rancid. Fresh air couldn't erase what secrets those covers witnessed. I watched in Salonius's villa as the carpenters made the first woodcut on the sopha and applied its moldings to match the room. Above, the ceiling murals of clouds on faded blue-green skies lulled me to sleep. I had my sixteenth birthday the day Octavia had her fifth, and we celebrated so that I was invited to sleep in the house of Salonius-Cornelius, chaperoned by Velia so that little Octavia, skinny me, and rotund Velia all shared and slept upon the same, soft torus on this enormous lectus full of wormholes. Velia even allowed Octavia to hold the kitten in the folds of her tunic. Salonius, in the next bedroom slept with his 20-year old son in two separate lectus and torus far apart at opposite ends of the room. In the darkest hours of the early morning pouring rain chilled the room yet soothed the scraping of the crickets like nails on dry pumice stone and the erudite screams of the night. "Remember when we played Suffering'? And I'd rub your belly, and your doll would be delivered like a baby?" Velia laughed and whooped her perpetual hacking cough from years of inhaling the dust of granite in her father's sculpture and stone mason industry. I rolled over, pulling my short dark hair from my eyes. Next to me five-year old Octavia soundly slept. My mouth and nose felt paper-thin and raw as I trembled against the roar of thunder and the wintry rain pounding the roof tiles. Salonius tiptoed out of his sleeping chamber and crawled into bed with his wife. "What are you doing here?" I provoked him. Salonius shed his tunic at the foot of the too-soft torus and climbed under the covers to have coitus with his wife. I knew about those acts at ten from enough spying through billowy curtains on Salonius's older son and one of the kitchen slaves. Octavia woke with a start, rubbing her eyes. "Get out!" She raged in her five-year old, screeching voice. "Are you kicking me out?" Salonius stared at Octavia. His dark eyes bulged with unbridled anger. "Look what you did," "frightened, beaten-down Velia interrupted with a whine. "You woke dragon dumpling." "Shut up, you Etruscan whore." "Don't call my little girl a whore." "Better you should be crippled. You should have been born a boy. I'll kill you, you red-haired piece of garbage." Salonius hurried his tunic back on and stormed out looking for something to smash. He found a hammer in the living room and began to smash Octavia's musical instrumentsfirst her turtle lyre. Octavia's birthday and mine todayI had almost forgotten. Velia had saved a few sesterces from the pittance she told me that Salonius gave her each morning and bought Octavia two stringed musical instruments for her fifth birthday. I hadn't been home to look at the presents my loving father bought me, but that surprise could wait. I spent the night after Octavia's birthday party simply because Cornelius was close friends with his most important scribe, Salonius, and my father had work to discuss with Cornelius. We all spent the night in the house of Salonius. And now rage overtook Salonius as if possessed by an angry bull. "We Romans don't worship animals, nor do we let them pollute our households. Once in a while our Egyptian slaves let their kittens ransack the kitchens to scare off rats and buzzing insects." Yet the look on Salonius's face was that of a mad, starved animal charging his prey. Normally he was a charming man to Cornelius, or in public, but at home, I've seen him change in an instant before the eyes of his wife and children. And an hour later, he denied anything was amiss. When Salonius finished smashing the smaller turtle lyres, he went for Octavia's wooden kithera with its special echoing sound box, and then for her larger, barbitos lyres. These were presents my father brought Octavia for her birthday. Then Salonius shouted in pain as he kicked his bare foot through the thick and solid arms of the eleven-stringed phorminx lyre and the array of extra sheep-gut strings that Velia purchased for her older son's seventh birthday. After a year or two of lessons, he gave it up. For years it had stood among her son's undusted toys, forgotten, until Velia asked me if I wanted it and told me the story of how Hermes invented the lyre and how many years it remained in her family. I did want it at first, until I realized that Octavia wanted it more. So I made sure it stayed with Velia's family. I told my father not to bring it to our house, even if Velia offered it to us once more. Salonius put his foot through the paintings and other instruments brought for Octavia's birthday. Finally, he grabbed the Egyptian kitchen slave's striped kitten that lost its way and wandered into Velia's room and held its belly against the hot pipes being installed in the new indoor bathhouse, until it stopped meowing. I looked in on Octavia's mother, but Velia didn't move or respond to my presence. She laid there, one arm over the sobbing Octavia crouching against her mother. Velia gazed unblinking at the ceiling, and Octavia had told me many times that her mother said she had given up all effort. I would never give up trying to find a life, an identity, a self, or a sense of belonging. I ran into the peristyle and Octavia jumped up and followed me, clinging to me for protection, a protection Velia didn't try to give to Octavia or to me as a guest in Salonius's home. "Not my birthday presents. Don't smash my presents." Octavia cried, but now Salonius had spent his rage and returned, exhausted to his own room, but the respite didn't last for long. The louder the sounds of her voice grew, the more angry Salonius became. He began to chase Octavia first and then both of us all over his house waving this fasces a set of rods bound in the form of a bundle which contained an axe. Salonius's cousin, the bodyguard of a magistrate, carried the fasces. He must have left it with Salonius for safekeeping when he went to visit his son's new baby in the countryside. Now he separated the axe from the rods and swung the axe over his head like a madman. "If I catch you, I'll cripple you." Heads will roll before you'll become a tramp." He went for the axe in his private closet, putting the hammer away. Octavia and I scampered under a table and crouched there, sobbing. I didn't know how to defend myself or protect Octavia, being a scrawny boy scared beyond uttering a sound. Salonius seemed like a raging giant, a belching volcano spewing his poisonous gases at me and waving an axe. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, daddy," Octavia cried. "Better you should be crippled than to be born a girl and make trouble for me. I should have flushed her out into the Tiber. Better she wasn't made or born," Salonius ranted. I sneaked back into Velia's sleeping quarters dragging Octavia by the hand. And we saw that Octavia's mother began to stir and shout to Salonius who still hunted us down from the next room. "If I have to get up you two fighting make me sicker." She began to cough again. "Leave my baby alone." I shoved Octavia under the lectus and sidled under it myself. As children, even I at sixteen and she at five could crouch there, but a giant like Salonius would never be able to squeeze in that space. Salonius, now angrier with Velia, took a swing at Octavia and me with the hammer, and missed because we moved deeper into the dark under the lectus. Salonius ran out of the room to retrieve his axe and in the instant of time I had to flee, Octavia and I darted from the kitchen and dashed out of the atrium into the garden. There was a deep hole dug for an outdoor as well as an indoor privy and also a partially built storage room under construction. The workers had left for the night, and the hole in the garden soil was deep enough with enough dirt to cover us. In the darkness, Salonius chased his daughter and me, gaining on me as I disappeared into the hole in the garden. We squeezed our small bodies into a partially filled dung pit, hiding inside back of an old barrel left there as it was still too new and unfinished to be used by anyone. We covered ourselves with garden soil. I had a small space for air there in the barrel, and there was enough sawed out of it for me to see the lamp Salonius held high as he looked around for a few seconds, wild-eyed, wiping the beaded sweat on his upper lip on his forearm. "If I catch you, I'll kill you," he shouted in a tremulous tone. I brought my puppy, Xanthe with me and held her snugly. She protected me, and I protected her and brought nourishment to the 12-week old canis-lupus. This animal friend given to me by Paul of Patmos must be protected from other beasts. From between the wide slats of the broken barrel, I watched as he swung his axe overhead. As he passed a work table, Salonius slapped the ax against his thigh a couple of times. Then he sighed and left it on the table. Finally, exhausted, he plodded back into the atrium. I petted the puppy and covered her with my stola. We kept silent, and the silence tangled us together with one fate like a fisherman’s net as the full moon watched over us. The next afternoon, Salonius denied anything happened out of the ordinary the night beforeat least in front of my father, his architect and physician friends, and the construction workers in Salonius's garden. In fact my father had paid for the new addition as Cornelius was noted for his thriftiness and Salonius for his dutiful long hours as Cornelius's scribe. I had to stay another day while my father finalized business ledgers with poorly paid Salonius, Cornelius and the architects. Salonius kept grumbling about me eating him out of house and home as I sat eating some cheese and figs from the kitchen slave's hands. I watched Salonius stalk into the kitchen pawing after the Egyptian slave girl who kept looking for her missing kitten. I told her what I saw Salonius do to the kitten as I sneaked after him trying to hide in the room where the pipes heated the new pool. Suddenly, Velia, in her best shrill, let him have her words as if they were daggers. "No sooner did I put the baby on your lap then you told me to take her off because she gave you a stiff ache between your thighs." "You keep hounding me just because your step father came into your room to ask you whether or not you wanted to copulate with him when you went to visit your mother." "I told him don't even think of it and ordered him to get out. He's your rich brother and insisted I couldn't tell him what room to go to in his own house." "You could have told your mother." "I didn't want to upset her. She had enough meeting me for the first time as a grown woman after giving me away to my father and step mother when I was two." "What was wrong with you that your own mother kept the boys and gave away the only girl? When she married for the second time, she kept the girl she had then and gave her all the inheritance, didn't she?" "Yes. She said because I made her look old." "Why did your father divorce your mother?" "He wanted to marry that Thracian redhead." "So why didn't you kick your stepfather out of your room?" "I did. I insisted he get out. Then I told him I expected to be treated as a guest while visiting my own mother. Don't you understand or believe me?" Velia pleaded. "I threw him out, but you don't see him grabbing an axe or a hammer and chasing innocent children, scaring them for life. Would you want your daughter to marry a man exactly like you?" "Girls only make trouble. You know how many times I asked the that Delphi hag who delivered you to check to make suremaybe she made a mistakemaybe Octavia was a boy?" "Is that why you never held a conversation with your daughter or even smiled at her? Why do you distance yourself from your daughter? Not once in your whole life did you ever talk to the girl or show her that she's more than human garbage in your eyes." "What about you going into your grown son's room to massage his feet every morning and comb the lice out of his hair? "I'm a mother." "He's twenty, and he tells me you're overbearing, you Etruscan harlot." "I married you as a virgin. Don't you ever brand me with that word!" "There was no blood." "My skin stretches. I'm going back to bed." "You have an answer for everything. I've run out of words, something I'll never do as Cornelius's scribe, but for speaking, you have to have the last word, just like a woman. And one of these days, you'll pay for that run-on mouth of yours with your life. Heads will roll. Where is Octavia?" "In the garden again." "Let her rot down there. Lower your voice. We have guests." Salonius didn't even notice I sat at the back of the kitchen in a corner eating my figs and cheese, watching him, following him as he staggered back to bed. Velia spent the rest of the day at her distaff spinning wool and following the slaves around, envying them. My bodyguard finished his business with Salonius. By the next day the litter arrived for me to leave, and I felt a droopy feeling at letting Octavia go back to that ambiance while I returned to Patmos, utterly rejected as the new language tutor. My bodyguard soon revealed that Velia had hired a boy with dreams of studying architecture. If only I could take my little friend with me. I wanted to leave so much, and yet, reluctantly, I sat one more afternoon alone and watched tiny Octavia, much too young for me to play with as a friend. I turned to bid farewell to wealthy Velia who wore the same stained and disheveled dark stola she wore the day before. But it covered her shortness and rotundity, her flapping ham-hock upper arms and her enormous la banza belly. Velia had revealed Octavia's older brother by fourteen years had a short temper like his father's. "My older son had a fight with me over you and Octavia making too much noise," Velia said. "Me?" I shouted. "I didn't do anything to spoil Octavia's fifth birthday party." "If you think Salonius shouted and smashed all of Octavia's birthday presentsfine musical lyres, some of them gifts from your father, my oldest son broke an amphora over my arm. I dared him to do it. Octavia saw everything. She crouched under the table to hide. She was whining, complaining for her brother to show her how to play trigon with the boys. He told her to go away, and she cried." "Does Salonius know your son broke an amphora over your arm?" "I had to tell him. So now he smashed Octavia's brother's learning tools and tore up his scrolls he needed to study to become an advocate." "I'm too tired to begin my travel back to Patmos today." I shuffled into the atrium passing the dead bird in the green cage. Velia and Octavia followed me. "It caught too much heat." You'll have to take it down to the garden, make a pyre and burn it. Octavia is too young to light fires, and the kitchen slaves have their hands busy with food." I ran, sobbing, into the bedroom. "Listen, you little mouse. Want to take Octavia to see the Neapolis market before you go back to Patmos? I'll be with your retinue today." Velia took a plate of pickled eggs from the kitchen slave and offered me a heel of bread. Businesses opened their shutters. Bankers seemed to pose like gossiping statues on the steps of the temples. Beggars hid in the recesses and shadows in back of the doors of open shops. I wondered what all the trade gossip meant and realized that only accomplishments, benefits, and advantages were pondered. At the end of the day, everyone would probably do the same thing as the sun drowned. At least the fragrant jasmine of Neapolis masked the pungent garum fish sauce stench of Rome's sweltering rooms in the heat of summer. Velia, Octavia, and I walked through the dusty shops looking at the baubles and silken wisps of cloth, the sweet, sickly stench of distinctive odors, spices, incense, and unguents. On her way I watched Octavia watch her mother, Velia steal from the vendors and shops lapis broaches, Scythian wolf earrings, a white stola so small it could never fit her rotundity, and tunics already woven and sewn for babies. When no one looked, she'd stuff clothing under her stola. "I don't want any of the beads or perfume," Octavia whispered from the communal public privy. "They're cursed. You'll get bad luck." Velia banged the shutter of each bakery we passed. "Your wealthy father only gives me grain for bread and a few lentils. How else can I live? He rewards the kitchen slaves with more than he's ever given me for spending. Can't you see he's in charge of who selects all the food in this house? I get a few asses for spending, but not enough even for a moldy dried fig." I passed no judgment. Instead, I blurted out, "I'll pay for everything. Eat what you wish. I must repay you for inviting me to Octavia's birthday feast. Why don't you come back to Patmos with me and follow Paul of Tarsus while he is there? My mother can raise the funds needed to keep him in food and shelter while he writes and speaks to all who listen on Patmos." My body blocked the view of the litter. "I don't want to wear that evil bracelet, "Octavia cried. Velia, the Etruscan, would lay that green-eyed curse on Octavia when she misbehaved, at least in my presence, and then Octavia would punish me by having an accident. It seemed the tiny girl had lifted herself up so she could fall as a release of the tension and terror. Laying the fear on Octavia with Velia's palms caused the fear, Octavia told me that day, and later Octavia sought relief by getting hurt, getting the accident over with. Only the curse, the evil eye stood forth, and the punishment the child inflicted on herself fired from deep within her like a cold well of truth. "Here, stuff this stola in the belt of your tunic and put this outer tunic over it." "No! I won't." Here in the market place, cheap tunics fluttered in the breeze I the midst of a sunlit square. Velia dragged whining me into a dimly lit shop. The old couple who ran the shop brought out some fabric remnants, and when their backs turned for a moment, the longer of the remnant ended up inside Velia's stola. She waddled into the street to see the shoemaker. Velia and daughter sat down on a cushion before the shoemaker's shop. "Give me that skinny foot," said the shopkeeper, trying to shove one of the new little sandals on Octavia's dirt-caked foot. "The soles are too thin," Velia complained. "Leave me alone!" Octavia whined, storming out of the shoe section. Octavia shouted a horrible obscenity at the shop keeper, the same word I heard her father call her last night as I looked over my shoulder at the shopkeeper's expression. "That filthy rat," he stammered. Breathless Velia caught up to her daughter in front of the public cistern where a line of slaves and poor citizens, all women, waited their turn to bring water into the small rooms they occupied around the market district called the Subura. "Please, Velia, as an Etruscan, come back with me to Patmos where as a foreigner you'll be freer than you are he This content hosted at the Internet Archive at http://archive.org/details/5MulticulturalShortStoriesByAnneHart Files may have changed, which prevents torrents from downloading correctly or completely; please check for an updated torrent at http://archive.org/download/5MulticulturalShortStoriesByAnneHart/5MulticulturalShortStoriesByAnneHart_archive.torrent Note: retrieval usually requires a client that supports webseeding (GetRight style). Note: many Internet Archive torrents contain a 'pad file' directory. This directory and the files within it may be erased once retrieval completes. Note: the file 5MulticulturalShortStoriesByAnneHart_meta.xml contains metadata about this torrent's contents.

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Multicultural Short Stories by Anne Hart CreativeCommons [2/1]

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Greastest Old School Rap Songs and R&B one hit... [31/17]

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