Oaks, Traditions and Conflicts: Serbia’s Unpredictable Stability
The bus from Novi Sad was proving impossible, an intemperate monster with narrow seating and dirty floors. Not an express, and certainly not this one, this bright red-tinted beast known as the Niš Express which runs through Serbia like a cholesterol-thickened artery. In Serbian, it might be better to term it the Nikad Express: one […]
Haiti’s Creole: Language of Revolution
Theories vary about the genesis of Kreyòl, or Haitian Creole, the most plausible one being that Taino Indians and West Africans, who had evaded slavery together on Haiti’s mountains, probably intermarried and developed a new language. The country’s name itself, Ayiti, is an Arawak word that means mountainous land. The word Vodou, which is essentially […]
On Solitude
A communion with oneself…. A state of being alone within the confines of one’s self-consciousness…. A singular moment of intimate encounter with one’s soul…. A spontaneous course that takes one to the infinite terrain of her/his inner space…. In most instances we don’t purposefully get into it. There just seems to be some potent energy […]
Short Story Finalist: The Long Haul
By Patricia Malcom Rosenleaf Vivian sat by her dying boy’s bed, nodding, starting awake, nodding again. She’d been here with him from almost the beginning of this hospital stay because somehow she knew in her heart, he wouldn’t leave — at least alive. She and Floyd, her husband and Mike’s father, had taken turns to […]
Short Story Finalist: The Reader
Read only those books that inspire suicidal thoughts in you. Books, as I have always believed, are more dangerous than an atomic bomb. A bomb can only kill or maim you, unlike books, which alone can transform you. They can transform you from something baser into something nobler, something higher. A great book reveals you […]
