Howie Good

Ashes, Ashes

About 5 in the morning, while most passengers were still asleep, the train barreled across the short border between darkness and light. My carryall bag on the overhead rack contained an entire set of ant-dreams in polished amber. Spies lurked everywhere. “Moose. Indian,” they reported me telling a contact. Actually, I wouldn’t meet my contact, an Orchid of Asia, until some days later. At one point I forgot the word “cremated” and had to ask her, “What’s it called – incinerating the body?” We were standing in a muddy alley by a pomegranate tree whose fruit the children pretended were bombs.

The Wind

Somehow we were always expecting something like this, a strange wind off the Atlantic, moaning and cursing and full of old hurts, tearing shingles from roofs and slamming birds against windows, threatening to fling us, too, into another country, where there are roadblocks and random document checks and coked-up child soldiers with machine guns cradled lovingly in their arms, and still it comes as a shock, so many people given a shove or a thorough beating and warned to move on, a pretty crappy way to die, when we might have just stayed together under a green tent of leaves.

Howie Good is the author of I’m Not a Robot from Tolsun Books and A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel from Analog Submission Press.