Jonathan Wright

She wanted to challenge her patron saint on the promises he had given her, but she waited for night to fall because during the day the picture was just a picture, inanimate and completely still, but at night a portal opened between her world and the other world, and the Lord came down, embodied in the image of the saint, to talk through him to Elishva, the poor sheep who had been abandoned by the rest of the flock and had almost fallen into the abyss of faithless perdition.

It was always fun with Hadi because he didn’t deny himself when it came to pleasure

It had been hard to separate Nahem’s flesh from that of the horse

Buffeted by the wind, the pedestrians were having a hard time walking. Some looked as though a hidden hand were slapping them or pushing them along from behind. People sitting outside coffee shops soon went inside, and drivers with their car windows partly open wound them firmly closed. The newspaper and magazine vendors dispersed, and the people who sold cigarettes and sweets at traffic lights put their goods into their shoulder bags so they wouldn’t blow away. People wearing hats pressed them down hard to keep them from flying away

Exhausted, every member of the family went to sleep dreaming of Hasib walking home with a cloth bag over his shoulder. They all dreamed something about Hasib. Parts of one dream made up for parts missing in another. A little dream filled a gap in a big one, and the threads stitched together to re-create a dream body for Hasib, to go with his soul, which was still hovering over all their heads and seeking the rest it could not find. Where was the body to which it should return in order to take its place among those who live in a state of limbo?

Hasib was aware of himself observing the explosion, but not from his position between the wooden sentry box and the big hotel’s outer gate. He was looking at the flames, the smoke, and the flying pieces of metal from high in the air. He felt a strange calm

He took out his digital recorder:

“Be positive. Be a positive force and you’ll survive. Be positive. Be a positive force and you’ll survive.”

He repeated the words several times like someone obsessed, until he noticed that the batteries in the recorder were dead.

He looked very ugly. How come the old woman didn’t seem startled by his dreadful appearance?

She didn’t see the Lord in quite the same way as Father Josiah did. The Lord wasn’t “in the highest”; she didn’t see him as domineering or tyrannical. He was just an old friend, and it would be hard to abandon that friendship

Mahmoud was confused about what Farid said. He didn’t want to think too much about his own attitude toward Saidi or Saidi’s attitude toward the general situation. These things required a level of effort, concentration, and mental distance that Mahmoud just didn’t have right now, or else he was just trying to trick himself into thinking he didn’t.