Every Writer

?Cloud? isn?t his real name, of course. It is ?Claude?. But his new classmates in idyllic Chester have never met a French exchange student before and got him wrong. They have never bothered giving it another thought. They are sure that his name is ?Cloud?, but that doesn?t mean you should ridicule him for it; he is a Frenchman after all.

In the short story, The Taste of 3 A.M. by Mercel Meyers, the good the bad comes back around.

  Broken Windows by Marijke Hillmann   It is lunch time in a Johannesburg factory. Kagiso, Gift and Tau are leaning against a wall in the scorching midday sun. Gift looks at a young woman leaving the building. “Who is she?” he asks. Shifting the blade of grass he is chewing on, Kagiso replies: “She…

She came to know a place, a very cheap hotel, where she had no past but was only the present. Sitting on the verandah at night watching mosquitoes immolate themselves in the kerosene lamps.

It all started when Jamie dusted off her Encyclopedias.

She was in the attic with her seven year old son, John. She stared at the heavy texts and shook her head. Now you could read about Giraffes or Atlas Moths on Wikipedia.

We lived in an apartment a quarter of a mile from the heart of the city. Our room was nestled into the back with a decent walk in closet and bathroom.

The camper ambles its way through the Tete Province, Mozambique on a sweltering, humid late afternoon in 1975. Our 13 months? old son is dozing off in his seat ? I sit next to him and hold the bottle he has just finished drinking.

The lone car sits in the deep of the morning, waiting for its owner to return. The car had been parked in this same spot the day before, glistening with the moistness of the morning dew. At 4:00 a.m. the sky still shadows the darkness all around the town, hiding the sins of its citizens.

Carol got on the bus, sat down, and quietly wept.

The front left wheel of Jack’s shopping cart spun in circles, making it hard to push up the incline and over the rough asphalt. He leaned his hip into the left side of the handle, and it went more or less straight. It was time to find a new cart.

We eat scrambled eggs around the scratched wood kitchen table, wiping the sleep from our eyes and kneading it from our necks. We slather sunscreen on the babies’ puckered faces, we haul the pink-and-

Herman by Marijke Hillmann is part of our series Africa in Short. Each month we have a new story from Hillmann about the time she spent in Africa.

He knew before he entered that the sound was leaking. Fork clanging plate, glass clinking glass, laughter. It travelled under and through the door, into the hallway. It seeped