Author Archives: E

In the malaria ward at the pediatric hospital, the doctor recites the status of the children. This one is emerging from coma. This one is doing much better. They have quinine drips and transfusion bags, sometimes an IV stand shared between two patients. At one bed, a father, dressed meticulously in a kaftan, stands perfectly [...]

I handwash clothes in a plastic tub on the floor of my bathroom while my laptop dials up Air France. The reservation agent greets me as I consider the dustiness of the wastewater. There is the sound of dripping, then the sound of her accented English, reverberating a bit in the bare tiled room. There [...]

The first time I rode a motorbike taxi through a West African capital was in early December, over five years ago, in Lagos. I was giddy with infatuation, overwhelmed by the city’s frenetic crush of yellow busses and packed bridges and industrial edges crumbling into urban fishing villages. I wore heavy wood earrings that morning, [...]

The city smells like diesel and dust, exactly as I expected it to. As evening falls, I stand in my courtyard and watch the driver haggle over a small pile of fake Nokias that another man has brought in. I buy a phone. The guard stands a few feet from his motorbike, turns away, and [...]

On this continent again, finally. Tonight I’m in a university guesthouse at the top of a hill: stucco walls and dusty shelves, bars of fluorescent lights at the ceiling. Astonishingly, there is an Internet connection. And, in the courtyard, a guard who sleeps beside his motorbike. I had forgotten about the guards.

At the end of the day, we stand barefoot in my third-floor room, the June light filtering through the blinds. I fold my hand around his jaw– he’s got a great jaw, a lovely mouth. He speaks with a Canadian raising, the vowels are all funny to me, but his voice is gentle. I am [...]

Somewhere north of Washington, we pause. From my window, the thin woods of central Maryland are deeply green under morning sun. Across the aisle, a freight train passes in flashes of blue-black and rust and gold. It clangs rhythmically and no one speaks. In my bag I carry a passport with a new visa to [...]

Somehow, I’ve gotten here again: leaning across a table in a basement bar to hear him, pulling my hair into a ponytail, drinking my beer, letting my hair out, pulling it up. I cannot sit still. I’m running this spring, which is what I always do at times like these, grateful for the uphill under [...]

The evening run from my house, around the inner-city lake. It’s the kind of city where one shouldn’t run after dark. It’s been windy all month, and tonight the wind is pushing the water around the lake, the leaves are already flipped silver side up, the big flat clouds reddish black. I’m alone on my [...]

Spring has left me restless, as it always does. This first hot day, I pushed the eighty-year old windows of this house outward against their winter stuck. I sat on the back porch until dark, drinking wine and watching the cats prowl the cracked concrete alley. A plastic garbage can lid scraped across the ground [...]