Soldiers hurl armfuls of books into the fire as I stare in horror. All those words highlighting the human condition diminished to ash. Heartbreaking. A soldier pauses mid-haul, eyeing me. I adjust my glasses, then scramble to my borrowed postal… Continue Reading
“The helplessness I felt when the bombs exploded, and mustard gas crept like ground fog into our trenches is hard to describe,” my Great-Uncle Leo said as we painted his barn red. After I dropped out of college, I became… Continue Reading
Every household has at least one bag of bones they try to hide under a pile of winter clothes. On the other hand, my family is so pleased with our fleshless corpse that we proudly display the skull, femur, and… Continue Reading
…and it should have been Kokura, but it was overcast, though it was cloudy here, too, but not cloudy enough, so by the time I returned home from business, it was all gone, everything, and like so many others, I… Continue Reading
The man who was shot in the head goes to church on Sunday mornings. His name is George Marcovici, but to his friends and family, he is the captain. George is a neighborhood legend in Antim, Bucharest, with his soft… Continue Reading
Hania grew up in a southwest Detroit neighborhood where most people understood English well enough to follow radio broadcasts of Joe Louis fights and fireside chats. But they were far more comfortable conversing in Polish. It was the language of… Continue Reading
Second Lieutenant Edwin Elston led the remaining boys in his platoon to a small clearing within twenty yards of a concrete bunker along the northern edge of the Siegfried line. Elston didn’t need to order them to take any cover… Continue Reading
The mournful wailing froze Conn O’Neill’s blood, as it always did. People said the sound the stuka dive-bombers made came from sirens the Germans fitted to their planes. Well, maybe. But Conn, fighting for Allied forces in northern France, knew… Continue Reading
The bombers were coming again, the sirens screaming. Rita pulled away from the crowd exiting the nightclub and started toward the coat check station. She could bear the cold but not what would happen if she didn’t make it back… Continue Reading
“One hundred days,” I say as the prime minister leafs through the contract I’d given him. He scans the pages through a pair of black rimmed spectacles held in front of his nose with a chubby white fist. He looked… Continue Reading