FROM SOMETHING I STARTED YEARS AGO CALLED STORIES I HAVEN'T TOLD ANYONE YET
This morning, for no good reason, I opened a large container of notebooks that I have not thrown away. I should. I should throw almost everything away. At the dentist's office yesterday I read an article about a Japanese woman who wrote an international best seller and that is her thesis: throw everything away. Imagine, if you can, the opposite personality. Not only do i not throw it away, i bring home more. every single day i bring home something or other - an often interesting often useless object that i want to look at for god knows what reason. and then i put it some place where i will be able to look at it once in a while. words too. i have them everywhere and don't often throw them away.
So I started these paragraph stories, many years ago. they were beginnings and they were endings. they were often about arabs and jews, and were meant to be the appendix of the book i was writing at the time called JARABS. If Jews and Arabs created a word together, maybe we could be ok. So here's one of those stories. From one of my notebooks. From the closet. From Stories I Haven't Told Anyone Yet
Nili was married when she first started seeing Fuad. And he was too, of course. Palestinian men, after a certain age, they are always married. They like their wives but. And Nili's husband. She did not talk about him. They'd met at a UN party. Both alone. They met the way people do who are most comfortable with strangers.