ARTWORK

COUNTDOWN

The girl beside Jeanna began actively moving her hands. Jeanna moved hers in reply. Nathan was fascinated by the delicate dance. Now faster and more emphatic, now gentle and coasting. Occasional smiles. Back and forth, a symphony. He turned to Sister Pilar with raised eyebrows. She leaned closer “That’s Abeba. They’re using sign language."

PRESCOTT GOLD

Cole took her arm and led her twenty paces away to the approximate point where he had first seen it. He turned her gently around and nodded with his head at the treeline. Baffled, Beth complied, looking up and around, then slowly really looking. Her mouth slowly dropped open and it was Cole's turn to laugh. 

ABDALI

Nathan steered north... tracing the familiar commute from Kuwait City to the border... Through the shimmering heat of the undulating sand... camels led by a lone nomad, moving with slow purpose across the trackless void... wisps of oil-laden cloud scuttled across the sky, shedding a fine, acrid mist of petroleum droplets that splotched the windshield like black rain. On the horizon, two distant oil wells stood aflame, their black towers of flame pulsing with a grumbling light.

SOUTH BY SABHA

Nathan... found the same group of old men by accident. He was drawn by the sound of static—an old transistor radio. The four sat in a small cleared space, their possessions carefully protected. One he hadn’t spoken to was sorting medical supplies—a small cloth bundle of vials and syringes laid out with careful precision.