This story was first published in Terror House Magazine

The old fighters greeted each other with their traditional, shoulder-bumping handshake.  They went to their usual table on the raised section where they could look out at the other customers in the restaurant.  There were two types of food to choose from: Eritrean or Italian.  The fighters could remember when this colonial-era hotel had been owned by actual Italians.  Their fathers had told them of the time before that when natives had not been allowed inside.

For better or worse, the Italians were long gone.  The friends ordered a simple meal of lentils and injera because both were adhering to an Orthodox fast.  It was late afternoon.

In any group of three there is a government spy but Johannes and Tesfay were only two, and the other customers were slightly too far away to hear their uninhibited conversation.  They spoke of blackouts, feuds with tenants, mandated food prices, the water shortage.  The coup attempt.  The boys who’d been arrested for it, who they knew.  In a small city of old families, there were only a couple of degrees of separation between anyone.

First published in Terror House Magazine

“Bastards!”  The man’s exclamation rang out through the bush, fading until the only sound was the cicadas droning in the heat.  His vegetable patch was completely turned over, the chook-wire fence pushed down and flattened.

The man looked like a retired bikie but in fact he was a retired biologist who’d let his greying beard grow wild.  He stood bare from the waist up in the blinding sunlight, a surgery scar livid on the brown skin of his chest.  He stared at his ruined tomatoes.

“What did it, Julius?” asked Alina.  “You said there are no bears here.  Was it wild pigs?”  His young wife put an arm around him sympathetically.  She spoke with a strong Russian accent.

Danae insisted on driving as they crossed the desert near Joshua Tree.  She’d insisted on a lot of things since becoming Assistant Principal and Meilani decided not to argue.  She remembered the time Danae had berated her during a staff meeting.

They’d been close friends for years.  Probably Danae’s military contractor boyfriend had been giving her misplaced ideas on how to lead a team.  Being an administrator of a suburban high school is different to commanding a brigade of mercenaries in the Sahel.

Whatever; it was water under the bridge.  That and other things.  Now they were just two BFFs on a road trip together.  It was technically work because they were going to an education conference at a desert retreat but on route they could gossip and chill.