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But Every Time I Start

An airstrike hits a tent in Gaza, turning a whole family into scattered limbs and blood. A young boy is mauled by police dogs in Jenin. A young man is crushed by a military vehicle in Ramallah. A young girl is struck by a settler’s car in Nablus. Ancient olive trees are massacred by settlers all over the West Bank. I want to write about the smell of the sea breeze, the color of trees after rain, a pigeon landing on the balcony rail, I want to describe the sky on a cloudy day, tell a story about crows and palm trees, or just the raindrops falling gently on my notebook. But every time I start, black smoke slips into the words, and blood fills the page. I want to write about the sound of the yellow leaves blown by the wind, about the waves playing with the sand, about the laughter of children on swings, but all I can hear is women crying over their children, fathers hugging corpses and screaming their lungs out, children wailing over their parents who will nev...
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The shadow that stayed

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It appeared in the middle of the day. She was combing her hair in front of the mirror when she caught the quick movement in the reflection. She froze, then ran out of the room and slammed the door shut, trapping it inside. Her heart pounded so fast that sweat formed on her forehead, and her breath came in short gasps. She had always lived with a sense of fear, though she wasn’t sure when it began or where it came from. Perhaps from the horror movies she wasn’t supposed to watch, or from her cousins’ stories told on summer nights when they visited from abroad. They would stay up late, sharing tales of strange things that happened to children sitting by a fire in the forest, or of ghosts wandering through abandoned houses. Her cousin once gifted her a stack of stories by Christopher Pike and R. L. Stine. It was her first encounter with horror. She spent hours reading them, and carried them wherever she went, to relatives’ houses or her mother’s hairdresser. Once, they watched The Mummy t...
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The Scent of Home

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Ants have no names. They live as one body, a superorganism, and each ant is a cell inside it. They recognize each other by scent, not by name. When they meet, they touch antennae to “smell” each other. If the scent matches, they know they are family. That is why when our protagonist, whom we will call Hana, got lost and ended up alone in a cold, almost empty room with no ant smell around at all, she was terrified. She had never spent a single night away from her community before. Hana, a queen in her colony, was subjected to a strange incident recently. During one of her short naps, a sudden powerful vibration sent her flying. A flower petal broke her fall. For a moment she could not move. The shock made her tiny legs quiver uncontrollably. The air smelled different, thin and sharp, carrying no trace of her kind. She pressed her body close to the petal, trying to steady her breath. The vibration came again, heavier this time, like a distant storm. Could it be the wind? Or a creatur...
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The Second Reflection

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  “Kill one person and it’s a tragedy; kill a million and it’s a statistic.” I found myself thinking of this quote after our A Few Good Pages reading session last week. Some stories end in the reading circle, but many of them follow me home. We had read The School (1974) by Donald Barthelme and The Wrong Seminar (2025) by Scott Monson. During the session, The Wrong Seminar stood out to me for its sharp humor and modern tone, yet it was The School that stayed on my mind the next day during a long drive. At first, The School felt light and conversational, told in a casual voice with dark humor. It doesn’t really have a protagonist. The narrator, a teacher, speaks as if we’ve stepped into the middle of a conversation. The story feels intimate and detached at once. Its ending offers closure without clarity, leaving you wondering what it is really trying to say. That same casual tone reflects the indifference in how the narrator talks about death, and it might have been contagious...
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The Butterfly Effect of an Ant

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Dedicated to: “Meena Kolnad”, " A few good pages " and to the community we have become.   I definitely did not expect that an ant I saw in Tunisia on a retreat a little over a month ago would end up being the subject of discussion in the "short story" club that I’ve been attending religiously every Thursday. My dad used to read me short stories and poems when I was a child. That’s how my love for literature began, and I started writing poems at a young age. I wrote a few short stories in school, but poetry always felt more natural to me, so I kept returning to it, experimenting with different forms over the years. I first experienced publishing in newspapers, then on websites, and eventually a few books. In recent years, my relationship with writing began to shift. As my reading turned more toward psychology and spirituality, I found myself journaling more often, writing for no audience, with no intention of publishing. It became a mindfulness practice and a way...
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