The Witch OF Endor

by Karim Kattan

There remained, in the mountains of Endor, a scattering of the elder people. Most of the others — the handfuls left — had moved to the cities of the south decades before. These people of mountains and hills, of ice fields and pine trees, now dwelled in seashore havens and desert cities, resort towns and neon oases.

The few families who had remained, huddled in the mountains surrounding Endor valley, lived in a half-dormant, savage state. He was acutely aware of their presence, hiding in the snow and behind the pine trees. Their half-closed almond eyes burned with a wildness he knew well. He was himself descended from these elder people; this mountainous terrain was his original land, this cold, this smell of pine trees. Yet the wind bit his flesh; the mountain suffocated him. He was only from here in imagination. In reality he was from an oasis of the south. His world was one of gurgling springs, swaying palm trees, and the bustling black market where anything — including eyes, diamonds, livers, rifles, children — could be sold and bought. His was the world where the hot winds wrap the body in a gentle, insistent caress. Here the wind was a slap in the face. (Continue Reading…)

Al-Kahf

الكهف

By Beesan Odeh

There once lived a man who was stolen from the sea. Rare and magnificent, he lived in his cave, rising to the surface every so often to pluck the strings of his violin for the birds before retreating into the water to play for his kin. They spent their days enthralled by the doleful songs of the man who lived in the littoral cave. But there came a day when the songs ceased and the people stopped going and the man was nowhere to be seen. His people first forgot his face. Then they forgot his voice. And then his name. Until they remembered only the sweet music he played to keep himself company in the cave day and night.

Talub had experienced much in his thirty years, including heartache at the loss of others like him, rare and magnificent and stolen from the sea. Few existed, living in trenches and corals and caves, each possessing an instrument chosen in youth, forever playing a song that kept them alive — a song that was theirs to play and only theirs. Adored for their sublime skill, they were also hunted by men from the surface who sought their music’s healing properties. It was rumored that the rich notes of a horn or a few strums of an oud could cure injury and illness, but mankind could not leave rumors as rumors, nor could he forsake the opportunity to benefit. (Continue Reading…)