Due to be idiotically busy right now, here's something I wrote many years ago. It was just a strange train of thought which occurred to me back when Americans were being beheaded in the Middle East and a lot of people were still screaming "kill the Arabs". I know it's a sophomoric piece of writing, but I did like the underlying sentiment.
He sits at the table, shoving another forkful of tabouli in his mouth and smiling at his son struggling to learn how to use the fork. His wife is dead, killed by an American bomb, and he considers his son a gift from Allah. He has no remorse for filming the beheading of an American that morning.
He glances out the window and notices a light on the house across the street. In that house, an Iraqi businessman is on the phone, frantically trying to convince an American colleague not to pull out of their joint venture. The American sits in his office in Los Angeles, his mind drifting back to a brief relationship with a Costa Rican woman he met while in college. Unbeknownst to him, she became pregnant with his child.
His daughter is running down a beach in Costa Rica, laughing with her friends, wearing running shoes put together by a Malaysian man who is now standing in a factory, watching the needle plunge in and out of the leather, ready to pull the shoe and glue on the sole. He doesn't know about the latest American beheaded in Iraq. Instead, he's mentally composing a love poem. He will go home tonight, as every night, and recite it to his wife before the two of them drift off to sleep.
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