The Focus of the Gun
The picture shows a captured Iraqi soldier – possibly, from the star on his shoulder and his neatly trimmed, almost gentlemanly moustache, an officer – receiving water from an American GI. His head is...
View ArticleA Beach Pyre
I walked along the shoreline with nighttime approaching. Overhead, stars began to appear in the wake of the fading sunset, and beside me the sea was cast over with darkness, dulled white horses rearing...
View ArticleLet It Come Down?
Recently I saw another photo from Abu Ghraib prison. In comparison with what I’ve seen before, this one was decidedly tame, but it shocked me even more deeply than the others. It shows the battered,...
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The Guatemalan Civil War
A man called Raphael took me across a lake. It was dawn, and the mist was rising. The hills looked like the snout of a sleeping crocodile. As he paddled into the mouth of a reed-choked river, Raphael...
View ArticleLike Ghosts, Like Children
Sacbe Arrival Following my directions, I caught a bus from the centre of the small church town. A decommissioned school bus with a curved tin roof, it shuddered like a horse when it reached the first...
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Toast to the Lamb
I had three days to reach Todos Santos in time for the Day of the Dead festivities. I was deep in the Cuchamatan mountains, one of the most isolated and impoverished regions of Guatemala, with a...
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A Visit to Maximon
In the village of Santiago, on the shores of Lake Atitlan in the western highlands of Guatemala, I visited the folk-god Maximon. A wooden effigy with cowboy hat, sunglasses and grey silk tie, he sits...
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Drink to the Dead
By ten o’clock in the morning I’ve taken several liberal swigs from a bottle of aguadiente – a local sugar cane liquor – and hauled myself up to the vantage point of a half-constructed concrete roof...
View ArticleThe Exact Same Sensation As This
“You know what it is about this lake?” she asked me, this girl whose name meant happiness. “It gets into your blood. It will stay with you. I don’t think you can leave.” We were sitting on a camp bed...
View Article3rd Person
He was stirring the sugar into his second cup of coffee when he noticed the two men in the corner, by the cigarette machine. He was certain that they were talking about him. Neither of them was...
View ArticleBernadette and the Blind
Her parents were devout Angelicists. She was born on the outskirts of a scrubland town, in a splinterwood shack between a disused oil pump and the fields in which her father turned up rusted machine...
View ArticleBeach Cocks
I strolled along Southbank at lunch, and saw three builders running around on the beach drawing a picture in the sand. They looked like happy children playing. It was really sweet. I watched them to...
View ArticleLoyalty Cards
The militants occupied the frozen food aisle before dawn, shelling the shop-floor all the way down to the meat counter. Simultaneously, an attack was mounted on a patrol in the canned fruits alley,...
View ArticleThe Bear Discount
I was employed for a short time to distribute flyers on the streets of Manhattan. It was part of a promotion for the Build Your Own Bear store. I don’t know whether you have ever been inside a Build...
View ArticleThe Attack of the Solar Bears
The surface of the sun. Blinding explosions of light. Frequent thermonuclear reactions on stage necessitate the audience wearing three-inch thick protective goggles. Fifty Solar Bears leap out of the...
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And All Is Well
The foreigners in our city are taller than we are. When not pacing the streets in the high heat of noon, sweating through their beards, they stand together in unusually stiff, upright postures, as if...
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Uncle and Ice-bear
No-one in the family knew what Dai was until he fell off the ladder and died, that autumn ten years ago. There had been a lot of rain, and he was clearing mulch from the gutter, scooping it out with...
View ArticleEight Signs of a Culture that has Lost its Way
“The thing to do is to invent something which people will have to have, which they will use once and then throw away.” - K.C. Gillette Ready-Egg This product is a small flesh-coloured plastic container...
View ArticleFranco's Tomb
As happens, increasingly, around this time each year, the first boatloads of African refugees have started washing up, exhausted and dehydrated, on the tourist beaches of Tenerife and the Costa del...
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4862
How did it ever come about that I wanted to be 4862? I don’t know. It just happened. There was no warning. Perhaps it started with a shove. Or maybe it was the gloves, how trusty and firm they...
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