It was a bleak day in Cairo. Not cold, just bleak.  Overhead, dry clouds were laden with desert dust that settled in every nook and cranny as it drifted toward the parched ground below.  The tops of the trees I could see from my third floor apartment were yellow. I wondered how they continued to live with smothered leaves.  Magdy, the overworked gardener, swept spring flowers, long since withered away, off the sidewalk. Shihata, the aged bowab, leaned up against the trunk of a tree for his afternoon snooze.  

Cars whizzed through the maze of narrow streets at breakneck speed. Honking horns, screeching sirens, and squealing tires blended with the white noise from the fan of the heater/air conditioning unit poked in a hole in the wall over my desk.  I stood up to turn off the fan and looked out the window.  The balcony, cleaned by Galal just that morning, already wore a film of fine dust.  

Across the street, a cow tied to a tree awaiting her slaughter for the coming feast shrieked indignantly. On the street below, a woman dressed in a dirty black galabeya hollered Arabic commands to her children, who were helping her move a small herd of sheep to the grassy traffic circle about a block away.  Some of those mangy sheep would undoubtedly soon become a part of some family's holiday feast, marking the end of Ramadan. A single goat brought up the rear of the pack.  

On the traffic circle at the opposite end of the block, a taxi driver laid on his horn while he leaned out the window to curse two little boys driving a donkey cart, tipped precariously sideways and loaded with cast-off goods retrieved from dumpsters. A cop, his ill-fitting uniform dusty and worn, stood in the middle of the road in flip-flops re-routing traffic while other officers tried to push the police vehicle that had stalled in the middle of the bridge just beyond.  

Underneath the bridge, I knew, were hastily constructed markets, some under faded umbrellas, where poor but cheerful vendors sat all day to hawk questionable goods.  I shuddered, dreading my daily trip to buy bread and fresh vegetables.  The sites and sounds of Cairo, which I'd found fascinating the first couple of months, had grown wearisome in the three years that had crept by so slowly.  I wondered if the next two years would seem as endless.  

My computer, whirring and groaning to automatically save my unfinished story of home, drew my attention.  Home, the place I could only write about, was thousands of miles away.  Sighing, I sat back down in my chair to complete my epistle of yearning.

Author's Biography

Anne Marie Jasper is an author who was born in Auburn, New York, but who now lives in El Paso, Texas.

She has written and published two novels, "Sandspurs" and "William Dancey's Grave." 

Over the years, her travel with her husband has brought her to many places, providing a variety of subject matter for the fiction she loves to write.

E-mail Anne at DeliaGoodroe@yahoo.com or check out her Web site at http://annemariejasper.com    

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