Published Non-Fiction

Excerpts of Unpublished Fiction

Nor Bayezet is just west of Lake Sevan, following the gilded water's crest along a badly rutted road to Daroynk. In a year from now Alpine maneuvers will assemble and depart periodically around the cyclopean fort.

Men in their freshly starched uniforms will watch a mother walking by, sash tied around her upper body filled with fresh wheat or grain formed into a loaf and cooked, almost burnt by the baker.

To them the town is nothing more than hills etched with stone mounds, stone walled houses with crossed windows. It is a lovely place in the spring, when the pearly millet, its finger-like flowers reaching over six feet tall, ascends above our heads further and further towards the sun.

On the northwest slope of Derjan hill, in a courtyard of rosebuds and thyme, is the door of Noy Land Inn. The Innkeeper sits at her desk in the foyer with three rows of pig iron keys dangling on nail ends fastened to the panelled wall like a halo of imagined thresholds.

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Green, wild grass grew that month. Green and tall like it needed to be mowed and little yellow daisies sprang up here and there with grass rolling in miniature hills on the lawn. A vast prairie for the ants, the spiders, the little things that lived on a different level. A microcosm for insect myth journeying outward and inward in heat and in rain, fetching and mating, dying and foraging, shedding and changing beneath our feet.

November trees, coastal live oak and many of them embedded in concrete, with roots taking up parking spaces and sidewalks, their color the first and maybe the only to go when fall sets in. But this was winter and the sun shone brightly, making the red shingled house look pink in the white light.

John was a tall man with long hair in a loose ponytail and thick torn jeans. A clipboard, a Ryobi flashlight, glasses on a neoprene strap around his neck. He leaned against the porch wall and watched us as we trudged back and forth to the car with bags of things. Numerous things…

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In those days, lone children were turning up everywhere. On the way to the butcher, idling along the rivers edge, catching minnows in the stream. Whispering to one another while the salmon run. Even sleeping under a holly bush, cradling berries like a pillow. When asked where their parents were, one little girl replied:

"Grandmother fox must'a took her."

There was no telling what had happened. Perhaps these children were never brought in by a parent at all. One myth tells of a little boy born without a father. Spawned from a Virgin mother, unloved in body, whose child was destined for immolation. Some children are thought to be raised by the wild, or by a pack of beasts, learning to speak in growls. But never has there been a story told of the absolute parentless child, brought in by the nothingness.

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