Small Sun

This was another magical story. The man Fahd was drunk seeing a king's son who he thought was a sheep , he was promised seven jars of gold coins. He went home to his wife to tell her about it, they fantize about having wealth for their soon to come child. The man gets stabbed to death by another drunk man while on his way looking for the king's son.

Flower Crazy

This story was very all over the place I could barely make out who was talking, I gathered that this lady was a prositute had two or three kids and was probably getting sick from aids. She spent her money on magazines and cigoretts, she had a famished dog and only gave coins to the kids.

Persian Carpet

This was a good type of sadness. This woman threatened to burn herself alive if her husband and the laws of Allah would not let her out of her marriage. She wanted to marry the man she had fallen in love with before she was forced to marry him, they had a daughter. So the father re-married to Maryum and they had another daughter. One day the oldest daughter was taken to see her mother, she was very excited. Before that had happen the story tells you that the family's rug had been stolen it was a valuable cherished persian rug, they accused people but no one came forward. So on the day the girl had went to visit her mother she noticed that her mother had the same exact rug because she remembered exactly how it had looked from doing lessons on it. I felt bad for the girl finally getting to spend time with her mother and realized that she was just a thief.

Cairo is a Small City

Being that I am not personally a fan of the Arabic culture, I will try and paint a nice picture. Basically this man has been stalking this woman for awhile and starts falling madly in love with her. So much that he starts building his buildings after the months he had left untill he could see her because he was an engineer. Then he takes all the steps into getting a meeting with the girls father to ask for permission of her hand and the rest gets tricky. I didnt understand the turning point with the gun being brought out and the point at the end where Adil was killed.

Another Evening at The Club

All these stories start off with the fact that as a young girl in that kind of culture its their job to only think about getting married. But at least in this story the girl gets to marry a nice guy all most and seems to live wealthy having maids bring her breakfast. The story has on point of action when the ring goes missing, and they falsely accused the maid. When turns out the ring was found by the wife on the floor under the dresser. But instead of saying they was wrong of accusing the maid the husband decided not to ruin his reputation.

Clocks Like Horses

It was interesting as to how the ninety year old man kept time with each different parts of the world. And it was like a lapse in time to hear his old war stories of how he led his life working on ships. The weird part was at the end when the story mentions something about how he knows there will be the old man waiting lying in his bead dead. Maybe this story had an alternate meaning but I really didn't catch it.

A Night Out

In class we had a wide debate of disgust about this story. The main points consist of this man found this prostitute walking on the street , went back to her place to have sex when he already purchased a hotel room for himself. Then he gets there they talk about her assumed to be dead husband while she's putting her child to sleep on the floor, after it had been coughing a rough cough. Then they have sex and the man wakes up in the morning a realizes her son was dead on the floor, this man den slips her some money on the table and tries to leave unnoticed. But the mother half way wakes up to tell him goodbye and the man doesn't even bother to mention to her that her child may be dead on the floor because he didn't want to be involved with the funeral mourning.

Government by a magic spell

Halima was supposed to be this woman who was embodied by a spiritual infant called a jinni. Halima was considered holly and was praised a having magical gifts. She ruled with the government using her sacred gifts for twenty years bringing water and keeping the people healthy.

Cages

I did not like this story. It was about how this boy now a man had came to live and work for a now dying man named Fajir. Humid slept outside the dying man's shop and basically ran the place because Fajir was ill. He never went any where outside the until he met this girl. He started wanting to see what the rest of his village was like outside of the shop. He started having a deep fatuation about the girl named Rukiya. This story made me mad because it was like she was teasing him and using him so that he would give her extra sugar. She knew that he was attracted to her and she knew he wanted her. So she told him he would need more things in order to maybe have her one day, like that was supposed to be some kind of enlightenment for him.

The man

There was this king who was being hunted for but nobody could find him. The king owned a palace with one hundred and fifty rooms in it. He employed high paid prostitutes who wasn't aloud to know which room he slept in. He was soon to be murdered by his hunter. It shows how everyone is not safe from a man with a cause.

The Rubbish Dump

The rubbish dump was about a boy named Joey and a man joey nicknamed Mazambezi. The man worked and i guess lived at an airport where he collected trash. Joey would go to the airport to play with his car and watch the planes while he wasn't in school. At first the boy was scared and curious of Mazambezi because I don't think he fully got that the man was homeless and lived off eating scraps from the trash. But once he got to understand the man joey became friends with him.

A Wasted Land

Started off talking about a war in January 1981 in England. Its not clear if the person who is talking is a female or a male. It states that the war started when he or she was ten and ended when he or she was twenty-one. They lived in Bindura, and celebrated all the major American holidays. So the person who is talking is a boy named Bernard. The story showed how the wars back then meant hardships and death to those who wanted independence.

Wake

This was another difficult and all over the place story. From what I could gather it was a lot of talk about death and having to die. There was no real clue as to direction, time, place and language this story had written in. There where bits about this girl named Naledi who if I'm correct loved her father so much that she cut his toenails, and was a slave to him but he never said thank you or told he loved her.

The Barrel of a Pen

OK , this was a very vivid and barbaric story. These three girls lied to their parents to sneak and rent a hotel room. One of the girls was pregnant and her best friend had hired this other girl who had been a nurse's assistant to help this girl have a abortion. They had tried to get the abortion done professionally but the doctor stiffed them for the money. So they did it illegally with a pen. This story was way too x-rated to write about.

Stress

The couple of paragraph's talks about the (generals lover) and goes into describing the furniture.I got the impression that this girl was basically what Americans call a home wrecker. She was having an affair with a general who only visited her on Sunday's. Then she gets dressed every day while waiting on the general to go outside on her balcony to try and seduce another man who hasn't showed interest. This other man was a poor school teacher, who had house full of relatives living with him that he was supposed to take care of. His wife was giving him grief one day because he decided to buy himself a costly beer when his family needed shoes and books for school and they barely ate enough. I thought that was kind of selfish of him but it didn't do the wife any good to patronize him everyday because they where poor. So the man ended up killing the wife by accidentally strangling her to death just so he could get some peace.

Enigma

This girls seemed upset by her fathers over protectiveness, he wouldn't let her walked to school like a normal girl. The conflict of this story seems to be that this girl is trying to complete a homework assignment by writing a paper about her life, but she's struggling to put pen to paper. She is not happy by feeling that its life or death if she doesn't find a husband. All this while she has been having a secret relationship with this boy named Marie, she ended up pregnant. The girl felt like she would be going through some life changes, judgements, and maybe even being put in jail for getting pregnant before being married.

Papa, Snake and I

This was the story that had alot of conflicted discussion in class. The mother was very hard on one of her sons , there was this snake problem that was causing the chickens to disappear. The mother had asked the father to handle it but he didnt, so the boy felt it was his resposibilty to try and kill the snake and earn some respect from his mother. The trouble started with the pet dog trying to protect the boy and his brother and the dog ends up killing the snake but died after the snake had bitten it. Then the ending was disappointing because the mother still didnt appreciate what the boy had tried to do for her.

Snapshots of a Wedding

This story was funny because they made fun of how untraditional their African wedding was going to be because the bride was already six months pregnant. Sounded like something from our American ways. The groom had conflict with marrying Neo because she was known around town as a rude and snotty person who looked down on others because she was more educated than the rest. The groom was in love with this other woman Mathata who was six months pregnant by him as well but he didnt marry her because she was uneducated and couldnt bring as much money to the household.

Protista

The tone of this beginning was very dull and dragging. This man kept talking about this woman named Maria, this gave me the impression that she either was dead or had abandoned him. Maria was his wife and secretary. Then he starts talking about how he starts to forget things giving the impression that he was in his last days. He had no water, barely any food and he was all alone in his hut, and he was left there to die alone.

The Betrayal

The story starts talking about a very successful and very educated man named Dr.Kamal. Dr.Kamal was the president over a youth league that's purpose was to make the citizens become more actively involve with their country's politcal views. At this point in time there was revolts taking place thousands where being slaughtered for the political beliefs.There was disputs about racialism and so the war started.