A Basketful Of Figs, cont'd.

Somehow or rather, our family house has become an important “base”. I roll the word in my mouth: concrete, tasteless. Awful. Refugees turn up at our doorstep and Mother takes them in. Soldiers from the Army decide to set up a communications center, right smack in the middle of the courtyard, under the fig tree. They are sweet enough not to move their bulky metallic equipment around too much. The whole place reminds me of a marketplace. A sad marketplace, with no wares to be sold and with only stricken expressions, accompanied with jerky and pained body language, as people try to comprehend what is happening to them and around them. The words I hear are not delicious or savory words. I try to ignore them, but I end up tasting them, remembering them. It is pungent like the bitter dark herbal teas, composed of bark, root and other plant parts, that Mother makes all the time to alleviate disharmony and imbalance in bodily yin or yang. And as children, we always remember the bitterness most keenly.
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Fang, Claw and Steel, issue 09, Autumn 2000.

A blast from the past: here. My story is Waiting For The Full Moon.

Final issue was in the year 2006. :(