Travelogue – Issue 1 | November 2008
Sheikh Zayed Road
by Helena Axelson Fisk
The truck driver is young and dark, dressed in ill-fitting beige trousers and a red, worn tee shirt. The policeman’s thumbnail is long and thick. He saunters over to a driver that has stopped in the middle of the road to ask directions. They talk things over while the other policeman checks our papers. I get the green slip: not guilty.
On my way home, I pass through Media City, Internet City and Knowledge Village, addresses that didn’t exist when we moved here—as familiar to me as my hands by now. As I enter the gate to our neglected and aging compound, I wave to the Indian watchman/gardener on duty. He holds a university degree and shares a corner hut with five other compound employees.
Voices reach me from the playground area, where the grass was once brilliantly, irresistibly green; it has long since turned to sand.
About the author
Helena Axelson Fisk, editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine, Frostwriting, catapulted herself from Sweden twenty years ago and hasn’t found her way back yet. She now lives in Dubai, where she composes fiction inspired by the Middle East while listening to the music of cranes and building-waste chutes.
Read our current issue, Issue 1 | November 2008:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
