FROM ‘GHOST QUEEN’

Left for Dead

Short story, offering a bizarre and penetrating insight into the eternal horror that is the Middle East.

(Artwork by the author, from archive images.)

From an anthropologist’s notes.

We drove on; shuddering about in a battered Pontiac, through mile after mile of sun-scorched rocky desert, along an almost empty highway — a terrible place; the wastes of Northern Israel, no one in his right mind would want to live there — before climbing slowly up into the heights that looked out over Syria and Southern Lebanon.

My driver seemed nervous.

I offered him a beer.

He pointed to his head, meaning no. He was toying with a smouldering marijuana spliff, mis-shapen and hurriedly-prepared.

‘Gold ?’ I enquired, politely.

He shook his head. ‘Persian.’

I nodded.

I had hired him from an agency in Tel Aviv.

He told me that once we were in Falagh territory driving would be hazardous, as the Falagh, with their impaired vision, were by far the world’s worst drivers.

I felt nothing.

It was ten thirty in the morning, and I had already put away five cans of beer.