When You Have Lived As

She Would Grab Whatever She Could -a Look , A Whisper , A Moan - To Salvage From Perishing , To Perserve. But Time Is Most Unforgivving Of Fires , And She Couldn't , In The End , Save It All .

We Stayed Huddled That Way Until The Early Hours Of The Morning. The Shootings And Explosions Had Lasted Less Than An Hour, But They Had Frightened Us Badly, Because None Of Us Had Ever Heard Gunshots In The Streets. They Were Foreign Sounds To Us Then. The Generation Of Afghan Children Whose Ears Would Know Nothing But The Sounds Of Bombs And Gunfire Was Not Yet Born.

It Turned Out That, Like Satan, Cancer Had Many Names.

For A Novelist, It's Kind Of An Onerous Burden To Represent An Entire Culture.

Years Later, I Learned An English Word For The Creature That Assef Was, A Word For Which A Good Farsi Equivalent Does Not Exist: Sociopath.