COMING
OF THE PARIS METRObby
Penny Howston
 We
did not go to sleep and something did happen though I
had nothing to do with it. Before Jean-Paul could leave
my
bed a big black something hit us with a terrible crash.
Flattened to the mattress, we lay there too stunned to
be frightened at first. My head hurt. We were in complete
darkness. We were buried alive under
something heavy...
SPARKY'S
DINER: A Story of San Franciscobby
Bob Biderman
 I thought
about this as I drank my beer, occasionally
looking up to see whether
my old friend had arrived. San Francisco
wasn't the city I once knew. There was
a time when I couldn't imagine living
anywhere else. It was a place where anything
was possible, where candy-coated dreams
were nourished and nurtured (albeit in
a haze of cannabis fumes). But then things
began to change. I wasn't sure when it
happened or how, but change it did. And
so did I...
ICE,
NO CREAMbby
Lisa Selvidge
 This
was the first time Volodia had been out of the apartment
block and, as he later told us, he immediately regretted
it. A small hole in Dyma’s pocket revealed the
floor of a city, held together by ice and partly covered
in snow. Hundreds of padded human feet trudged over the
slippery and rugged mountainous surfaces where deep ruts
cut through the pavement and metal lines jutted out of
the packed ice and snow. Even the chocolate was hardening
fast, much to his horror.
CONSTANTINOPLE
1920 bby
Haig Tahta
 The
Galata bridge! In reality this bridge only joined
old Stamboul to Pera across the Golden Horn – but
Nikolai had the impression that it was joining Europe
to Asia. Across it walked or clattered the whole
world or so it seemed to him. Turkish and Kurdish
porters half trotted across – bent forwards
with huge packs or cases on their backs attached
to a thong which passed across their foreheads, calling
out “Make way! Make way!” Turkish ladies,
mostly still veiled, passed towards Stamboul to go
shopping in the great bazaar or moved the other way
towards Pera to go to the Taksim gardens.
THE
LAST DANCE OVER THE WALL by
Lisa Selvidge
 Klaus
hesitated. Dietrich, as the postenführer, was
responsible for their watch. Even so. Their Commander would
be furious. And what if it were a trick? Perhaps Dietrich
was testing him? But a wall stripper? He had heard other
guards talk about them. He double checked that there was
no movement his side and went to join Dietrich. He focused
his binoculars on a bedroom window on the fifth floor to
the right of the watchtower. A young woman, early twenties,
with dark, curly hair down to her shoulders, a pale face,
red lips, with long curvy silky legs and small feet standing
beneath a naked bulb facing the window. The curtains were
open. Either she had forgotten to draw them or… Klaus
imagined the alternative as she unbuttoned a long, white
shirt.
SEVEN
DIALS by Bob Biderman
 It
was the curious nature of the place – a roundabout
with seven streets radiating out like spokes of a wheel.
And then there was that wonderful pillar, like an ancient
artefact – an obelisk or totem or the like – and
just below its pointy top, six faces, six clocks (sundials,
actually). There should have been seven – for Seven
Dials – but the number of radiant streets was originally
six, the seventh came later. Each street had the face of
a sundial at its terminus – six streets, six dials.
Then came the seventh. A street without a dial.
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