Browsing Bric-a-Brac Stalls on an Old Market Day

I am walking up a hill, a sunlit morning with an old market day feel. I pass by stalls with a variety of wares laid out when I am I stopped by a seller with brown leather hat and neck strap, auburn hair waved across wide shoulders, a hardy weather beaten face. She wears a thick white shirt with sleeves rolled up to her elbows revealing sunburnt arms, faded blue tattoos.

She admires my watch. Can I see that? she asks, and I take it off so that she can get a closer look.

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Late Night Crush on the Tube

Late night crush on the tube

Trying to get the tube home.

A young Chinese woman in a brown plaid jacket and skirt holds a black briefcase and stands with her back to me on the platform. She watches a District Line train passing through, but it is too late for me and has left by the time I get there.

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Venturing Out From a Hotel in Afghanistan

Venturing out from a hotel in Afghanistan

Fabulous vignettes in Afghanistan. I am in a bland western hotel in the desert, white tiles, travelers milling about but I am bored, so I leave to walk around outside.

The landscape opens up with fantastic open spaces, green brush, Native American like cave dwellings below, inset in rock formations. The walls are carved with Arabic tooling, like the decorations seen on the window treatments of an ornate vizier’s home; an arch outlined with five half circles. Black and white dots fill the space between the outlines; each arch small with respect to the caves, but repeated horizontally, in sets of three, along light brown walls at floor level.

Miniature entrances to another world.

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Strange Foot Treatment at a Beauty Parlor

Pedicure by Hagit Shaha

I won a prize beauty treatment.

As I sit down for my pedicure, in a small white living room, a man squares up in front of me and raises my naked left foot, puts it on his knee.  He takes a large dressmaker’s scissors and, starting from the bottom of my pant leg, he cuts vertically up.

Next to me, another man assures me I will like it.

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Skirt

A plain skirt

I am wearing a white ankle length skirt, full bodied, made of lace. People look at me funny, but I am defiant, I like my look.

I stand at a shop window, look at the house prices. I could become a realtor. I go in to a bar, or maybe it’s an office. The looks are hostile, but I am still defiant, I like my skirt.

A man, black suit, white tie, looks down on me, physically down, puts his pointy black shoe on the tip of my nose. I can introduce you to a realtor, he says.

At a beachside café later, Barbara laughs at me. You cannot wear a white skirt in this season, she says. It’s because of the wind. And what do you have on underneath?!

I think about it, try to come up with a better answer…

Black leggings, I reply.

Image via Pixabay