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“Malcolm is dead,” Eddie kept hearing as he raced to the shop. As he got closer, he saw the flashing lights, and the siren that had been only an eerie, barely audible musical accompaniment to his thoughts began to register as belonging to an ambulance and not as being a regular plant alarm. He knew that he would not cry no matter how awful it was; he never cried. That was one thing he never had to worry about. If one of them had to be killed here, it was better that it was Malcolm—because if Eddie had been killed, Malcolm would have cried like a baby.

A prophet is never recognized in his own country, especially when that country has fallen into the mouths of dragons. Bob waves to a woman in a BMW across the street. It’s his lawyer, Christine. “Is me, Bob!” She closes the tinted windows and weaves through traffic. There was a time when BMW stood for Bob Marley and the Wailers. He thinks of the foolishness of that now.

            He returns to the park, searching for the boy from the night before. He wants to shine his shoes again, to see the light in his eyes from Africa reflected there. In the daylight, the park is different from how he remembered it, but the boy’s tree still leans, and there’s a man selling peanuts and asham.

            “You see the little youth that sleep inna the park?"

            "Which one?"

            “The one with the play-play guitar."

            “Oh, me remember him. Him in juvenile detention! Is a bad youth.”

            “No. Me see him last night.”

            “Him kill a Chinie man in August town. Man-slaughter."

            It doesn’t make sense. Bob has a feeling that he has stepped into the middle of someone’s dream. The fall-down skin itches and there is a dull pain behind his eyes. An idea comes to him.

            “You know Bob Marley?”

            “Yeah?”

            “What if me tell you him come back?”

   We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were nonfiction - short biographies, children’s encyclopedias, textbooks - because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over. 
  We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom. 
     He always began: 
     “Once upon a time . . .”
 

Breaker, trick rider, picador, and the heavyweight ring’s fastest jockey, Ali has made ring time canter and canter, bow, leap over giant bushes, and move so much in his own terms that time became mutual with his grace, Truly the Professor of Boxing, he elasticized his profession, made daring and cunning and mystery part of the craft. Did we ever wonder as much during anybody else’s fights what the champ was thinking?

BLU: … i seen pictures, gemini, of oceans that are actually blue. waters so clear you can stand waist deep, look down and see your feet. not like any ocean i’ve ever been to. light reflects off the top of the water and you can see the sand on the ocean floor.

To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue 
pears laced with needles. I had no life
in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor,
its longing for before? I have a faint depression
polluting my heart, sings the lake. That there is music 
in everything if you tune into it
devastates me. Even trauma sounds like Traum, 
the German word for dream.