A Thousand and One Knives
A story about a group of friends that include a paraplegic soccer coach name Jafar who lost his legs in the Iraq-Iran war, Jafar’s sister-in-law, a butcher, and the narrator who was once a player on Jafar’s soccer team. Each of the have unique abilities to cause knives to disappear, with the exception of the sister-in-law’s ability to make knives appear. Jafar makes a living selling pornography on the black market, but he is inevitably arrested and tortured by the police. As the police attempt to cut off his arms he causes their knives to disappear, rending them unable to cut him. The police profess him a devil and ultimately amputate his arms with bullets instead of knives and then set fire to him. The reflection of his torture is told with a straightforward sincerity, reflecting that this is something that just happens to men such as him. Rather than surrender to sorrow for his lost friend, the narrator gives him new life by naming his newborn son Jafar.
An Army Newspaper A government journalist takes credit for a fallen soldier’s short story. He is even promoted as a result and as if in retaliation, hundreds and then thousands of short stories by the …show more content…
“Before they did it, they announced over the loudspeakers, ‘These people are traitors and terrorists who do not deserve to eat from the bounty of this land or drink its water or breathe its air.’ As usual the Baathists took the bodies and left the stakes in place to remind everyone of what had happened.” Boys take the three stakes, which bear dried blood, to make goal posts. One of them says, “We’re still missing one goal post. Maybe they’ll execute another one and we can have the stake.” The father of one of the boys, when he hears this, weeps. Because death becomes so commonplace that it’s okay in the mind of these little kids to wish for another execution just so they can have another goal