: We Are Family :
an excerpt by Askold Melnyczuk
They were in the middle of a late supper when the bomb went off.
Everything stopped. Forks froze, eyes widened, even the candle flames stood taut.
“Welcome to Beirut,” their host said with a tight smile.
The explosion pricked the balloon of conviviality. Oliver, a journalism professor on his first visit to the Middle East, felt the energy leaking out of the room, replaced by the nervous awareness you feel walking through a dangerous neighborhood or driving too fast. A latecomer to caution at forty-one, Oliver had covered countless urban crime scenes. Talked his way into, and out of, many hostile rooms. Brooklyn wasn’t Disneyland. Neither was it Beirut. Once a sign he was on the right track, his racing heart now gave him pause.
I am scared, he thought, because I will die here. That’s why he’d come. If he wanted fun he’d have gone to Paris or Patagonia.
