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in a strange and alien place, where everybody seems so remote and soul-less. I am trying to speak to people in all the languages I know, but they don’t see or hear me. Their eyes seem empty and cold, and all the time there is a baby wailing somewhere…such a forlorn, hopeless cry of an abandoned child.
    Peter Rubaya Leningrad, Russia
    There was no reason to push that woman. It was violent and unnecessary, but she had come to mean everything to me in that moment. I knew she had the book. She knew I wanted more than the book. It was too much, swirling up and around me—dreamless as I was, I wanted something magical to happen. I don’t know what. I didn’t think about it—I just pushed.
    She went over the edge of the dock and gulls screeched. Her arms windmilled in the air while off in the distance a barge shoved slowly through the water like a large, stupid bird. Maybe I wanted her to take off, to wind her arms and lift into the air. I was so tired of running that I wanted her to vanish. Which she did with a large, protracted splash and millions of ripples.
    20.
    There are clichés: when prophets come they bring light and love and wisdom. No one ever talks about when they go. About the darkness they leave behind, about us blinking in their absence waiting for our vision to adjust.
    21.
    I didn’t mind asking Jack things. I was curious, after all, but the questions I asked were for me. I never accepted money to ask him anything. That’s a cruel rumor. I had my own curiosity. I had some questions for God.
    Which is it? I asked: The truth will paralyze you or the truth will set you free? Which is it, Jack?
    Erin , he whispered, you don’t want to know .
    22.
    I was in my living room…. I could hear this loud voice speaking in King James dialect…. The sound of people screaming begging me to let them in was terrifying. Suddenly everything was scorch[ed]…no trees to cover us no water it was like a desert…no animals clouds or sunshine. Needless to say we had no will to stop what was happening. We moved along like zombies.
    jfine Racine, Wisconsin USA
    They tell me it’s impossible to be dreamless, that the doctors couldn’t possibly have concluded that and I must not remember it correctly. My parents could not be contacted. My father died a year after Jack, my mother is now anAlzheimered resident of the Sunny Glen retirement community in Springfield, Arizona. I want her here, to clear this up. They say there’s no record of Jack’s birth or life or death but how can that be? What I want to know is whether I exist. Without him do I exist? If God won’t talk to me is he real? Am I?
    23.
    There will be a rally for peace and justice in the nation’s capital. At night, there will be a candlelight vigil and then gunshots ring out and everyone is running and screaming. The people shooting are wearing crosses.
    star24 Greenville, NC USA
    She went under like a bag of sand, and the water churned over her, erased her with froth and ripple as I stood there, still panting. The sweat on my body and face began to freeze. There was an awful, absent silence for just a moment: a pause as if the world noticed what I’d done, took one gigantic, outraged suck of breath, and then the city exploded with life. People surrounded me. Two large policemen pulled me away from the water and handcuffed me, cursing and mumbling my rights. I saw people peeking from windows and streaming from buildings. Men and women trickled by us on the docks. The river lapped and lapped; a tugboat sounded its horn as it glided past. And in my head, the song she’d been humming in the store:
    Here ,
    All we have here is sky .
    All the sky is, is blue…
    24.
    In the hospital the last time, Jack pulled me to him and whispered an endless stream of vital things. I wrote page after page of his words and added them to the books of Jack, his