Drifting Home

Craggy rocks, topped with evergreens, rise from the water. Around the next corner, the river passes under clay banks three hundred feet high. Mixed in with the dark spruces are the bleached trunks of birches and the olive greens of aspen poplars, many of them notched by the teeth of beaver. At times we seem to be plunging directly through the dark forest, the river no more than sixty feet wide and shaded by the trees; at others the channel broadens into flat meadows; then again, the high, eroded banks return, pocked by swallows' nests and marked by mud slides. We will come upon these clay cliffs again and again as we drift north.

From Drifting Home by Pierre Berton

The Locker Room

The locker room is unique. Bodies are everywhere. Dirty bodies. Aching bodies. Stinking bodies. Filthy clothes are strewn on the floor like rags. Sweat saturates the air. Curses, boasts, and threats fly across the room. Injuries are bandaged and massaged to the grunts and groans of the wounded. Emotions drown in the showers.

by David Brand

Wars on the Sleeping Mat

Sleeping [with my siblings] brought on the wildest dreams. A tree would fall over my body and I would struggle awake; it was an arm or a leg flung over me. Some of the other sleepers were veteran warriors of sleep -- they went to sleep only to ja'ru'pa, to fight tremendous wars which took them from one corner of the mat to its extreme opposite, rolling and mowing down bodies on the way, ending up in the morning upside down in the wrong place or miraculously back in their original position. I would wake up in the night after a violent struggle with pythons that had tied up all my limbs, suffocating under slimy monsters from a mythical past, unable to utter the scream for help which rose in my throat.

Nothing disturbed the blissful repose of these warriors and other victims of their campaigns. They slept and snored soundly through it all, led from the bed by the stentorian bassoon of Wild Christian.

From Ake by Wole Soyinka