His family had tried raising fish in the irrigation canals, but kept losing their stock to the speckled herons that speared the fingerlings with their blade-like beaks. Komet’s mother would have willingly trapped the herons to eat or sell, but his father refused to allow it. He’d seen villages ov...
Braving the heat, she set herself up at a table on the veranda of their bungalow, which, though failing to deliver a view of the sea, overlooked a lush garden. She suspected the garden owed its fecundity to poor plumbing—she heard water hit the ground below the bathroom floor whenever she took a ...
Bangkok’s Eastern Bus Terminal was a maze of ticket windows, shelters and numbered docking bays, where dozens of buses idled with engines rumbling, air noxious with the smell of diesel fuel and rotting fruit. Despite the diligent cleaning ladies whose grass brooms whisked away litter beneath the ...