Short Story: Muslim Writing in a Diary

    I was jobless, so my parents sent me off to Sweden. It was December, and they figured I might stay through the winter holidays. Sweden is the most sophisticated of countries, and I am lucky enough to be Swedish, of sorts, I’m very happy to say. My dad’s mom’s mom was born there in the late 1800s, and immigrated to the United States, solo, unmarried and in her thirties, in true immigrant, gritty style.
    I’m like my great-grandmother, because in high school, my parents also shipped me over the seas, solo. I was gone for a whole year, but I traveled the reverse journey of my ancestor, living with a family in Sweden through a high school exchange. During college summer days, when I was on vacation, I always swung by Sweden if I could manage it. Now, my first year out of college, I have a pretty wide base of Swedish friends, so they are taking me in and making me comfortable.
    It’s been a weird vacation, though. It hasn’t all been a shining light on fresh snow, and small, bundled stores, and long cobbled shopping streets. First, there was a bombing by some Muslim guy. I’ve always been a very tolerant person, and I have friends who are African-American and Latino, and I knew a few Muslims from my college classes. They were all right, except sometimes a bit too friendly, and sometimes a bit too haughty, and sometimes just a bit too loud and giggly. I never could see the attraction of wearing something over your head, if you’re a girl, but I wasn’t going to tell anyone else what to do either. But this bombing seriously scared me. I mean, Sweden is one of the most peaceful countries in the world – my friends say they have an army, but you know they probably just gathered up a few hunting rifles and bullets and called it a day. So you can be walking around in Stockholm in the middle of the day, minding your business, buying presents – you’re unselfishly spending your money on others – and along comes some guy and wants to kill you. Not fun.
    So it’s been kind of scary, but weird, because the news covered the bombing for a just few days. And then they got all caught up with some guy who’s leaking government material from back home, and was wanted for extradition into Sweden for rape, a guy the US really does not like. But to me, the Swedish news did not have time to waste on the guy with the government secrets. Believe me, if someone blew himself up in Seattle, where I’m from, they would have dug up every nugget of rumor and commentary and anecdote and strung them together into half a year’s worth of news coverage. Then, at the anniversary, and the dedication of the memorial park, the coverage would have started again.
    But in Sweden, they just tried to forget about it.
    I got the impression that no one knew what to do, now that someone had walked onto the streets of Stockholm with the intent of killing as many people as possible. I think people were more shocked and sad than angry, though shock and grief may inspire anger, I’m sure.
    So there I was, a bit on edge, on the train hopping between cities and friends, and I forced myself to sit down next to a black-haired girl, in late or post-college years like me, dressed for the cold in a violet-plaid coat. I figured that she was likely Muslim, and seeing that I am blonde, I was out to prove that blondes do sit by black-haired people, and that we’re not scared of each other, and in fact, that blondes welcome Muslims to live side by side. That was my goal.
    She gave me a smile, disarming me a bit, so I tugged myself out of my heavy wrappings, curled up into them, and settled into the train seat. We exchanged a few words, putting me further at ease, and in a friendly gesture that implied I feel close enough to you to get into your business, I glanced down at the little account book the girl was scribbling into. And it was in Swedish. And at that moment, I realized that I cannot claim Swedish language skills of which I had often boasted, for I looked at the hasty words and understood them not a jot. Except for two words that seemed to gleam out at me, disconnected, from the rest of the page. Two words that said: exploderade and muslimsk.
    Such a to-do! I was in a fright. You could not, after all, trust any of them. Here I was, living my own life! I was trying to visit friends! I was putting myself out to trust this girl, and she was concocting the latest bomb and nail and gun entrapments apparently dear to the hearts of all Muslims. She looked so innocent, but looks can be deceiving, is what they say. What they mean to convey is, “all that is gold does not glitter,” but I recognized now that the proverb covered also the second scenario, which was, “all that glitters is not gold.”
    I sat tight for a minute, shaking, shivering, my coat and scarf feeling like scratchy ice at my neck and fingertips. And I waited for someone to slap me, for something to provoke me out of the burning flames smoldering in the back of my eye, to stop the gunshots and screams echoing in my ear.
    But nothing happened, except that the girl flipped the page, and so panicked was I that the evidence might disappear, that we, all of us on the train, might disappear in a calamity, that I ripped myself from my seat and ran to the nearest attendant, took him aside, blurted out what I had seen and confessed to what I feared, and then ran to hide in the bathroom.
    They told me afterwards that they had confronted the girl, and examined her journal, and there was no outright harm in it; she had written: I haven’t yet done my prayers for the day, and it’s getting late, and there is not a single place I know of yet at work where I can pray during the day, and a Muslim man exploded himself in Stockholm the other day.
     I could not tell from her words if she was as unhappy with the Muslim exploder as I and my friends had been. But whether she disapproved or not, I admitted, in the end, that one could not convict her of violence or planned destruction based on that excerpt. I did not see the girl again, I hid away in another carriage for the rest of the ride, praying that the girl would disembark at a stop before I had to go collect my belongings. As we approached my station, I took a peek, and saw that her seat was empty. And I scrambled all my things into an armload, cowered beneath the seat top until at long last the train doors opened, and then shot out of the station as fast as ill-equipped shoes might on icy, snowy pavement.
     I was ashamed, see. I’m one of those white girls in the US who lives a very sanitized life. I’m not prejudiced against African-Americans, but the only ones I see are the well-groomed, educated ones who dress in clean clothes and smell good and are not morbidly overweight. I don’t see, though some of my friends have told me, the segregated schools in the inner cities where cursing is more plentiful than gardens and trees, where the kids rove around in gangs as dusk starts to fall. I’m a girl who would be flabbergasted if I ever saw such a thing; I might elect to smile and walk slowly if I met a menacingly-dressed black man in an open street at night, in an attempt to hide my fears and in order to uphold my tolerant upbringing, even if the result was a mugging or harm on my part. Because if the man was in fact kind and harmless, I would have set him back and hurt him by coldness and distance.
     So now I can only think, what did I do to the girl? She is a peer of mine – we are the same age, same time in our lives. Will she carry my suspicions as a grudge forever? Will she now pull away and set to bashing and plotting against the western world, because one day on a train she was confronted with an unfounded accusation? It was supposed to be so easy to do the good and right thing. 

Blast Off!

I decided that i was not writing the story correctly, so I am starting over, and I'll just put short stories here for a while. This one is called Blast Off. It is not about Muslims.

One day i am go to go to Sweden and stand guard there. It is the best place in the world. There is no place better than Sweden. Heja Sverige!

Joan closed her eyes and leaned back against the seat. She had not expected a plane could be this tiny. She had lifted the middle seat bar so that her side spilled out against Tristain; but he didn’t notice. He was buttressing his hands against the window sill and staring out, and his non-stop commentary left no time for individual thought.
But she listened virtuously to Tristain and answered his questions and copied his fresh two-year-old voice. Rob was just across the aisle, and she wanted to show her husband that she was a good mother.
“Look, mommy. There’s a plane outside.” He was pointing across the tarmac.
“There is,” she repeated in the special mother sing-song.
“Mommy,” he chorused. “There’s a plane there.”
“I know!”
“Mommy, can you say arriba?” Where her two-year-old was picking Spanish up from, she had no idea.
“Arriba!”
“Arriba. Mommy, when the plane goes up, we have to say ‘arriba’.”
“We do?”
“Because that means up, mommy. We have to say arriba when the plane goes up.”
“Okay!”
“Are you going to say it, mommy?”
“I sure will!”
“Mommy, arriba means up. We have to say arriba when the plane goes up!”
“Arriba!”
She was happy, spending time with her little bright boy. She thought for a minute what an adult conversation with Rob might sound like, then the flight attendant cut her off.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are now cleared for take-off.”
Joan knew that merely meant, that even at this pre-dawn hour, they would simply roll onto the run-way and watch the planes already in line take-off, while they waited their turn. But Tristain did not know this. He felt the plane move, and was excited.
“We’re moving, mommy! Get ready to say ‘arriba’. Mommy, we’re going to take off. 5..4….3….2…1…blast-orf! We’re not going anywhere, mommy!”
Joan could not answer for laughing.
Tristain tried again. “Okay, we’re going to take-off. 5.. 4….3….2…1…blast-orf! The plane’s not moving, mommy! 5…4….3….2…1…blast-orf! Mommy, why isn’t the plane moving?”
The entire back section of the plane was now laughing. “What a cute kid!” one adorable and childless and stylish and white miss called out.
Tristain and Joan continued to talk about the planes and the sky and Tristain kept asking where they were going, and Joan kept saying “New York.” Then they finally did take-off, and she could see the black city and the yellow glimmers of light. The roads did not have yet the streaming rush-hour traffic cars, but that would come soon. She leaned back again, and let Tristain talk again. After a couple of minutes, she saw nothing below but the ocean, and what was that? Sand dunes? She couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that the ocean rolled right into an icy formation punctured by ragged glacial blocks. But there was no ice on the oceans in North Carolina; so was it the beach? What a strange and ethereal beach, then. She closed her eyes and let her thoughts splash along with Tristain’s. What was he saying…
She awoke. She must retreated for just a couple of minutes. Out of the window, she now saw not curling sand dunes, but a still smooth ice lake but so smooth and still you could have gracefully put your foot into it and let it soak. It was colored with purple and grey and blue that all looked white. But, it could not be ice… was it clouds. Had those strange sand shapes earlier also been clouds, then? She could still see a part of the ocean. It looked like a piece of faded blue cloth stretched so that you saw the little threads holding it together. There was just one glowing spot on it, where the rising sun was reflected. 
Again, she opened her eyes, and yawned. She must have fallen asleep again. Here in the wide open sky, it was harder to hear Tristain. But they were flying over land again. They were flying over mansions and green fields and a tennis court, and roads and bridges. She tried to estimate exactly how big that bridge really was and how long it would take to cross it walking; but although she knew better she could imagine it as nothing bigger than a piece of a child’s play set. Down down down, the thudding noise of the wheels popped, and they landed.
Joan and Rob said a few words to each other. Tristain was still talking as they helped him out of his seat and tried to calm his sudden screaming.
“Mommy, I don’t want to eat there. Mommy, please let’s go somewhere else.”
“Tristain, please use your low voice,” Joan prodded him.
As with all of Tristain’s screaming fits, this one too passed quickly, and they left the plane without further incident.