The Best Women's Travel Writing by Lavinia Spalding Page B

miss them more.
    For weeks, I mentally replayed the dream before going to sleep in hopes that it would repeat itself. It never did. Over time, all my dreams of them, and of Afghanistan, faded as I found my way back into the rhythms and comforts of American life.
    It didn’t occur to me until later that, in my dream, I must have already made the decision Nafisa had posed before I left Kabul. She was, after all, teaching me to pray. I must have said yes.

    Angie Chuang is a writer and educator based in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in
The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011,
Lonely Planet’s travel-writing anthology
Tales From Nowhere,
the
Asian American Literary Review, Washingtonian
magazine, and other venues. She is on the journalism faculty of American University School of Communication. She is working on a nonfiction book manuscript centered on her relationship with an Afghan American immigrant family and travels with them in Afghanistan. The names of the Afghans and Afghan Americans have been changed to protect them and other family members in Afghanistan, who have been threatened for collaborating with an American journalist.

LUCY M c CAULEY

    Beneath the Surface
    Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.
    â€”Henry David Thoreau,
Walden
    W e drove to Walden Pond that day to escape an unseasonably humid Monday afternoon in June. I knew that Fareed and Samir weren’t particularly strong swimmers, but I didn’t give that much thought at the time. They had grown up in other countries and were now at MIT, working on their doctorates. I wanted to be the first to show them Walden.
    We walked the path along the shore until we reached the bend that opens onto a small cove and where you can just see, if you know it is there, the trail to the site where Thoreau’s cabin once stood. The late afternoon hung heavy and overcast, the evergreens a smoky-blue smudge against the sky.
    When I remember that day, I think about how the place where you arrive can look so different from the place you later leave. How experience transforms the shape and color of things. The life-guarded beach and its few clusters of people lay far behind. We had this secluded shore to ourselves, watched only by pines, birches, and oaks. We spread the blanket, shed layers of clothes down to bathing suits, used a toe against each heel to coax off shoes.
    I watched Fareed watching me. I watched him back: long brown legs; a smooth, ample chest; a kind face. I first met Fareed on a dance floor in a club downtown. I was captivated by his eyes, which shone with visions my eyes had never seen—of ochre-colored deserts, of marketplaces alive with mirrors and lamplight. When the dance ended, like a child Fareed took my hand and led me off the floor. So familiar it had felt from the beginning, his hand cradling mine.
    In the pond, the water was cool but warmed as we moved, making our way across the cove, the three of us talking and treading water. We would pace ourselves, take this slowly. Samir had learned just that year to swim, taught by an uncle in the gulf at Beirut. At some point, surprisingly close to the shore, the water turned suddenly frigid and I knew the bottom had dropped out beneath us. After maybe twenty minutes Fareed fell behind, and I half-consciously watched his broad arms arcing as I swam, talking with Samir.
    And then Fareed was gone. A rippled empty surface where his body had been. Me, treading water, not ten crawl strokes away.
    Then he sprang into the air, a graceful whale breaching. Ah, I thought, he was just teasing. But then I saw his arms slapping water like the wings of a wounded bird. A still surface again, one perfect ring marking like a bull’s eye where he’d been.
    â€œGo!” Samir shouted. And as if shaken from sleep I darted toward the ring, just as Fareed resurfaced briefly. I saw the black outlines of his eyes, flung wide.
    Then, empty water.