Good Day Mockingbird № 4 — The Caravanserai

Issue № 4 The Caravanserai

In mid-century poster style, a row of red roadside signs along a desert track at sunset reads YOUR CAMEL'S TIRED, THE LIGHT IS LOW, THE WALLS AHEAD, ARE WHERE YOU GO, with a distant camel caravan on the horizon and, at right, a cream sign bearing a black mockingbird silhouette and the words GOOD DAY MOCKINGBIRD.

A free bench on a Lisbon metro platform and a dog that gets off there; a lone inn under a red cliff where a storm strands a caravan and every tale told at the fire is the teller’s own; a truck stop on its last regular night. A stop on a route, and someone only passing through.

From the Editor’s Desk

There is a laundromat off an interstate exit in the high desert that I have been to exactly once, at one in the morning, and I think about it more than places I have been to a hundred times. Everybody in it was between two other places. A couple in matching fleece who had driven straight from a wedding. A man with a duffel and a paperback who did not say where he was going and did not need to. Two kids in a band, if the T-shirts were honest, sleeping on the folding table in shifts. Nobody had chosen the company. The machines had chosen it, forty minutes at a time, and for forty minutes the only thing anyone had in common was the hum.

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In this issue

On a metro platform faced with blue-and-yellow tiles, an old woman in a dark coat sits alone on a wooden bench with her hands folded, while a grey dog steps off a blue train through its open doors.

The Dog at Anjos

Four flights down at eight, four flights up when up becomes the cheaper option. A retired bookkeeper, a free bench at the left end of the Anjos platform, a kiosk she prices and declines once a day, and a dog that gets off at her stop, which is not the same as getting off for her.

by Paul Titangos

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At sunset under a red cliff, a lone square-walled desert inn with one arched gate and squat corner bastions; camels and travelers gather at the gate, and two sandy roads fork in the foreground toward the viewer.

The Fire at Qasr Saffron

A sandstorm buries the west road and a caravan pulls in at a desert inn, where the courtyard becomes a market for one night and the keeper makes the strangers tell stories. Every tale is somebody’s own. Dawn shows whose.

by Pete Kaminski

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A weathered woman in a brown knit cap and a fleece jacket rests her chin on her folded hands and looks straight at the camera, in front of a stall heaped with yellow onions.

III

Next Time

A truck stop the hours rule invented, thirty-three years of one night a month, and a reroute that finds forty minutes of savings two counties east. Nobody at Ludy’s says goodbye. What you say at a stop is next time.

by Claire Jacobs

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