until one was thrown out of a cab window. "Why the fuck did you do that????" Only the "fuck" was in English. Four women, one cab driver. Translation: "In our Country, they blow up at this point in the game."
"This is not a game girls."
"Somebody seems to think so Oriana." The cab jerked over to the side of the road. "Get out." The cab driver turned halfway round in his seat and asked in French, though we were tasked with crossing Cairo to free the translators with Diplomatic Papers, "I said, Get Out, do you understand?"
One braved, "Just her or all of us?"
"Some mentor, getting us kicked out of everywhere we go."
We got out. "Surely there'll be another." The Doctor of Ancient Archeology rolled her eyes. "Only for the Americans now." Smoking, reading, looking at abandoned beggar's cups. The streets dissolved of traffic. "We might as well be in old Mexico." The sun making us into pinned moths on fading construction paper.
"I hear something!" Nobody made a point of listening too closely or being obvious about also hearing something. The low moan of a lawnmower or outboard boat. Some sheets of plywood in front of a wares table was suddenly kicked away, and two figures ran.
From out of the sun's rays, late afternoon tilt on shadows, came the sound of the droning plane. As it began to block the sun the sound split into others too. "That's routine around here." We stood there as we might eating sandwiches on a Cape Cod beach with seagulls doing a mostly silent ballet above us. Until the strafing began.
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