When the Winds seemed Still

The short stories collection of Mahdi Eisa Al-Sigar is interesting. The stories' ends are open and thought provoking. Nevertheless they are gloomy. Two of them about an elderly expecting the near death worried. The first elderly is a female with her cat. She reads in the daily newspaper about the death of another lonely  lady who has 3 cats. The neighbours smell her body after 3 days. Her body is found mutilated since the cats had eaten from her meat. The story goes on describing the elderly's interaction with her cat. The other story is about an elderly with his granddaughter in a garden. A white horse passes nearby in the street. The elderly man knows rhat the horse is diseased ans about to die. The girl is full with joy for the sight of the horse. When the horse turns with the street ans they can no longer see him they hear a thudding sound. The girl want to go to see what happened but her granspa succeed distracting her attention from that.

Another two stories end by killing. One by the killing of a young man by his friends after his father was worrying much about him and about the kind of friends he was spending time with.  The other by a father who killed his baby son because he was crying while they were escaping from a castle. The father feared that the guards might hear him.

Another strange story that I didn't understand was about a man and a dog waiting for a train and the train is late. The man put his head on the railway to hear. He was found later dead. There was sheeps too but I am not sure if he was a shepherd.

Another two stories were about handicapped persons. One on a wheelchair spending his days meditating the cars and the people in the cars while they go and come. The other story is about a man with paralysis ans a blind man who tried to help each other to steal dates from an orchard.  They were chased out in a frightening scene. There were children watching that scene. The children stopped playing for a while after that scene ended.

the last one was a good one named "When the Winds seems Still". It is about a boy trying to fly a kite yet not knowing which way the wind is blowing and concluded that the wind is paused. The girl next door is watching. She says  that the kite tail is too long ans that might be adding extra weight on the kite preventing it from going up. The boy annoyed by her remarks does not answer her nor look at her direction. The girl left after she felt hopeless. When she left the boy cut part of the kite's tail and tried again. But it did not succeed. He changed his position and suddenly the kite goes up. The girl comes back and asks him to let her hold the thread. He handle it to her happily.

It was a short story collection that is written with finely selected words. I liked it much.