1001 Nights Cast

Three Deaths

Jennifer Strange

Jennifer Strange lay on the floor of her home knowing that her husband Bill wouldn’t get home for another four hours. The phone kept ringing and she knew it was her mom. They spoke every day. Sorry mom I can’t pick up. I’m dying. She thought of the little bit of pot she had in her underwear drawer and if this was the end a hit might release some of the pain of going down. She felt like such an asshole and a fool.

Bill just wouldn’t buy the Nintendo, the kids had too many toys. Especially Keegan. She doted on him. Keegan was her guy, he reminded her of Bill when he was cute. He still was cute, but not like then. When they would get high in his car and he would do voices, like all the things hanging around his rear view mirror would be talking to her. I wuv you Jennifer Strange said the yellow cow bobbing over the dash.

She just wasn’t ready to start working out of the house and Bill agreed. But how did it wind up that he determined every fucking cent they spent and then she dutifully fulfilled the mission? He was the Sarge. She was the grunt. Keegan didn’t make her feel like that. He was like Bill when he was young. Even before she knew him. She still looked pregnant. Look at this gut. Imagine dying from drinking gallons of water, not brew. Bill had known she was entering some contest. That’s all he knew. She knew he’d freak if his wife was in some radio show drinking contest. It was what she could do. It felt like high school. Doing something to the nth degree to say fungoo to the school. She hadn’t done stuff like that but she’d admired the kids who did. She liked doing a few doobs with the punks and laughing about some outrageous event. The time Kenny removed the toilet from the bathroom and put it in the hall. Huge bowl, just sitting there. Well she was the toilet now. Problem was she couldn’t go. Imagine drinking all that water and holding it in till you want to scream. And you lose the freaking prize, and after that a really tiny wee, and you just can’t. The phone was ringing one more time and that was the end of the world for Jennifer Strange.

Charupha Wongwisetsiri

A few days after a bullet from a gang shooting tore into an Angelino Heights home last month, killing a 9-year-old girl, police announced with much fanfare that they had arrested the two gunmen.

But the suspects—Cesar Zamora, 23, and Steven Castanon, 20—are now out of jail and back in their old neighbourhood, to the dismay of residents who held candlelight vigils to memorialise Charupha Wongwisetsiri.

Police released the men without filing charges after determining that Zamora or Castanon fired the shot that killed Charupha in self-defence.

The situation has shaken and angered residents of Angelino Heights, a diverse neighbourhood with commanding views of downtown Los Angeles. The area includes rows of grand Victorian houses restored by television writers and downtown office workers side-by-side with apartments housing working-class families.

According to police, the men were sitting outside an apartment on East Kensington Road when a car pulled up. One man got out, walked onto the apartment property and pulled out a gun. Witnesses said he tried to shoot but his gun apparently jammed.

Zamora and Castanon pulled guns of their own and fired several times. None of the shots hit the gunman, who fled in the car. But one bullet travelled down the street and into Charupha’s home.

Robert Pugsley, a criminal law professor at South-western Law School, said ‘A person has a right of self-defence, and third-party damage, as sad as it may be, is considered an unintended consequence.’

Charupha’s stepfather, Allan Maxwell, who has Parkinson’s disease, said that when he heard the first shot that night he screamed for his wife and stepdaughter to get on the floor in the kitchen, where Charupha was playing and his wife was doing the dishes.

Hrant Dink

When Dink walked through the doorway of his office in downtown Istanbul that morning he didn’t know he would be shot in the head, though he had probably rehearsed his death shaving every morning. Maybe he used the lather brush and a straight razor or maybe he enjoyed the buzz of the electric razor. There would be some music if not in his apartment, then a tune in his head for sure. And I see a family around him too. Yes, his wife Rakel whom he met in the orphanage and their three kids.

My mind somehow returns to the doorway he entered at the moment he was shot, that it was made to be a portal for humans entering and leaving their workdays, never their lives. A doorway is not a casket, nor a rocket ship, nor a car. Dink was killed for thinking out loud. The newspaper he edited, Agos was the fruit of his belief that only dialogue could resolve the bitter memories left by the mass murder of Ottoman Armenians during the First World War. Agos, for all I can guess is Italian slang for some kind of cock. Someone that crows. It seems there is a big silence coming over the world.