Sometimes a short story grows out of an incident which occurred many years ago. In the case of 'Death by a Thousand Melons' it was the memory of climbing into the back of an old, overloaded truck in Libya which had stopped to give us a lift, and meeting a European girl of my age, eighteen at the time. Girls hitching in North Africa were a pretty unusual occurrence but this one had the huge advantage that she spoke Arabic.
I don't remember talking to her much but onto that bare event one can paste layers of fiction to create a story. When this one won a competition I was quietly satisfied: of the many I had written, it was a story that deserved to win.
The story is available to download here
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