Short Stories by Elena Suprema

She was twenty-something, sitting in a stranger's car near the Israeli border, when he pulled out a gun. For the first time in her life, she had to count reasons not to die right there. She found two: she hadn't seen Jerusalem yet, and it didn't seem fair to end in Jordan.

Ten years later, she came back.

This time she found something worse than danger: a prison cell in the Jordanian desert, two months with women from Ethiopia, the Philippines, Ukraine — and a question she couldn't answer: How did I even get here?

Twenty stories. Twenty moments when everything could have gone differently. A Bedouin insists a red cup is blue. A man named Dracula disappears after stealing thousands. A shepherd boy asks for a cigarette. A surf instructor asks: "How long are you going to allow your past to influence your present?"

For anyone who's ever felt lost, afraid, or certain that danger happens to other people.