Parthian Books

one believes a seed will become a flower until they see it bloom.

No one believes a seed will become a flower until they see it bloom. Some people will need to see it happen a hundred times and even then, they’ll have their doubts.

I, Ġ użeppi Marija Mifsud from Valletta, son of Pawla and Salvu, proletarian and committed Socialist although I have never read the red books (because those are blacklisted by our Mother the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church and because I don’t have a head for difficult, evil books, though I do know how to read a little), soldier of the Second World War assigned to the anti-aircraft cannon to defend my homeland from the air assaults of the fascist Italian bastards and the Nazi pigs, risking my life for my homeland, for the family entrusted to my care by the grace of God, with tattoos on my arm because I’m a proletarian soldier – a corporal at first, then a sergeant in the King’s Own Malta Regiment and the Royal Malta Artillery in Bigi and Tignè – my skin blistered by white-hot steel, toiling as I had always done since childhood after my mother was widowed for the second time, running about the streets wearing only one shoe in order to make the pair last longer, taking on whatever jobs I could find to support my mother and my younger siblings and