When I used to look out at the Corniche from our apartment in Beirut in the 1980s, I’d see a lot of guns, partly because a makeshift military post had sprung up
Cats Instead of Guns
one night in the field in front of us, and partly because there was a war. People still found away to walk the Corniche for a breath of fresh air from curfews, and a few, a very few, stray dogs milled about too. The military post is now permanent and people still walk on the Corniche for fresh air, but the guns have diminished greatly and there are no stray dogs about. Both the guns and the dogs have been replaced by cats—so many cats that their different shades form the mosaics for the beach rocks, almost like beach blankets made of cats. Sometimes they work as optical illusions, too, as they spring in and out of the rocks, where they camoflauge as good as, if not better than, khaki. I’m not a huge fan of feral cats, but, as long as they don’t want to bite you, they are a lot more amusing than guns.
Alia Yunis is a writer, journalist and filmmaker. She is currently producing and directing “The Golden Harvest,” a feature length documentary about how olive oil has shaped the Mediterranean culture, cuisine and history for 6,000 years, through war and peace. Her debut novel, The Night Counter (Random House) has been critically acclaimed by the Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and several other publications. It was also chosen as a top summer read by the Chicago Tribune and Boston Phoenix. The Boston Globe has called it “wonderfully imaginative…poignant, hilarious.” Alia was born in Chicago and grew up in the U.S., Greece, and the Middle East. She has worked as a filmmaker and journalist in several cities, especially Los Angeles. Her fiction has appeared in several anthologies, including The Robert Olen Butler Best Short Stories collection, and her non-fiction work includes articles for The Los Angeles Times, Saveur, SportsTravel Magazine, and Aramco World. She currently teaches film at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi.
Alia Yunis 
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