Quickie: Fiction with a Dash of Reality …

“I was 25, single, on my first overseas tour of duty in Asuncion — a newly minted political officer issuing nonimmigrant visas. I had degrees from Georgetown and Johns Hopkins. I tested at a 4/4 in French! Why, in God’s name, did the State Department make me learn Spanish and bury me in the consular section of this South American backwater?”

From The Roads Are Closing
First Place in the Journal’s 2009 Foreign Service Fiction Contest
By Patricia McArdle
Read the whole story here | July-August 2009 | See pp 18-22