Check out a few of Kaye's published pieces:

Kaye Linden at The Camel Saloon, Soundings Review, The Bacopa Literary Review, The Raven Chronicles , Expressions (September '08 issue), Breves No Tan Breves, Whispers of the Unseen

A Homeless Legacy

Published in The Raven Chronicles Vol. 14, No. 1: "LEGACIES"

Once upon a world war, there was a young woman whose love for the vast Australian plains created a shock of homesickness that continued down the generations.

One day, daring to leave Australia, uncertain but gallant, she takes a taxi to the port of Sydney, bracing her two little girls against the unknown. She boards a P&O steamer bound for England, hoping to reconnect with lost parents and sisters, searching for the sense of wholeness lost during the war.

"Mummy, I want to stay home," her young daughter cries with wet, weepy eyes, clinging to a teddy bear that has had one too many surgeries. "Why isn't Daddy coming?"

"He will come my dear, later," mother says softly.  But he never does.

Bombarded by hundreds of colored paper ribbons that well meaning bon voyagers toss over passengers on large ships, and crying goodbye to the Australia she will never see again, the young mother clings to worn railings for hours as the ship pulls out into the dark Pacific. 

After six weeks on shifting oceans, vomiting over storm whipped decks, glimpsing catacombs in Rome and trading chocolate for bracelets and ceramic dolls in the Suez, she finally reaches the fog shrouded ports of England. Here she follows clues to those who have disappeared, tracking their names through others' memories, walking through littered streets, and missing Australia. Gathering up her leather bags, two wailing girls, and a squirming kitten collected in an alley, she seeks out her parents. Longing for a home amongst loved ones, she sits ensconced in vintage trains, meandering across Europe to the sandstorms of Egypt and the one sister she has now found. Here, her future becomes her past as she joins other young immigrants who seek their own connections in fragments of lost families, and by joining together, seek to quell their homesickness.

"Community is our legacy," they sing every day as they trudge to the only synagogue still standing despite its crumbling stone walls. Thus they find immunity from homesickness in an unforgiving land where wind beaten and war weary, they eventually transform into living mummies, crippled with pain, lying stiffly on hard beds in Cairo, wondering where the time went.

The very English, Australian daughters of the immigrant mother from Australia reject the world of bored camel drivers who stare with depraved eyes at smooth, young limbs and long, blonde hair, thirsting for the forbidden with no hint of disguise. After one of the daughters is chased through an alley and pounced upon by a man with evil intent, the mother begins to regret her decision to leave Australia but because she has found community, she will not leave.

Tea doesn't taste the same in 1945, in Cairo, where Bushell's tea leaves don't exist, and coffee with cardamom pods curbs any comfort that might come from Australian tea with cream. Believing that the Nile river and the city of Cairo are barren invitations for raising children with hearts, the Australian daughters leave their mother and head for America where safe marriages trade adventure for sanity.

"Don't leave me in this wasteland alone," the mother pleads, even though she knows that in America she will be lost.

"America will scare you. America's too big for you," the girls throw back, giving their mother justification to stay in a familiar place and themselves permission to leave her behind.

The legacy of homesickness planted by their mother forty years earlier in Australia lies neatly dormant for decades in America until the Australian daughters also lie stiffly on hard beds in Miami and Seattle, missing their aging mother and wondering where the time went.

"We should return to Egypt to be with our mother," one daughter says.

"We could bring her here, but she'll have no health insurance," the other replies.

"Best to leave her there and you'll visit once in awhile," a husband interjects where he doesn't belong.

Twisted orange trees fruit for their fortieth year as another afternoon sun looms large over a shaded hammock on a screened Miami patio, mangos dripping overripe sap and lemons perfuming acrid sweetness into the air. The daughters live separate lives, connected only by their disembodied phone voices and occasional jets that shrink the miles. Saddened by the symptoms of homesickness, and spurned by the blueprint created by one mother, their sense of rootlessness heats up again in hardening arteries, fueled by too many margueritas and steaming heat. In one daughter from Australia, the ever-present weed of loneliness finds minute cracks in her shattered emotional armor riveting her attention back to her childhood home.

"I miss blue gums and beaches, empty and clean, stretching for miles, where horses and dogs are welcome. Australia is where I was born. I miss the smell of the Blue mountains, smoky and smelling like tea over a campfire in wide open spaces." The one daughter in Miami telephones the other daughter in Seattle and grieves.

"If you leave, then the circle goes on and on. You'll never find a sense of home, if you keep moving," Seattle replies.

The Miami daughter tries to break free from the original seed of disconnection by saying goodbye to greyhound buses and a thousand generic Wal-Marts in America. As her mother did decades before, she gathers her two young daughters and takes a Qantas flight to Sydney, where no one meets her because no one remembers her. The young woman passes through the long immigration lines, her girls crying and wanting to go home.

"Welcome to Australia," the custom man smiles, one tooth missing, unfamiliar "strine" accent and eyes already on the next person. The woman before her speaks no English and struggles with Cantonese-English while the man behind her struggles with English- Punjabi. Colorful green, saffron and hot pink saris float through the airport like waves of silk. The once bland Australia has changed into an Asian Pacific gourmet delight. Miami daughter is intoxicated by accents and languages, colors and spices, and luggage hauled by families of ten people. These are the lucky ones, connected, free, together. Connected in community.

On the way out of the airport she smiles at the billboard that encourages Australians to visit America. "Disney World Awaits" seduces the future tourist with the white gloved hands of a mousey lady named Minnie. The Miami daughter remembers her mother who left Sydney on a steamship during a war that scattered families like sand grains over a dying world.

Once in the hotel room, bags unpacked on a solitary bed, she looks out on a city that blinks unfamiliar lights, speaks foreign languages fluently, and laughs at the languid English of an American girl. She calls Seattle but gets an answering machine. "We're not home now but if you leave a message ..."

Along the beach, an old man begs for money and she hands him a cheese sandwich that he throws at the sand. The two little girls laugh and splash each other with cold seawater in a city, in a country, a long way from their home. Seeking friendly faces among crowds of strangers, she sips cappuccino on a busy street where a cleaning machine growls past, spraying her with fine mist. She stays at her table and orders more cappuccino surrounded by people drinking only Foster's. Despite international charges, she picks up her cell phone and dials her mother who says," What did you expect? Of course you don't know anyone. You were little when you left. You don't belong there. Go home." 

Home.

She redials her sister in Seattle who says: " Your roots are here with us."

Australian by heritage, Middle Eastern by default and American by choice.