Tales of Greed & Wishful Thinking — Kim Ekemar

Eight short stories that has greed and wishful thinking in common …The Gift of a Golden Wish; USA/The world, in the 1930sWouldn't you too be game if you received the unexpected gift of getting everything you desired? Then again, what if this delightful gift turns out to be a challenge too great to handle? This is a dream about attaining everything imaginable.The Puppeteer; The World, 2023 – 2028Making the world a better place may look easy if you are the richest man in history. But even the richest man can be trapped by human greed and become the victim of his own device.Mad Captain Boccaccio and the Ship in the Desert; The Middle East, in the eighteenth centuryExtra! Extra! Rumours of a ship stranded in a desert are flying, and men come from all over the world to confirm their versions of an elusive story. After a telling night of speculation the truth unexpectedly dawns on the participants. This is a satire about how news is handled by the media.Bargaining Chips; Spain – Papua New Guinea; 1932What can a man do when he covets something beyond his reach? His last resort is to trade the jewel among his possessions – his wife. A story that exposes the simultaneous bargaining going on in two distinct societies which, despite all, are not that different when it comes to getting what you want.The Prospects of a Secure Investment; The United States, 1993-1995Small fry and big fish – it's all a matter of size and confidence in a game where the participants play only for their own advantage. A con man is trapped by his own device, as the victim he wants to set up is in fact manipulating him. When things turn in his favour, he suddenly perceives an opportunity resulting from his previous misfortune – both for riches and revenge.The Grapes of Greed; France; 1999A widowed watchmaker reaching his retirement age decides to use his lifetime savings to purchase a vineyard, with the aspiration of becoming a renowned winemaker. Yet he is tempted to reap the fruits of his investment quickly, rather than using his head for some sobering thoughts about why everything is handed to him on a platter.Greener Grass; Switzerland/Panama, 1992A Swiss bank clerk decides his safe world is too suffocating for his own good and envisions greener pasture somewhere else. He eventually finds it at the end of the world, but not the way he had imagined. Money isn’t everything, but it’s what a lot of people set their sights on in life. Bank transactions are at the heart of this story.In the Eyes of Blind Love; Central Asia, more than a thousand years agoThose in love only see what they want to see, and their hearts obscure the rest. They become the game of their own desire and their passion challenges their reason. A tale out of an ancient Arabian storybook, where the storytelling moves a heart of stone to see that there is more to love than meets the eye.