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i beg to be built again
“i wonder what it’s like to have a body that doesn’t feel like an afterthought hacked together with whatever spare parts god could find as he ran out of time to get me down to earth.”
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Ache
“Tom walks to the window. He stares out of it for a moment—at the trees, the light, the coffee shop across the street, what Mona must see when she sits and writes. He wonders briefly if she thinks of what she’s looking at, or if her mind is always elsewhere, crafting a story.”
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Once Upon a Time, There Was a Mountain – Pt 1: The Butterfly
‘“Tell me a story,” the little monk piped up. “Ma always told me a story before bed.” The old monk gave him the simplest one he knew, which was also the only one he knew.’
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A Death in Palermo
“We became a little acquainted over spleen sandwiches and arancini bought from street vendors. We ate on a city bench in the Port of Palermo watching the sun sink below the Mediterranean and speedboats return to the shore. Wasn’t this the life?”
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Kitty
“Penny had now reached the agent. She meowed. He didn’t look down. She meowed again. He said hi, but nothing more. He must not have children, Jess thought. Then, channeling David, she amended: He’s probably had a long day.”
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Sea Lion Caves
“Every day, people lived and were happy in the aftermath of their mistakes. Eli made plenty of mistakes, lived, and was happy. Danny was careful and made none.”
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Battle of the Sexes
“Eleven was a liberating age because I had no hesitancy. My world was folk rock and grasslands, it was as large as Jackie, and I never questioned those bounds.”
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Le départe
“The sun is thrashing against the windows now. Your departure has me fixing myself a tomb.”
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Proof of Life
“Since then, I’ve begun to feel slightly disturbed, certainly more so than I used to, when these flashes of the outside world get through the gates. An antenna had sprouted out of my skull, sending surges of electricity through my nerves whenever it detected an aberration.”
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I Let Myself Fall
“They will dig at our bones as we did the dinosaurs’. And when they find yours and my bones twisted up in each other, they will create a great creature out of us.”
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Cherry
“Without telling her mother, Antonia bought her first Summer Fridays after a tanless summer spent marinating in a boardwalk pizza shop with dough-crusted fingernails and a horrendous lime green apron, getting tipped in pennies and the occasional seashell.”
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Chats
“Suppose Father had gone to heaven. Wasn’t he born there, then, again? Every birth, thus, was a death. A death from nothingness.”