Sweet Disposition
Thoughts have gone wolf again, hunting for reasons in the dark. Suppose we were never supposed to fall into each other’s arms? Made a bone-boat tossed all our memories in— watched it sail. There’s a chance I know nothing and I…
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Before They Were Flesh-Eating Zombies Trying to Take Over the World
[Editor’s Note: Clicking on the number for each footnote in the main body of the text will take you to the relevant note. After reading the footnote, please click on the number to the left of the footnote text to return to the section of the story you were reading.] Winston Hall-Miles Worked as…
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The Invisible Book
Sometimes when I’m reading, I’m distracted by the invisible book underneath the book I’m actually reading and the problem is this: it’s better. It’s like the superball under the couch that your fingertips barely brush: the slightest contact and it’s gone, gliding easily away, because its form is nearly perfect, there, a sphere in the…
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In Minneapolis, My Father
watched a crew wipe the family name from the face of our supper club. The new owners slapped a cartoon moose on the sign out front. If I tell him I love him, either he is holding my little hand while we step across an icy parking lot toward a greasy burger joint or he…
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K Becomes K
I recently went to an appointment with a terrorist I used to know. He lives near me in New York City, and when he wrote me a letter that said Dear Sashi, come and see me, without thinking very much about it, I did. Even when I was a little girl in Sri Lanka, before…
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By Morning, New Mercies
Ellis Howard was sitting on the back porch, oiling the barrel of an old flintlock rifle that he had propped across his knees, when the neighbor girl appeared before him, scabby and slouching, pulling at the hem of a yellow cotton dress, and asked him if he had seen her dog that had run off…
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Pilgrimage
I am not inclined to go off with strangers, yet here I am sitting outside a bar in Miradoux, a village in southwestern France, about to embark on a two-day journey along the Chemin, the Way, with Priscilla, a woman I met just days before. We will walk along a route called Le Puy, which…
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Planet of Fear
Here was my Wednesday ten o’clock: Robert James Coates, according to the file on my desk. But he refused to answer to that name, and at our first meeting, after the guard left us alone, insisted I call him Dog, which naturally I wouldn’t do. “All right, then, whatever, call me D,” he said agreeably,…
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On the Museum
El Negro de Banyoles tugged the hem of his orange loincloth to save Europe from shame. Storm clouds darkened the gallery skylights. Bruegel’s blind man led a parade of blind men into a ditch as a student sketched a copy at her easel. After the war, Vietnamese beat cradles, tools, and kettles from spent artillery…