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Downstream

His parents placed him on a Greyhound with twenty dollars, a plastic bag full of asparagus from the small garden out back, a satchel containing his meager summer clothes, and a letter. The asparagus he tossed in a trashcan when the bus made its first stop in Pennsylvania. The letter he opened before they’d even…

Whale Watching in Iceland

Scarcely had our break-of-day whale-watching trip on Faxafloi Bay been canceled because of high waves than our house-minding daughter would weigh in with the news her dog, the selfsame stray we took in fifteen years ago, has died. She insists on digging Toto’s grave hard by Oscar’s, there on the crest of the leach field….

Either Or

Death, in the orderly procession of random events on this gradually expiring planet crooked in a negligible arm of a minor galaxy adrift among millions of others bursting apart in the amnion of space, will, said Socrates, be either a dreamless slumber without end or a migration of the soul from one place to another,…

The Sinner

After two years in Europe, fighting in the war, Frederick returned to the family farm outside of Ipswich. It was June of 1945. People commented on how much he’d changed. His eyes, which had once been full of feeling, were now entirely empty of emotion. Looking into them was like staring at a desert or…

Burial

The body is at home in time and space and loves things, how they come and go, and such distances as it might cross or place between the things it loves, and its own touch. But for you, soul, whom the body bred in error like some weird pearl, everything is wrong. Space is stone,…