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  • How To Like It

    These are the first days of fall. The wind at evening smells of roads still to be traveled, while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns is like an unsettled feeling in the blood, the desire to get in a car and just keep driving. A man and a dog descend their front steps….

  • A Terrible Disappointment

    Koslowski has been, as far back as he can remember, utterly convinced thay he would one day be one of the three best violinists in Europe. But when, at the age of 36, he held a violin in his hands for the first time, he, as he told his friends confidentially, “almost broke out in…

  • Freak

    For Byron Burford A child is born with a third eye smack in the middle of his forehead. It's not worth much. He can't see with it, can't ogle with it, he can only blink with it. But this is good enough to get him a job in a freak show so he spends his…

  • The Call

    In religion class we argued about the weather in heaven. Was it always sunny? or did it rain once a century for contrast? I said perfect meant perfect— sky would always be cloudless, the sun at meridian, shining evenly through translucent saints, who, like a stained glass dome, would project their colors— martyr red, hermit…

  • None Other

    Matthew 27.50,51 What can still bleed is not yet food. In the ninth hour Jesus howled and his wounds' crusts were opened. Blood repainted its dried trails. He felt the scourge's language on his back burn for interpretation, final insight, some emphatic look into the memoirs of the Cruel, the Other. But none came. His…

  • A Replica of the Parthenon

    One of my presents, one Christmas, was a Golden Treasury of Archaeology, a book almost too big for my hands, its cover illustrated with masks from Sumer and a terraced ziggurat. The book's heaviness suggested it contained a secret weight: I stared into it, sure that some subtext buried like foundations would come clear. Heinrich…

  • Between Talcy and Mer

    Here 40 years ago on moonless nights pilots cut their engines and Allies parachuted down. I know from movies the farmer's lantern, the password. In July now, irrigation sprays fan the fields with light, tiny mirrors that rise, arc, shatter the heat-stunned afternoon. Along the unswerving road someone has planted roses—for miles, alternate sides the…