“See this knife? Maybe I’m going to stab you,” Sylvia’s mother said as she set the table for dinner. Then her mother swallowed a whole bottle of pills and the ambulance took her upstate to the mental hospital. They called it The Nervous Breakdown.
Sylvia’s father kept her home from school and drove them in the ancient Studebaker to visit Mom. He swore at the other drivers, words Sylvia had never heard before. “That guy’s tailgating me,” he hissed and stomped on the brakes in the middle of the freeway.
The hospital looked like a castle with patients calling to her in witchy voices, “Come here, little girl, come on.” Her father got her mother and they walked on brittle leaves golden, deep orange, red. They sat at an empty picnic table. …
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I saw Sibyl with my own two eyes, and when I said to her, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to forget.”
I want everything that makes me different from the half-remembered snapshots in the attic stripped from my bones. I want to be born old and die a baby, as I forget, day by day, my entire life. I want the coroner to hold my hand. I want to ask a question and be amazed by the answer. That is what she meant.…
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Even the cats were skittish. They normally couldn’t be bothered with whatever was going on in the house, where they looked down upon their owners, or so it seemed to Claire. Now they watched Claire and her mother more carefully and started at the slightest noise.
Claire sensed that there was something amiss. She was only twelve, and sometimes didn’t think she knew enough to trust her suspicions.
Tick, she thought. A mark in the notebook in her head.…
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The first few seconds were always the best. Before consciousness fully returned and he remembered where he was. The Caged Man couldn’t say how many times he’d awoken to see the cold black bars, water bottle and bucket. It had to be over five hundred. When he’d first arrived, he had kept a careful count. Then one morning he realised that he’d forgotten the number. It was probably better that way. Time was relative and it was heavy enough without needing to remind himself of how long he’d already been there. Sometimes it got to him, the boredom. On those days he would bang his head against the bars and scream at the dim room beyond until he felt faint and collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut.…
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Lin heard it takes two minutes and she counts the time in imperfections.
A chip in the paint above her single long dorm-issued bed. A tear in the cardboard cover of her college-lined notebook. A pinprick of a pimple on the inside of her pale upper thigh. The knowledge that she still hasn’t read the first three parts of Oedipus at Colonus, a discussion of which will be held in her Classics class three hours from now. Three hours. 180 minutes. 10800 seconds. 90 sets of two minutes. A lifetime of time.…
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A frail old man treks into the hamlet, his filthy, grotesque rags covering only a miniscule portion of his body. His long hair protrudes beneath his knees, and a scent similar to that of a skunk emanates from the fragments of his crude clothing. The flesh of this man is reduced to the outlandish outlines of bones.
Upon his entrance the hamlet morphs into pure silence, the sun illuminating the various wrinkles dwelling upon his withered brown skin. The villagers evacuate to avoid his presence. Perhaps the villagers view him like a wild beast, a presence of gut-ripping fear, a monstrosity. Or perhaps the villagers view him like a fungus, a contagion of disgust and malaise.…
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The awning over the table has a hole in it; a tear that is the precise shape of nothing. Absolutely nothing the woman can think of would fit into that space. It is mid-morning, but the moon is out, a shadow-skull in the hot and brittle day. She has never seen a sky less blue.
Across from the woman sits another woman, the friend of the first woman. The friend is talking; words are climbing out of her mouth like ugly little men. The woman nods along. Ugly creatures climb out of her own mouth in response. The ugly things sit on the table. They kick off their ugly shoes. Wiggle their ugly toes. The woman looks away. She wishes there were something she wanted. Expensive sunglasses, social justice, a cheeseburger, a child… anything really.…
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