“I’ll call you Tre.”
There’s a little plaque, welded into the base of #273 with its number and a company name. I look up and up at the monstrous pinwheel. I put my hand against its trunk and feel it hum.
Two plus seven is nine plus three is twelve and one plus two is three. Tre. Like the youngest in a line of oil heirs. Only it’s wind power and has no parent. “Hmm.” But a burden. It has a burden, just like the disappointing James or Howard or Colin that can’t even be called his own name because his namesakes live and glower down. I nod at Tre.
I walk back to my car, still running and perched on the gravel shoulder.
***
I often think I’m a piano player but moving words and punctuation around.…
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Once at the county fair a foreigner—a Russian with an elaborately waxed yellow mustache—was selling wooden dolls, cleverly made so that they seemed to be only one doll, pear-shaped and gaily painted, but inside each peasant woman was a similar doll except slightly smaller; and inside her a similar doll; and insider her; and inside her . . . six altogether, the smallest representing a peasant child, a brightly smiling infant.
Nord thought the dolls were the cleverest woodworking he’d seen. He bought one for Peggy, but she didn’t seem to see the cleverness—maybe because, being a woman, she’d never worked wood so therefore couldn’t appreciate the skill such a set of dolls required.
The dolls were kept, one inside the rest, in a cabinet in the parlor.…
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Sonny didn’t go to the bar often, but when he did it was a circus. He was a real character, always had some new thing to showboat about, something he bought or something he had planned. He liked to drink, but the attention, that’s what he lived for, and boy he could get it. There were so many nights like that, where he marched in with a big smile and yelled out something absurd and had the whole place in his palm, but the night you mean is the one with the horse, right? That wasn’t just one night. That stretched on for weeks. But that’s all right if you want to hear it.
I don’t know horses well so I don’t know what kind it was, but before Sonny’s, it was Joey’s. …
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A sad man walks past my house. His hat covers his ears and his scarf covers his mouth, but I can see something of his eyes and I recognize the curve of his spine. I don’t need to see the tears to know that he’s crying.
“Get your shoes on,” Marnie says to me. “You’re going to be late to your appointment.”
In this car, the radio doesn’t work right. Set the stations if you like, but they’ll drift the next day. When I listened to the radio on Sunday, they were playing “The Magnificent Seven” by the Clash. Today, I swear it’s Richard Marx. Richard Marx or Rick Astley. This can’t be the same station.
“When you’re done, wait,” Marnie says to me. “I’m going to be at the store, but I won’t be long.”…
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I was the one who fished Izabella out of the sea.
It was just like her to do something like that, convince me to help her row out for an adventure, then dive too deep and come up too fast. “Beware the Bends,” everyone warned when we registered for diving lessons, but Izabella never listened. She lept before I could act and swam deeper than I could see. Minutes later, her hands splashed atop the water, but her legs hung immobile.
I knew what happened, even before ambulance lights danced across the sand and the official doctor’s verdict. A bubble of air in her spinal cord exploded during her rapid ascent—the Bends.
She couldn’t even think about her paralysis, only the dragon skeleton, the answer to her riddle.…
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Our plans were made in the wake of disaster. We endured two hours on a 27-mile-stretch of stop-and-go roadblocks and hazard-flashing work crew trucks before reaching what we assumed was downtown Miami. The television aerials of chaotic devastation since the storm had been dramatic. But on the ground, the smells, the rotting food in the tropical September heat, the stench of decomposing carcasses of pets, backyard animals, and vegetation was overwhelming, not something film footage could capture.
We had driven eight hours total. The massive hurricane ravaged Miami two weeks prior and four of us, a professor, a realtor, an engineer, and me, a physician decided to volunteer with the cleanup. We had been close friends for twenty years. But now we were just church guys trying to help: Life is for service.…
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The isolated village didn’t appear on any maps. It existed just below the timberline, surrounded by stands of white pine trees. Less than four hundred people lived there and those who did had done so their entire lives. When or how the sundown to sunrise Skeleton Day ritual became a tradition was unknown. But it had taken place every seven years at the Winter Solstice for as long as anyone could remember.
Preparations for the observance involved every man, woman, and child in the village. In the week leading up to Skeleton Day, the men gathered small branches, large tree limbs. They also trimmed logs to be the main poles of the three bonfires they’d construct on the village common. Heavy with frozen sap, the logs had to be trussed up with ropes and dragged by hand across the frozen ground.…
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