Under the blankets she shivers like she’s out in the snowstorm, not curled safe in our bed with the lights out. I close the door behind me, but I don’t move to warm her. She’s piled those blankets so high tonight, so high and so heavy. The heat’s turned way up in here. Outside, the snow falls for real, thick sheets of it tumbling from clouds that block the moonlight. A few stars shine through, though. Just enough light to see her by.
“Allie?” The pillow turns her voice to a bare murmur, like the voice she uses when I’m there beside her, our hands and hair twined together, one blanket sheltering us both. Like the voice I spoke with when I started school, mumbling at my shoes, before her kindness opened me up.…
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My father was an old man. Seventy-seven years he had lived on this planet. One day he complained to me of a headache. It seemed mild at first, but toward nightfall he was massaging his temples, his face wreathed in discomfort. By the next day it had morphed into a meaty migraine, and he told me he heard rustlings in his ears. Clinkings and tinklings. In the evening my poor old pops spoke of whisperings. He said they came from inside his head, and that the voice was a young girl’s.
On the third day, my father was unable to get out of bed. Every time he tried to stand, he fell to the floor, head-first – as if something in there was too heavy, was pulling him down.…
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A warm wind blowing in from the west made the exposed hairs of my legs and forearms sway and move. High in the sky the sun’s heat caused me to stir and slowly wake. My eyes opened and carefully focused on some blades of grass as I followed a small ladybug until she flew away. I was awake now, and fully aware of where I was. I was on top of my favorite hillside, overlooking a stream that ran to a lake a few miles north. What I was not aware of, was who was with me.
I was laying on my side, my left arm being used as a pillow for a girl I didn’t know, my right arm wrapped around her slender figure. Her hair blew softly with the wind and tickled my nose, bringing with it a beautiful smell I had never experienced.…
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When I graduated high school I figured I’d spent enough time sitting at a desk. I thought about everything I’d learned in school and out, and figured that my most salable skill was painting houses. I was living in L.A., which made house painting possible year-round, unlike Michigan, where one of my cousins lived, where winter shuts down the world.
I got a truck, a ladder, brushes, got cards printed, gave them to my friends’ parents. Word- of-mouth took care of the rest. Some friends came back for holidays and said: You’re smart. You could have made something of yourself. But every day I renew the world. I take old surfaces and refresh them, put gladness in the hearts of homeowners and neighbors and even people just driving down the street.…
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She lived in the third floor apartment of a very tall and narrow brownstone at the south end of the District. A spindly tree of indeterminable age sprawled skyward and cast a dark and cool shadow across the building, its branches and leaves reflected in her window, looking so much cooler than the summer night sky it was mirroring.
A long and wide cement staircase tumbled down from double white doors, curving for the last five steps that widened as they reached the sidewalk. A cast iron railing provided guidance and comfort and a feeling of security.
He had been out for a walk that first July evening, clearing his head from something he’d been trying to write, failing miserably, the sickness of the silence digging deeper into him than ever before.…
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All to him was a morass, a hurly-burly intertwining of decomposition and formation, of crumbling and construction, the eternal transformation of space at every moment. Wherever he looked he saw decline and ascent, the rise and fall of seas past the farthest horizons. Cities crumbled, elsewhere cities rose; into the pits was gravel poured to staunch the demise by being a new ground for new birth, which soon would grey and become mulch.
“What is the purpose of life?”
“According to the Existentialists there is no inherent meaning to the universe except what one gives to it.”
– Joel Netsky …
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She looked at the six shots lined up before her. They stared her down. One, two, three, four, five and six. All vodka. All full to the top and waiting. A lemon-flavored Gatorade stood at the end, the ugly duckling of the bunch.
She had heard that a fetus less than twelve weeks old would not survive six shots of alcohol. It was how all those sorority girls had gone to keggers and fraternity hookups every weekend and rarely taken home a little linebacker. It was just too much for something that fragile. Something that new and pure. It didn’t matter what poison she picked, any one would do the job. She refused to hear the term “aborted” in her head.
She didn’t know if it was twelve weeks.…
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