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Amid the usual smell of sour milk at the Stratford dump, a burning odor. The rusty flatbed rolls off the scale, turns for the graveyard of refrigerators. Robert holds up his hand to the next truck, extends his neck and sniffs. “You smell that?” he says. It has not rained in weeks.
The driver says, “Something burning?”
“Sure hope it isn’t here,” says Robert, stepping off the platform outside the trailer and rushing a few yards through the dirt to where he can survey more of the place. “I don’t see any smoke.” He radios to the crew: Erik over in metals, Mary up at freon, Juan in general, Steve in recycle, Donna in brush. “You guys smell that?”
Mary says, “Fire?”…
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The day before the funeral, Nathan’s dad came by to pick me up. He wanted me to spend some time with their family. On the ride over to their house, he commented on the changing colors of the leaves. “The trees are vibrant this year,” he said. I merely nodded my head, afraid if I opened my mouth the truth would come gushing out. The car would be flooded with my honesty, my tears, my shame. That I was at a party while Nathan was dying. I was having a great time dancing, bumping into strangers with a red solo cup in my hand, sloshing beer on the floor. If he knew I was drunk while his son was newly dead, he would hate me.
When I was in high school, I wanted to meet Deaf kids my age so I could improve my signing skills.…
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You walk the beach at Nazaré
and carry for your granddaughters
the shells and pebbles they’ve discovered –
each a treasure – until, hands full,
the girls must now decide again
which to save and which to return.
Walking, stooping, passing judgment,
they assay each piece, then keep
or toss or simply leave it in the sand.
For you, time’s the treasure – moments
measured by these pebbles and shells.
Climbing closer all the while,
massive waves break, run,
and tease the girls’ feet with foam.
This tide keeps an ancient time –
past without beginning, future
without end, indifferent to hands
full of precious moments, gifts
from these children just for you,
grandparents treasuring time.
– Douglas Twells…
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He started by repairing the crack in the ceiling. It had appeared the month after he left, and I slept under it for the eleven months that followed. Now that he was home, though, the crack seemed to be growing, and I worried the ceiling was going to cave in on us in the middle of the night.
I helped him slide our bed from the center of the room, watched as he carried a bucket of spackle up a step ladder and began to smear it into the fissure. As he worked, the muscles in his face relaxed. He seemed to like doing it, even as I became bored watching. I left him to it and went to the kitchen for a soda.
Later, as I cut carrots for a chicken potpie, he came into the kitchen, wiping his speckled hands on a rag.…
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“Hey, mom. I thought you did nudes.” My 23-year-old son called from the basement. I dried my hands on my terry-cloth apron as I descended the stairs.
Alan was leaning over a carton of oil paintings. My eyes caught the word basement spelled `bastment’ by the van packers. I smiled with remembrance of my desire, at the time, to fix the word. The yellowed cloth that had covered the old carton was carelessly pushed on the concrete. The box bottom was moist and showed mildew.
“Didn’t you do nudes once?” I nodded my head and mentioned I’d left them at the Milwaukee airport. My son, now in medical school, had squeezed in oil painting classes while maintaining pre-med courses and grades. How could I save these…he pulled out two landscapes…and not nudes!…
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In those days, as the summer sun went down, our parents would gather on the half circle of benches in front of building 3 for an evening of gossip and laughter, chess and card games, and even though it was prohibited by the management office, maybe a cold beer or two. Thick curlicues of blue-gray cigarette smoke wafted under the conical sphere of a street lamp above the row of concrete checkerboard tables. Doo-wop oldies echoed from transistor radios. Kids played tag, or hide ‘n seek, or some other game that involved running and screaming, and occasionally crying because someone accidentally got hurt.
For a while, the best hide ‘n seek location was under the first bench, right behind Freddy’s father, Big Lou. Lou was a six foot six, two hundred and seventy-pound avalanche of a man with ham shank forearms and voice projection like a tuba. …
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For my brother, one of the old stock who plays guitar and sings
What will happen when all of the real men are gone? The ones who can build, install, plumb, lay, and fix all manner of things with their own two hands – a dying breed of the old stock, they say. What will happen when all of the real men are gone? Will no buildings be built, no cars fixed, no oil changed, no lights installed? Everything broken and in disarray? What will happen when all of the real men are gone? When finally all of the hammers grow rusty, the wood rotting from their handles for lack of use. When nails fall from our shelves, and we just sweep them out into the ground for we know not what they’re for or from where they’ve come.…
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