He fixed his eyes on the small sun. In the distance there were mountains and the sun hovered above the tallest peak, apprehended by only one thin cloud. The orb was yellow and red. The color of Anne Marie’s favorite dress. The man stared at the sun, and stayed staring. He stared until the peripherals of his vision caved into darkness, falling away and into the middle towards the center point: the sun. This was no sunset, when the darkness pulls down over the light. Instead, it started from all sides and crept to the core. Then after the last grains of light slipped down the hole and his vision filled with darkness, there was a white circle left where the sun had been. Then the outlined circle faded too.…
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Magic. You want it to be there forever. It’s like that time when you’re six years old and you find yourself in first grade with your favorite teacher with your favorite book and you’re transported to a different place; that time when you’re lost out on the beach making sandcastles with your monster friends; it’s drinking wine in a temple with your friends on top of a mountain on the other side of the world.
When you find it, you want to wrap yourself in it. This is what love is. You spend Friday nights going out with friends, doing harmless things like drinking in parks or hanging out at your favorite bar. Your job is nothing to brag about, but you’re not the type to brag anyway.…
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I’m writing concerning a case I hope you might review. From your website, I see you offer a Free Initial Consultation to every prospective client. I’m sure it’s customary to conduct these sessions in person, but I hope you’ll be willing to read this e-mail instead. I find it easier to express myself in writing than out loud, especially when it comes to the matter I’m going to tell you about.
The case concerns an alleged Sex Offense, which I see on the site is one of your areas of expertise.
The victim and her attacker were known to each other before the events I’ll describe. In fact, they dated for several months in college before breaking up and going their separate ways.
A few years later, the woman was working at a bookstore when one day the man came in.…
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Our grandparents always found us. For years, my wife and I packed up our possessions and moved to another city. Then they would find us again. They never called asking where we were, and we never called them. Our grandparents were cordial in the beginning, said they just needed proximity. They’d move into the neighborhood or the next sub-division over.
We’d let our guard down, and they would pounce. The arrived always at dinner time, crock pots in hand and wine for the grownups. There was an incident in Madison involving the destruction of our front door and tire marks on the carpet. They were cycle heads, Gram and Gramp, and when they moved they moved light. My wife offered them Brian, our oldest, after they found us somewhere near the place EST became CST.…
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Last year I woke up and didn’t see my brother.
He slept across the room from me, but that morning he wasn’t there. No one knew where he’d gone. Not Mama. Not Papa. Not even the maid who picked up my toys when I wasn’t looking. A lot of people came and looked for him. They looked around the house. They looked in the woods outside. I could see them through the window. They even tried to look in the attic, but there were nails in the door. After a while, we couldn’t find him and gave up.
I didn’t miss him.
He’d been older than me and only talked about girls. He wasn’t any fun.
Besides, now there was no one to split dessert with.…
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When we were seven, Marshall and I would play astronauts and Martians. He was always the astronaut, and I was always the monster. By virtue of being 23 minutes older, and somehow much bigger, he always got to be the good guy, but he never let himself be the winner. He was always going down in a hail of laserfire or jumping on an imaginary bomb to save a bunch of imaginary lives.
I wonder whose life he imaged he was saving in the end.
I was the evil, ugly Martian, doomed to die, if I had been playing with anyone else. Not Marshall. Even though I always won, his incessant martyrdom always made me feel weaker. Already significantly shorter and skinnier, and much less athletic, he found a way to make me feel even more helpless by always being the one to sacrifice himself.…
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How much pain can the human heart endure was more than a rhetorical question for Jill at this point – it was more like how much pain could she endure, or continue to endure, because every day she had to endure it, and endure more of it than the day before, or so it seemed. The times when Anne was lucid were becoming less frequent, but Jill lived for those times, when Anne looked up from the bed with those sparkling brown eyes and remembered who she was. How are you, dear?, she would ask, more concerned for Jill than for herself. Are you getting enough to eat? You look thin as a bird, for Chrissakes. I should cook you something.
Jill always smiled at this, one of the few times she smiled anymore, but it quickly became not so funny.…
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