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ARF, HE SAID
Growing up my family always had dogs, only one at a time, of course, since we were a modern suburban family, which may be why we had a dog. It clearly wasn’t because they loved dogs, they tolerated them on good days, ignored them the rest of the time and the good days were few…
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IN TRANSIT
Mom died, the text message read, similar words we’ve been hearing too frequently but always leaving us with the same hopelessness. The words my brother, estranged now, estranged then, come to think of it, said two years ago in a quickly left phone message. I thought of confronting him, but when he never answered, I…
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ONE EVE, NO ADAM
They arrive ones and twos accrete dissolve reform, swell the cacophony grows takes on a joyousness as they ebb and flow; the food disappears the wine the laughter draws you in and you want only to circulate but how with shifting nuclei and then the scheduled end and hours later the last slips away and…
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WHAT’S IN A NAME?
He is four, he announces to all gathered at the extended family table that he will be five soon, in January. It is important that we know this just as it is important that he sit next to his cousin, for boys like he should always sit next to cute girls and sisters don’t count,…
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FIRST PERIOD
They stand impatiently in line chattering, giggling, tittering like so many schoolgirls with secrets they promised to keep to their deaths and have to immediately tell a friend. “Did you hear about Letitia?” one says, and goes on to say she shared her journal with several other girls in the eighth grade. It goes on…
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A LEG UP
We agree we must learn the rules, to master the game, practice until the moves are second nature. We have three weeks to do all of this, then Place the game box back on the shelf to be discovered and taken down, opened spread out on the table, impatience controlling. Want to ensure that one…
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SUSIE
What do you say on the loss of a child? We sat in the lounge drinking a vile potion from a hollowed pineapple giggling insanely for no reason. We wandered the tunnels faces painted, clowns in bedlam. We lay together on a mattress on the floor and listened to Aqualung my arms around you both,…
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THE FOG
I speak to my father every week or so our conversations are as long as ever but we are rapidly becoming little more than a skipping record. He mostly recalls my name and the various parts one with the other of us has had rebuilt but even that is quickly slipping into the fog that…
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THE SON
He hangs on the guest room wall, simply framed in black, adjoining his more ornate, Cheshire- cat smiling sister. He isn’t brooding really, there is just a certain needful sadness, as he stares out, imagining how he pictured things would be, how they were supposed to be, realizing here, they never were, never will be,…
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TOMORROW
Tomorrow I will lie to him will tell him when he asks, at least the first ten times he he does, that she is doing fine, that she is a tough old bird, that she’ll outlive us all, that she’s a Taurus, the bull and he will remember the end of their marriage, the Battle…
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an old writer and his words 