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Cold Comfort

Cold Comfort

This is the third year that she has haunted me. She is pale and slightly shimmery, as if brushed with frost, but her cheeks are stained with the soft pink of little girls her age. She trails behind the other children as they jam their feet into snow boots and search...

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Party in the O.R.

Party in the O.R.

Today is my double mastectomy. Today is also my birthday. As he numbs me, the anesthesiologist wears a pink pointed hat, the string, thin as a Tuohy needle, stretched tight under his chin. Nurses patter around the room, prepping the procedure and blowing sound makers...

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Be Prepared

Be Prepared

A baby grand piano appeared after Billie moved in with her son. Fourth-rate elegance. Plywood garbage. The stroke took away her walking bass. Billie couldn't trust her left hand to play the blues, even after two years of physical therapy. Drinking a glass of water was...

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Hair, Teeth

Hair, Teeth

They came to town, one riding a lawnmower, the other carrying a leaf blower, their hair shorn tight and crisp like hedges. And their teeth: white, too white, so white they were blue. Flashed those teeth at everyone they passed as they wandered around our town. When...

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Not Interested

Not Interested

I’m not interested, she said, in restless craving, space-time music, outside combining elements. Images only, she said, with a shake of white hair. Minutes later—on time, she said—life, non-human, began to unravel. The Russian beside her—brave, grassy, invasive—was...

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Day Trader

Day Trader

You’re good at selling words. Every morning you go to the market with the other girls and offer up a word or two to the man on the stall. By the time you leave you have a pocket full of money, enough to buy food to last a week for you and momma. Momma doesn’t like you...

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A Too Small Room

A Too Small Room

Like a Grimms’ fairy tale transported to Japan, “A Too Small Room” proceeds through a world whose houses, forests, and marketplaces are elementary, even quintessential, but make up only half its substance, since the space in which it exists is built every bit as much...

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You Will Do This

You Will Do This

She will look tired. He will look bored. They will sit on the edge of their bed, close enough to indicate they are still married, far enough apart to indicate how it is going. They will have called you to their bedroom, which will be immediately weird. Your parents...

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