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Matthew Vollmer is the author of Future Missionaries of America, a collection of stories, and is the coeditor, with David Shields, of the forthcoming book Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.
For many years — the majority of my life, in fact — acknowledging death’s inevitability exerted little psychological pressure on me. I had no fear of passing, as they say, from this world into the next, or, assuming no next world exists, simply entering oblivion.
December 2018I believed, even as a child, that I was being raised up in the right way to live. My family attended the local Seventh-Day Adventist church every Saturday. I sang songs about David and Goliath, and I belted out that I was “too young to march in the infantry” or to “ride in the cavalry” or to “shoot the artillery,” but not too young to serve “in the Lord’s army.”
October 2013My grandmother always said that if she ever lost her mind, I should put a pillow over her head — meaning she wanted me to press a pillow against her face until she suffocated, thus sparing her whatever indignities she imagined people who lost their minds were forced to endure.
July 2012Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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