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Accident

They dragged him from the car (still screaming, he was later told), but they had to wait for the Jaws of Life for Anabelle, and he kept hearing that — the Jaws of Life, the Jaws of Life — and it didn’t really register what they were talking about; it was that device you see on the news that they use to pry people out of cars, and it usually means death, not life.

Guidelines For Mountain-Lion Safety

I was five years old the first time I saw the total interconnected harmonic clockwork of the cosmos, and it happened again when I was seven or eight, and possibly once more when I was reading the great philosophers and experimenting with hallucinogens in my late teens.

Shoes

Dancing the tango, going barefoot, playing tag in the mud

All Their Riches

My English wasn’t always this good. Once, I stood before an impatient pharmacist, touching my son’s throat and saying, “Sick,” and, “Help.” I stuttered in fear buying a bus pass or a sack of oranges. I set a microwave dinner afire on the stovetop because I couldn’t read the four sentences of instructions.

The Great Bewilderment

Reading “Captin JJC The Feirce”

Wars where feirce at hand. In crimenal v.s. soldier a young boy that hade a dream lived in these pereyod. hes dream that filed his heart is to work with a famous crimenal. He could do well and impress the bandit. The Bandits name was captin JJC the fieirce. The young boy was an orfen. he hade a plan.

World Enough And Time

I’m back in my hometown, staying with my sister Nancy, the hands-down favorite to replace me. For this first week my daughter, Rachel, is away at camp. A trial separation. Then she will come here, and we will both get used to the idea that she will go on living with Nancy after I am gone.

Making It Last

Shared desserts, a summer romance, the last batch of pickled plums

Higher Learning

From his perch on a low bleacher in the college auditorium, Seth watches the girls cluster together, some still in their graduation gowns, hair hanging down their backs or clamped to their scalps. One holds a bouquet of bluish roses. She has thin lips, but her limbs are long and tan. Her friend, thick in the middle, wears a red tube dress that hoists her breasts up, displaying them like jellied eggs on a platter.