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Presumptions

So we were near the end of two and a half hours of long-distance conversation, an eternal friend and I, and we were finally getting around to the good stuff: the war between the sexes.

For You

I did my job. I picked her up when her mother threw her away, I handed her over to the shrink when the time came. I did my job. I’m the stepmother, not abnormally wicked.

Obsessions

Typographic niceties, OxyGenesis, polo shirts

Prisons (All Kinds)

A subway ride, a military prison, a 1950s chain gang

Skin-Bearing Animal

Many days Ann took the coat out of the front closet, placed it over her arm and stroked the white fur. She imagined herself standing at the North Pole surrounded by clean white snow as far as the eye could see in all directions, snow sifting from the colorful flickering sky and falling softly around her in the antiseptic cold, falling and collecting smooth and without footprint to the horizon. In the frozen wastes of her imagination, under the aurora borealis of her wounded central nervous system, she could achieve numbness.

The Tall One

He rolls the flower cart down the sidewalk, and I watch him through the window. Six days a week he goes by with his cart of flowers. He comes by just before visiting hours and stays until all the visitors have gone into the hospital.

The Man In The Control Booth

Wycke, I knew, had thought of his eyes as prisms, capable of seeing many points of view at once. They sat in deep dark sockets, alert, cautious, and ever vulnerable, like two small animals uneasy in their burrows.

Descent Into Brotherland

Now I’ve visited okie in the brig before, I’ve visited okie in the psychiatric wards, and I’ve visited okie in the oklahoma jail, and I’ve talked to the lawyers and jail wardens and policemen and psychiatric boards and judges. So I’m only a little bit nervous about talking to this va psychiatrist about okie’s va check which hasn’t been coming for the right amount of disability since he got out of jail.

Solitude

Compost piles, 1500 acres of uninhabited mountaintop land, the jazz of the tree frogs

Understanding Pain

(Part One)

How can pain be minimized? The general rule is: Be agreeable or go away.