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Fiction
A Child’s Christmas On State Street
Somehow the knowledge of his identity passed through to me in the moment I stood there locked to him. It passed through his knuckles and into my skin. It burned out at me through his eyes.
December 1991Home Free
He’s functional now, of course, a basically normal guy. That’s what gets me — I look at him and marvel at what a ground of pure craziness that normality is built on.
November 1991A Body Of Sound And Light
What is in a body? We see flesh with blood going through, but who knows what it is? I never asked before. All my life I saw a body as just a body, this bit of flesh we’re put inside the day we come alive.
November 1991Reality Fire
Water will not put out a reality fire. Those little red extinguishers are useless. A reality fire will not be tamed. As the eyes move from object to object each bursts into flames and is consumed, gone forever, and no smoke either — for a reality fire will consume so thoroughly that nothing is wasted. No smoke escapes. Never any smoke. From a reality fire there is no smoke.
October 1991The Doctor
On Friday evening, December 31, 1982, corresponding to 15 Teveth, 5743, Hyman Lebele Andower rose from his evening meal, sat on the couch to read his evening paper, and felt a sharp, twisting pain in his genitals.
October 1991Letter From A Mailbag
It was a dare. A dare I gave myself, but still a dare: “I will ride in a mailman’s pouch all day, and write an article about it for The New Yorker.”
September 1991Lady Con
Even with two thick coverlets over the blankets, her pelvic bone pressed like a wooden hanger against my cheek; I was sure it would leave a red mark. She had been eating for nearly two weeks now. How thin could she have been when she was first released?
September 1991Out Of Season
Last week while she was in bed with the first bout of morning sickness, she watched the “Donahue” show. The woman he was interviewing, a fleshy redhead who leaned sensuously toward the camera, had just written The Mistress Book.
September 1991The Nosebleed
When the children were small and woke with fear in the night, they came into our room and stood breathing quietly by the side of the bed, waiting. They never waited on Dan’s side, but always on mine.
August 1991A Kind Of Power
Then, a mist drifted up in front of my eyes. It started gray. It began to burn, to get redder and redder and the words I heard rolling from my lips were like the words my grandpa knew. They were holy words, words of the old prophets. Wanton. Strumpet. Whore. Sister of the serpent, angel of evil, Satan’s bitch, vessel of filth, pestilence of desire, demoness eater of the soul.
July 1991
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