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Inspired by “The Cape.” In the wind of the beach, I climbed into the gorilla.  Its skin hung down like an immense human cape.                –Ben Crowley The Ape  My father always knocked on my door. ‘Perchance, the ape is in?’ He opened my door and helped me into theContinue Reading

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My father was attacked by an unidentified animal. It concentrated on his eyes and neck. He is horrible to look at. He has become an angry threat because of his deformity. When people look, he looks back. When people ask, he follows them into the store and harasses them untilContinue Reading

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Our town’s favorite men were the men in blue jumpsuits who walked into the forest then down into the collider. The collider was a good way’s underground. It went under the forest, then under our town. We prayed for life to our collider, on our knees beside our beds. OurContinue Reading

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He had a double-name where you couldn’t get away with saying one or the other, you had to say both. It was hard to remember. It was “Asher Pembroke” or “Antonio Pope,” or something. But I knew it was Anderson Percy. The boy himself could never spell it. Instead, everybodyContinue Reading

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The night of a storm, a duck banged into the window. That’s Quackers, my daughter said. Rain fell onto the window. Branches tapped the walls. I came to the window. There was the duck in the mud on its back. It did not move like a duck, but like meatContinue Reading

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God put His hand into the earth and pulled out the sea. God put His birds in the trees and his cows in the fields. God put Lacy into a small blue house and a tall green tree, and across from it all He put THE KNIFE.  THE KNIFE crouchedContinue Reading

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There is a wall made of muscle.It is as if there were a shoulder pressing into a leg, wrappedunder a pair of arms, and a back bent in many segments. It istwenty feet tall.If one takes a flashlight under the crease of two long musclesnear the ground, one sees theContinue Reading

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There is a well with the voice of an older man. No one is surehow long he’s been in there.I’m stuck down here, he says.A pair of boys find him in the woods. They are the first in adozen years.Does he crawl out at night? Does he crawl around likeContinue Reading

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There was an old woman made of rags who lived under thesink.She threatened everybody.Get your filthy hands off me!The sink was worse.He loved cigars. And he was a racist.He spit at people. He kicked at people.He was not really a sink but an old man bent to look like aContinue Reading