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f148efd
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We met every morning, still bearded with toast crumbs from our continental breakfasts.
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Karen Russell |
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5893917
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He tried to scrub children's vomit from the webbing of the Tongue in a way that suggested deep reservoirs of genius.
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Karen Russell |
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f45775c
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But her favorite is the Houdini fantasy. Big Red disagrees with his biographers, who say that he was driven by his longing to shuck off this mortal coil. She knows that he was all the time just searching for a box that could hold him.
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the-city-of-shells
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Karen Russell |
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af7f365
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On her last visit, the girl stole one of his family photographs right out of the frame. He thinks this means she is starting to care about him, too. Now whenever he looks at the empty frame, Sawtooth is moved to tears. He has to stare straight up at the ceiling, a loophole that prevents fluid from falling out of the eyes, thus saving a man the embarrassment of crying like a damn fool infant.
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out-to-sea
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Karen Russell |
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706df63
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Sawtooth slumps into his deck chair and stares up at the sky. It's a drunken sky, the stars hiccupping light. Great gusty clouds go spinning past the moon. The bright planets feel like pinpricks to Sawtooth's old eyes.
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out-to-sea
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Karen Russell |
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5454c5e
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The whistle dropped from the branch's spindly fingers like a black cocoon, a pendulum of secret music; the wind pushed sound soundlessly around.
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Karen Russell |
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43725d5
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I see nobody on the road," said Alice. "I only wish that I had such eyes," the King remarked in a fretful tone. "To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!" --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass"
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Karen Russell |
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4cb7a8b
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We know that Rangi can at least mutter because Digger Gibson says he used to talk to the bear. In his group home for orphaned Moa boys, Rangi had a pet cinnamon bear. I saw her once. She was just a wet-nosed cub, a cuff of pure white around her neck. Rangi found her on the banks of the Waitiki River and walked her around on a leash. He filed her claws and fed her tiny, smelly fishes. They shot her the day his new father, Digger, came to pic..
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occurrence-00-422
karen-russell
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Karen Russell |
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7c43abd
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It's unclear whether Brauser was trying to hit Franz Josef or Rangi. I hope it was the former. There's one difference between a bully and a hero, I guess: good aim.
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occurrence-00-422
karen-russell
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Karen Russell |
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7706d07
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The krill are in a rebuilding year. The krill are always in a rebuilding year. Every year the whole franchise of 60,000,000,000 krill gets eaten. Team Whale sucks Team Krill into the primordial combs of its baleen plates at twenty-eight knots. We've got a decent offense but we've got a pretty dismal record on defense. But this is going to be our season. With all your might, try to believe that.
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Karen Russell |
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a2c0481
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There is a rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Omaru's saw. My father--my real father--is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mother coughs and cleans phantom juices off her silver with a cloth doily. My sisters clench their knives.
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fathers
family
sisters
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Karen Russell |
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b8a6ec7
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People are symptoms of dreams
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Karen Russell |
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1c118eb
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Granana lives on the other side of the island. She's eighty-four, I'm twelve, and Wallow's fourteen, so it's a little ambiguous as to who's babysitting whom.
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karen-russell
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Karen Russell |
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de18760
|
A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
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Karen Russell |
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ebcd09d
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but I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water.
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Karen Russell |
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6c9576d
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Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.
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future
parenthood
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Karen Russell |
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a9f84fe
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I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. But until we are old ladies--a cypress age, a Sawtooth age--I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love."
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loneliness
loss
love
sisters
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Karen Russell |
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07fbd03
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Help!" she screams to a sky full of crows. "He's not actually from Europe!"
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Karen Russell |
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4ef2fdc
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Don't look back, you asshole! he thought. Good advice, from Orpheus to Lot.
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Karen Russell |
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398a0c1
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We stare at each other pop-eyed over the burlap sack and laugh as if we're afraid to stop. Somebody needs to say the magical, abracadabrical words that will turn tonight's crime into a joke. Marta has buttoned her wet sweater up to her neck. Petey's vanished. Now Raffy swirls the flashlights with true panic. Our joke keeps hatching and waddling forward in a snaky black procession, growing longer and less funny by the second, and this time n..
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Karen Russell |
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5b2adc2
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Who is going to pay a day's wage to slide down a damn tongue?" -- The Chief, Swamplandia"
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Karen Russell |
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46b298f
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This is it, the geographical limit of how far I'll go for Ossie. We are learning longitude and latitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning precision.
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Karen Russell |
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030403a
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We clacked skeletons -- to call it an embrace would misrepresent the violence of our first collision.
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Karen Russell |
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a4a732d
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March 1. DEAR BABY: I like the way you turn in half circles on the mattress, like a senile clock.
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Karen Russell |
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a3fbd27
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Words, I guess, are her more durable artifacts.
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Karen Russell |
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345bcbb
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I had an ear for languages, and I could read before I could adequately wash myself. I probably could have vied with Jeanette for the number one spot, but I'd seen what happened if you gave in to your natural aptitudes. This wasn't like the woods, where you had to be your fastest and your strongest and your bravest self. Different sorts of calculations were required to survive at the home.
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st-lucys-home
karen-russell
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Karen Russell |
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e9c3fd3
|
There are twenty-two stalls in the Barn. Eleven of the stabled horses are, as far as Rutherford can ascertain, former presidents of the United States of America. The other stalls are occupied by regular horses, who give the presidents suspicious, sidelong looks.
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Karen Russell |
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4ed319c
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I needed a darkness that would have killed the others. And they needed me to keep it a secret from them.
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Karen Russell |
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0da6d59
|
Our mother, in several beautiful ways, may have been a little crazy. For example: who dries their clothing with a hurricane coming? Like Ossie, Mom got distracted easily. It was seventy-thirty odds whether she would remember a conversation with you. Her moods could do sudden plummets, and she'd have to "take a rest" in the house, but she'd always emerge from these spells with a smile for us."
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Karen Russell |
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0c1b0eb
|
His words hung around, too, leaving their brain stain on the air.
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Karen Russell |
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df0a025
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Even if she'd [Ossie] gotten away from him [her ghost fiance] the prognostications were grim--alligators with unusual pigmentation can't camouflage themselves in the dust-and-olive palette of the swamp. Their skin is spotlit for predators. That's why you don't see albino Seths [Ava's pet name for alligators] in the wild. Once an alligator reaches a size of four feet its only real predator is man.
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Karen Russell |
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7dd86fc
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Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:b lack, gray: black. In the distance, a knot of twisted trees flashes like cerebral circuitry.
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Karen Russell |
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4d3d8d8
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For the first time, I feel just as sorry for my ma as for my dad. Everybody wants to go home, and no one can agree on where that is anymore.
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Karen Russell |
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ff9327d
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What a stupid innovation! Skate blades. Indoor lakes. It had a perverse, fairy-tale logic, I thought, tying knives to your feet and carving out over frozen water.
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Karen Russell |
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b0f928c
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I pace along the edge of the marsh, too afraid to follow her, not for the first time. This is it, this is the geographical limit of how far I'll go for Ossie. We are learning latitude and longitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning precision.
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Karen Russell |
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bdae3b2
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When you are a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.
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Karen Russell |
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ff72712
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Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn't you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, "sleep for all"--who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness."
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Karen Russell |
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fa9abf8
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The past, with its monstrous depth and span, reached toward him, demanding an understanding that he simply could not give it. His mind was too young and too narrow to withstand the onrush of her life.
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love
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Karen Russell |
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7b0e61d
|
America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.
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Karen Russell |
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3e5b7bc
|
Stars slid away like rain, she was gone so long.
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Karen Russell |
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63ef814
|
You can always put balsamic vinaigrette on salted meat and sort of pretend it's a salad.
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Karen Russell |
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d0a661a
|
Nal had begun to sense that his life had jumped the rails--and then right at his nadir, he'd agreed to an "avant" haircut performed by Cousin Steve."
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Karen Russell |
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7f93522
|
As a kid I heard the word malignancy as "Malig-Nancy" like an evil woman's name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her first symptoms for a pregnancy, and so I still pictured the Malig-Nancy as a baby, a tiny, eyeless fist of a sister, killing her."
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loss
sorrow
death
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Karen Russell |
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45975a0
|
But in fact I was like Ossie, in this one regard: I was consumed by a helpless, often furious love for a ghost. Every rock on the island, every swaying tree branch or dirty dish in our house was like a word in a a sentence that I could read about my mother. All objects and events on our island, every single thing that you could see with your eyes, were like clues that I could use to reinvent her: would our mom love this thing, would she hat..
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Karen Russell |