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d7ba4d3
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Beverly pushes down and down and down into the muscles under his tattoo to release the knots.
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Karen Russell |
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711be2b
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It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams.
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Karen Russell |
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7dde3a3
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How could you make a mistake when you had one option?
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Karen Russell |
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94058ce
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Rutherford arches his neck toward her outstretched hand. Freckles of light float across his patchy hindquarters. He licks the girl's palm according to a code that he's worked out: - - - -, which means that he is Rutherford Birchard Hayes, the nineteenth president of the United States of America, and that she should alert the local officials. "Ha-ha!" the girl laughs. "That tickles."
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Karen Russell |
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38ae6ce
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The horses have been trying to get hold of the girl's schoolbooks for some time. Every president wants to find out how history regards him.
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Karen Russell |
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237e50f
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Sometimes you are able to keep moving because you are not really yourself anymore. Your entire brain can shrink to one pinhead of cognition, one star in a night.
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Karen Russell |
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e11d3b0
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a definite hostility to being looked at, like a vampire or a vacationing Olsen
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Karen Russell |
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d5795ec
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Turn the lights of please, Ava," she whispered, and I remember her breath hot and rummy on our cheeks. To this day I think of rum as a marine smell; the scent of it on an adult's breath turned the world as small and dark as a boat hold."
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Karen Russell |
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c55e700
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I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none.
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Karen Russell |
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1f7989a
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We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, underblossom smell of the forest.
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Karen Russell |
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681e95d
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It occurred to me that, given the life span of a moth, one kid's twitch must take a year to complete.
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Karen Russell |
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9dc0428
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We didn't talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness.
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Karen Russell |
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2ecabba
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First love, first love," Sean murmured sadly, scratching his bubonic nose. "Who are we to intervene, eh? It will die of natural causes." "Natural causes!" She was thinking that the poor girl had been garroted. Her bright-red hair racing the tail of the noose down her spine. You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you."
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Karen Russell |
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0faab68
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My father has the "settler's scar," a pink star scored into the brown leather of his palm by the handle of the moldboard plow."
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Karen Russell |
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8f35ad8
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The Sticksels have met every Homestead Act requirement save one, its final strangeness, what Pa calls "the wink in the bureaucrats' wall": a glass window."
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Karen Russell |
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f8272dd
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My mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her.
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Karen Russell |
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bea2536
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The body can be a marvel of resiliency, a cactus when it comes to sleep - capable of surviving on mere drops.
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Karen Russell |
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35a364d
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Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I've been sitting here so long their falls seem contiguous, close as raindrops.
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Karen Russell |
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d00de56
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Often I wonder to what extent a mortal's love grows from the bedrock of his or her foreknowledge of death, love coiling like a green stem out of that blankness in a way I'll never quite understand. And lately I've been having a terrible thought: Our love affair will end before the world does.
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Karen Russell |
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6f2483c
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Long before the kaiko change turned us into mirror images of one another, we were sisters already, spinning identical dreams in beds thousands of miles apart, fantasizing about gold silks and an "imperial vocation."
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Karen Russell |
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25093d7
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This idea appealed to me--I was a quiet kid myself, branded "mean," and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.)"
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Karen Russell |
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b266836
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We amassed a plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the oak that included the Sounds of Warfare Blazer, a toy gun that required sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a tubercular guinea pig. Those
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Karen Russell |
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163f060
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That summer Nal was fourteen and looking for excuses to have extreme feelings about himself.
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Karen Russell |
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8697d22
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A dog's love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one's ability to hold that one's interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monogamy even as we extol it, wishing parole for its weary participants. But dogs do not receive our sympathy or our suspicion -- from dogs we presume an eternal adoration.
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Karen Russell |
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e92aa23
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Secret deals get brokered behind the Barn, just north of the red sloop of the bunny hutch. A number of the presidents are planning their escape for a day they are calling the Fourth of July.
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Karen Russell |
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d2ea41d
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When the door came loose, colors flooded over us. I screamed, too, and covered my face with my arms, and if Ossie hadn't caught me I might have fallen into the wedge of canal between the shoreline and the boat. In that second I knew that I'd been wrong this whole time: that my sister was psychic, that the whole world was haunted, and now a ghost was tuning itself like a luminous string above me. Then the ghost broke into particulates of win..
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Karen Russell |
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b8da305
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their eyes flicking all over each other.
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Karen Russell |
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1ab1e4f
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The heron is painted a somber Madonna blue, my only criticism of it. Turquoise would have been my choice, I tell him. "Turquoise is what that blue would look like if she divorced the night and went on a fabulous vacation." --
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Karen Russell |
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f609503
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They greyhound whine with her, distressed by her distress. Sometimes, in a traitorous fugue, the dog forgot to be unhappy and ran off to chase purple butterflies or murder shrew-mice, or to piss a joyful stream onto the topiaries. But generally, if her mistress was crying, so was the puppy.
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Karen Russell |
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85a8f1f
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This strain of virulent misery, this falling out of love, caused different symptoms, unique disruptions, in dogs and humans.
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Karen Russell |
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d5dea16
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Just about everybody I've ever wanted to impress, I've now outlived.
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Karen Russell |
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3588d7d
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Weather damage is the inverse of a victimless crime - people get robbed of everything, and there is no evildoer to lock in a cage.
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Karen Russell |
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2d93a88
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My oldest daughter was four pounds at birth, and her appearance flooded the earth with an infinite number of horrors and perils, a demonic surge of catastrophic possibilities out of all proportion to the tiny mass in my arms. Love unlids Pandora's box.
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Karen Russell |
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961f29b
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Live long enough, and your life becomes your own to gamble with again
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Karen Russell |
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a4132b8
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An unembarrassed silence seemed to be on loan to us from the distant future, where we were already friends.
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Karen Russell |
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b2dc21a
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With her mauve lipstick in place and her glossy hair smoothed, she was shooting colors all around the room. Could you scare a dead boy with the vibrancy of your life?
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Karen Russell |
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344d5b7
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Who can say what the dead do or do not know? Perhaps the knowledge of one's death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost.
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Karen Russell |
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29ed2c0
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The boy could scarcely believe the size of the boulders, clustered under the enormous sun like dead red rockets awaiting repair, or the span of the sky, a cheerfully vacant blue dome, the desert's hallucinatory choreography achieved through stillness, brightness, darkness, distance -- and all of this before noon.
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Karen Russell |
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394748c
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Kids were for later, maybe. They could still see the children they had been.
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Karen Russell |
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458ddd0
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But the desert offers something that no forest, brook or valley ever can: distance. A cloudless rooming house for couples. Skies that will host any visitors' dreams with the bald hospitality of pure space.
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Karen Russell |
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df82b31
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Now her body was the only place where the memories were preserved.
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Karen Russell |
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95d4658
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You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you.
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Karen Russell |
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e7ee239
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Heartbreak is the university diagnosis for the pain that accompanies the end of love. But this was an unusual breakup, in that Cillian's mind shattered first.
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Karen Russell |
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71e83a7
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You had to really cultivate an ending. To get it to last, you had to kneel and tend to the burial ground, continuously firming your resolution.
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Karen Russell |