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Beneath the Skin

We were sitting by a stream that runs through a gulley beside my father’s apartment, when he began picking at his thumb. I let it go on for a bit, distracted and listening for my son playing off in the trees, but soon my father was gnawing at it, making …

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Mahjong Tiles

When I arrived at my father’s apartment for dinner, something was wrong. Through his living room window, I could see Guangzhou’s Canton Tower across the street; the light show was beginning—the usual run-through of the colors of the rainbow. Inside, the ceiling fan whirred, and the smell of old newspapers …

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Bystander

Third grade. R. For years, he was just a boy on my bus, a boy other boys teased, a whiny boy. R—who lived less than a mile from my house, on a farm—was a boy I avoided. Then one afternoon, my mother offered to give him a ride home from …

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Unfinished Litany

Today I read a report, and the legend attached to its registry of names: threatened, endangered, extinct—and the giddy blur of the boy I was at twelve sundered me with his distant bliss of killing jars and pins, his trawling nets above the zinnias where hairstreaks and skippers caught the …

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Youth

I ran away with a girl one summer. We stole money from our parents and stuffed our things into a large backpack. Jacqueline had two pairs of jeans, a thin leather jacket, bras, her pairs of red espadrilles, assorted oversized sweaters, and toiletries. I put some shirts, pants, and underwear …

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Sketch on a Hotel Napkin

I was stuck inside the second person and didn’t have time for anyone, wandering through the intersection of this and that, there and the other way of saying the mind is a magician that improvises its act as it goes on: you, posing for a photograph to resist the inevitable …

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The French Pimp

My grandfather collected antique clocks, so there were several in every room of the house. My favorite was a graceful, black marble mantel clock that lived over the living-room fireplace. Other clocks rang the half, or even the quarter-hour, with a Westminster chime heard all around the house. But the …

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The Dead Cat on the Side of the Road: An Ode

I didn’t cry when I saw it, the dead hair matted back with blood and muddy rainwater. I should have cried, hid my eyes from the upturned lip, the chipped fang and black-ocean pupils frozen in gutterworn rage— the sorts of hollow, holy things that we aren’t meant to see. …

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Sometimes when the news comes on

I bend it into a bow like a ribbon, not a weapon for shooting arrows. I knot it, not it, like kind of when you bend me, I mean, my mind, how when I think I know what I want to say, I don’t. Like that time you bought me …

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How to Make a Cake to Conquer Anxiety

This time, open the bag of flour instead of trying to hide behind it. This time, break the eggs without crying for the birds that were never born. The frosting is sweet, which is how life is, sometimes. The frosting is sweet, which is how life isn’t, many times. Try …

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