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Pillow forts and potpourri
In the privacy of her bedroom, before Stanley gets home, Beatrice will pretend that her name is B and nothing more. She will strip before the mirror, contort her fleshy parts, pull her breasts to her armpits until her chest turns flat. She will stand before herself, as half herself, and see someone more than…
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Flagging
The tables are sticky, the alcohol is flowing, the sun is pulsing. In this moment, June feels suspended in the summer. There is life, and then there is this. Jean shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Her nose is filled with the half sweet, half sour scent of suncream mixing with cigarette smoke. The pub garden…
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Intermission
The sky is deep, dark, and violent, hanging low. In the distance, three seagulls sail the wind, twisting their bodies higher, then lower, then higher again. It is monumentally loud – the sound of the sand scattering across the beach, the crashing waves, the February air hitting the rocks to the West.
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An abundance of bad luck
About thirty minutes North of you, when winter still began in November, a man died and June was born.
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I know, I know, I know
In another life, I am a man sitting on a fold-out chair with a wet rag in my hands, waiting for the cars to roll in
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Green bedsheets in a small room
It was too warm for touching: they held onto each other at their toes. Sometimes one of them would open their mouth to speak, mutter something incoherent, lost to the humid air that stagnated at the open window.
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Surfacing
There is a person on the beach, and their name is June or Jude or some other name beginning with a J. It’s on the tip of your tongue, lifting with the salty breeze and coating your lips with white streaks of salt; something still there but already gone.
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Themes of distant yet frequent death and subsequent unsettling grief
This place is not a welcome place. Autumn is ending. Death is close.
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The universal gesture for peace
Each time we play cards, I find I have forgotten the names of the suits and their kingdoms, the rules of this game, the first game we played together.
