Stories tagged childhood

Light

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Children imagine dying all the time, especially when someone in their life, someone close, has died. Children's games often include pretend dying, flopping around after being shot for about three minutes, choking, falling to the ground and…

False Alarm

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"The rhubarb grew like seaweed blotting out the underwater house, the tangle of giant leaves making it impossible to get out the front door, like in The Day of the Triffids." Ziggy Zimmerman was lying on his analyst's…

Attention Deficits

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I was working on my dissertation that summer, and I took a part-time job doing psychological testing in a poor public school system. The town would send me around to different elementary schools to test their most troubled children, or, rather,…

The Cozy Battle Station

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They were magical children, the two little boys who lived under the sloped roof and big Northeastern skylight of their bedroom in the little Cape, like a tree house in the forest, with families of cardinals, blue jays, goldfinches,…

Perceptions

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no one takes any real notice of her.

The Chicken Killer From Brooklyn and His Satchel of Death (Birds of Prayer 2)

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In overalls, earflaps and muddy work boots, my grandfather Zeidika blended with the Christian townspeople. But in his long black coat that tied like a bathrobe, the Hasid just arrived from Brooklyn at the rural New Jersey train sation stood out…

Secure Children

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Overheard from the back seat of car:

The Crawling Eye

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As a child, I was sick for a week with the flu and then pneumonia and spent every day on puffed up pillows under down blankets eating popsicles and watching the movie of the week on the Million Dollar Movie: The Crawling …

The Watcher

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Cherry Picking

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he really had earned it

Mother's Poem

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The monsters in the sky burst with riotous laughter, their rumbling voices barking out commands, their cracked nails scratching on the screen, their knotted knuckles tap-taping on the window. Little girl, won't you come out to play? She clutches her floral bed sheets,…

The Cozy Battle Station

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No Sanctuary 3. Bathroom

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These were definitely the two worst ways to die.

The Rare Air on Planet Teeny

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Half-pint Ball canning jars, each labeled in earnest capital letters, took up a whole wall of Teeny’s bedroom. Inside each jar was air she had collected from some place important to her life.

The Diary of Anne Frank's Daughter 4. Psychotherapy, God and Me

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The therapist started to seem increasingly far away, his head a tiny potato head, across the ignorant universe of his dustless desk that seemed to get bigger and bigger as the session progressed, like something out of Alice in Wonderland.