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My grandmother was born on a wooden table, in a dark kitchen, in a blue house, in an apple orchard. When she was seven and complained of a sore throat, the same doctor who birthed her took her tonsils out on that rough-hewn table where she was born, where
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Will, high on liquid coke, jumped up and down in the sterile dining room, up and down on an occupied long table, up and down, yelling— …
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From the first, the music struck Cecile. It was lilting, graceful, each syllable like water falling at different levels, at varying mathematical degrees.
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I remembered breakfasts from long ago, the french toast soggy and the milk too raw.
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My grandmother stared at my dog. He was snoring peacefully, his fur lifting and lowering as he breathed. “That dog is fat!” She said. Everyone called him fat. But he wasn’t, not really.
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We buried her upright, in the stance of warriors.
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... all my friends are girls; I like opera; I can answer all the questions about male and female ejaculation – without stammering – in sex ed. classes.
And Braydon? In boardshorts, tall and tanned and naked from the waist up ...
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No glue can reunite this tea set wreck. The refrigerator clicks and hums, towers over, swallows me in shadow.
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It's Granny hauling her crooked soul into heaven. Guess who I stole that image from?
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I once had a Creative Writing teacher's assistant from San Diego at the University of Pittsburgh tell our class "Please don't submit dead grandmother stories here. I know you loved your grandmother, but everyone's grandmother dies. And everyone writes a story about how…
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Out of respect, I would honor my father, put on a clean, starched shirt and hand buff my shoes, laced as tightly as the tone that sealed the room. I understood that walking over the dead, barefoot or otherwise, was tempting fate, and will admit…
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"People do that. They cross the road when they aren’t supposed to and get away with it. They do it all the time. Only, then, he might think I was a rebel and I’d rather he imagine me a square. A square who never was a wild thing. A rebel who chose to be t
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I think she later thought about that. Just as she loved her son, I loved my mother. Just as my dad loved her, so the same kind of protective honoring love existed. Right or wrong, it was there, the elephant in the room.
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Glaucoma can be a wonderful ally.
Aziz-un-nisa saddled her steel chair in yards of pashmina wool, wickered navy and brown, waiting for him to step into the room. Goodbyes rehearsed, she sensed it was showtime. Glaucoma wouldn’t lose this afternoon.
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