Their marriage was made neither in heaven nor hell more like in limbo and tumultuous it was and tested by tragedy but it survived all that and thirty years flew by like wildflowers and he …
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An Argument for Life
Death is often referred to as a journey. Some journey! — being sent against your will and against every fiber in your body and every function in your brain to nowhere, to be met by …
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Loneliness, a beginning
He travelled a long way to get here. Ten thousand miles on a cargo ship. He was twenty years old. He waved goodbye to his mother and his friends on the dock. His mother was …
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The Heat of Battle
“All these years,” she said, “I wanted to kill the americanos who did this to my little boy. Then I read your story and it moved my heart. And now I meet you and you are a fine man.”
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Confessions of a vagabond reporter
Guido Michelini smashed his fist into a bathroom mirror in San Francisco. He didn’t like what he saw. A middle-aged man who was unemployable. This was due to his “erratic trajectory,” according to Johnny O, …
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The searcher
1. In the dead of night the steady drumming of rain on the roof and in the bushes outside my window awakens my soul and sends it searching, searching for my wife in the unknown void where death dumped her body …
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Long Red Fingernails
The sirens go all night in Detroit. Eight hundred homicides the first year I was there. the majority listed as police briefs in the newspaper. Every now and then a killing warranted a separate story. …
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Sunflowers for Susan
“Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.” The pain in my gut has gone for now, probably because I ate and drank as little as possible today — well, I still had …
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The Next in Paradise
The road I take / to paradise is bright / with flowers. — Japanese death poem by Sokin FROM THE ARCHIVES My journeys across the Pacific are becoming more frequent. For years I have been going to …
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The dead room
‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.’ — W.B. Yeats An elderly man lives alone in a bungalow in Upstate New York. An old friend halfway across the …