"She’ll be back healthy as a horse and rosy as a pippin." Sylvia really says this. She means my wife. Horses and apples speak of health. Sylvia’s veiled promise and Helen’s distant death are not to be spoken of. "...and there are these injections I hear about..." She means antibiotics. Streptomycin and mountain air. If Helen were tubercular and gone for the cure, they would have had her back in six months.
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Thelma hit the floor like she had fallen out of an airplane, no parachute, and her pistol went bouncing toward Ed Seitz and me. The gun’s muffled report reverberated, echoes crossing echoes like a dispatcher’s call in a marble train station. In South Carolina local distances were told off with the high school football field in mind. A motivated linebacker could get you from the pool hall to the graveyard in five minutes.
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The moose had dropped antlers before and anticipated the loss with regret. His antlers amplified the fall of snow, the separation of a dry leaf from its stem, the impact of
a pine needle on the padded forest floor. To go antlerless was to imitate the solitude of starvation and withdraw into himself as into a heavy,
windless snowfall.
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"Where is the bear when the bear is not where the bear should be?" asked Frankie Jelinek's husband with sweet reasonableness. "Ever think about that?"
"No," said Frankie, "I don't. Wherever teddy bears go. Maybe a picnic."
Steve gave his wife a sleepy kiss and rolled over. Supernatural phenomena
were not in the baby care books. Yet...
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An odor of mint attracted the francher to an unpromising patch of brown scrub. It spread its fetlocks and arched its neck down to feed. It munched contentedly for some minutes then collapsed. The francher's nostrils flared as it gulped at the thin unsatisfying air. Wide speckled eyes bulged; oval pupils stared. An Andean vulture circled closer.
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Errol Flynn, aged 120, has been kept alive with hormones and
organ transplants until 2025 for the last, final, remake of Kipling's 'Kim.' It will be a musical.
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"Zoop!" An electric toaster unplugged itself from its socket in the kitchen and flew into the living room where it nuzzled Betty and wrapped its cord around her legs. The toaster purred. Betty Kunkle, otherwise a normal, healthy girl, had a problem with household appliances. "Oh... brollyflogger,” said Betty.
"Language, Betty. Language," said Mrs. Kunkle, Betty's mother.
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"I am midtown. Manhattan?" Linda Winkelman speaks her question out loud in the middle of the rush hour push; no one takes notice. Linda is standing in the middle of a street. She can not recall who she is or why she is here. "I remember lemonade," says Linda. Buildings disappeared, people disappeared. Now it is her turn. Linda Winkelman was born the year they invented frozen lemonade.
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The woman at the far end of the kaleidoscope had not been there last week, of this Simon was sure. She was naked or near enough, thinly dressed in a diaphanous veil. "Holy shit!" Simon Alexander breathed on the lens and gave it a wipe with his sleeve. "I see that I have your attention..." said the woman, "...finally."
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The ineffable,
unnamable God of Hosts stood with a burly, bearded personage who held a bar towel draped over one arm, a symbol of his trade. The golem toyed nervously
with an ear. "My people should quake at My unutterable Name, not fall on their tukhes," God sighed. The ear came off. "Bim... this is not about you.
Try to stay on topic."
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It was a real nice laying-out—tasteful. Well, maybe not so much tasteful particularly, but neat. They’d got Ed’s left arm attached to his head and not his shoulder. And they had the remaining right arm attached on the left side. To look like them, I supposed.
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"See that, Franklin?" said Eleanor Roosevelt. "That’s O’Brien." Franklin observed a line of stars on the eastern horizon. There were four. "Oops, sorry." Eleanor nodded at her new constellation, O’Brien, and the fourth star blinked out.
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"My sister, is she dead? Go and give her a poke, would you?" The great white presence that was the Lady Mother of the Long Walkers indicated the row of captive queens on their dais beneath her, deferentially lower.
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"Arrgh! See me neck, lad?" The pirate's head hung at a grotesque angle from where the long executioner's knot had settled at the base of his skull. Theophrastus Bigelow was a big man—the weight of his fall through the executioner's trap had broken his neck but had not killed him immediately. He lifted a ten-kilo strand of gold chains to reveal his scars.
"Admirable, what-oh?" The mark of the hangman was stamped on Bigelow's throat.
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"YO, BABE!" a man's voice blared at Grenadine McKenzie, "SURPRISE, YOU'RE
PREGNANT." A craggy male face bloomed before her. The face was a hero's face, Lance Davenport from Rights of Spring. There was an odor of patchouli.
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Jim bit the dog's ear off. He spat―dog blood was different, somehow forbidden.
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Prosper Epilegomenes is a mouse demon in service to Sminthian Apollo.
He blows up a car dealership and kills a troublesome neighbor.
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Duckpin bowling in Taunton,
Massachusetts. A duel over a magic hat sacred to Artemis, sister of Apollo.
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A barroom in Hell's Kitchen. There is a meatball buffet and it is always
Thursday, August 14th. Artemis, Apollo's sister, is ahh... difficult.
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Libby Pease remembers her girlhood as a litany of lost callers.
Now a visitor: William Powell has misplaced Myrna Loy.
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Libby Pease accepts having her own personal shaman as an article of faith, which faith she could not tell. The dead Indian smells rank, but not unpleasantly so―fresh earth clinging to over-wintering vegetables, plug-cut tobacco and molasses.
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"Sweet Jesus!" Libby Pease has—for just a moment, a split second—the queer idea that there is an eyeball in her teacup. "Uh... hello, eye." The eye does not speak. She takes a swallow of Dr. Pomeroy's straight from the bottle and shakes her head to clear it. She squints; the eye in her teacup squints back—it is her mother's eye.
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Twins play which kid's got the papers. Originally published as The Flags of All Nations Hors D'eouvre Toothpick Caper.
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There was a dead man in the yard this morning. I checked in my wallet
for my latest picture of the front yard. I have a collection of yard pictures that goes back for years but I usually carry only one photo at
a time. No, he was a new arrival. I called Sheila. Sheila is my ex-wife.
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Lord Zorgon of Alymeade sighed, a great exhalation redolent of smoldering carpets. "Where was I? Facelifts, yes.
Women, whatever their ages, never wish for sensible things like orthotics or a tonsillectomy."
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