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Twenty years later, a woman reviews the diary entries she wrote in the days between her sentencing and her state-ordered sex-change operation.

the existential prostitute

Our negotiations in the garage always managed to zero out the big throb. Te rekindle it we engaged in playfighting and waiting again to enclose the unexpected. We debated, who was dasein, and was realizing being-in-itself a mark of proficiency or deficiency?

rooftop dance

Maybe we shouldn’t have been equipped with suicide kits. Some of us who made it think so. I don’t. I think they was a mercy for those who found they had to use them. No one had been to the city since the spores had floated down from the sky and the forest had grown up around it. But we could faintly hear the music. And we could see the buildings getting taller. It’s hard to describe the people – I call them people now -that we met in the forest. Butterfly/tree people who talk by twisting your vision. after the third night they tried to leave us alone after we put on our sensory deprivation hoods and huddled together. They tried. Or at least they told us they tried. Or I made myself think they told us they tried. I think that was the common element of all of us who made it – we could make ourselves think things that make sense.

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muscle noise

A mother, based on the idea of “skinship”, tries to reach her autistic child by bathing with him. Her husband, a ham radio enthusiast, argues by analogy that what she thinks are like Morse code prosigns, will in fact be interpreted only as random numbers, radio noise in the spectrum of muscle tone.

calling

When Erol discovered that a crow’s caw would send him into an epileptic siezure, he took it as a sign to leave the priesthood.

exposure

Fifteen-year-old boy begins sleeping outside in the backyard. His mom thinks it’s cute until the first storm, then they start fighting about it. A nine-year old girl fromthe next block discovers him one night and then comes to visit him regularly.

citation

I missed my anti-aging treatment one week – I guess I just got busy. Of course that was the week I got stopped on the street. They wrote me a ticket for lines on my forehead and salt and pepper temples. The follow-up visit to my apartment totally sucked.

shortly

Middle schooler idolizes martin short and dresses himself up as all of martin short’s characters and records himself doing routines with a camcorder. His older sister finds it and shows it to her boyfriend with a mixture of a small amount of pride, some amount of postured superiorty, and a large amount of secret sharing in an attempt to build intimacy. The boyfriend takes it, copies it, uploads it to youtube and passes it around school.

parenting journal

fifteen-year old girl who was just dumped by her boyfriend is the odd one out in parenting class. since she doesn’t have a partner, she gets assigned to be a “single mom” and is promised extra credit. she decides to take the approach of skipping town on the train to see her father with his new wife, and to make him help her take care of the baby doll.

the taker

The myth of the cat who ingested every lost thing – flickering within the smoke of a house fire, disappearing into the water heater closet when socks go missing out of the laundry. It is an orange tabby, which never opens its mouth – people have seen it suck things into its upper lips, making it look like a walrus.