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By AnonymLewis Nordan
A thousand times, when the train slowed or stopped, I thought of jumping off. I wanted to die in a ditch. I wanted to disappear. I wanted a different history and geography. In rhythm with the wheels I said I want I want I want I want I stayed on the train.
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By AnonymLewis Nordan
Even Solon Gregg was finding it hard to speak to a woman who had just paid hard cash for tampons and on her face wore the look of a woman who meant to use them, as advertised.
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By AnonymLewis Nordan
In my mind, I gave the woman gifts. I gave her a candle stub. I gave her a box of wooden kitchen matches. I gave her a cake of Lifebuoy soap. I gave her a ceilingful of glow-in-the-dark planets. I gave her a bald baby doll. I gave her a ripe fig, sweet as new wood, and a milkdrop from its stem. I gave her a peppermint puff. I gave her a bouquet of four roses. I gave her fat earthworms for her grave. I gave her a fish from Roebuck Lake, a vial of my sweat for it to swim in.
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By AnonymLewis Nordan
The Mississippi Delta is not always dark with rain. Some autumn mornings, the sun rises over Moon Lake, or Eagle, or Choctaw, or Blue, or Roebuck, all the wide, deep waters of the state, and when it does, its dawn is as rosy with promise and hope as any other.
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By AnonymLewis Nordan
There is great pain in all love, but we don't care, it's worth it.
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By AnonymLewis Nordan
There were happy days, with watermelon, and sad days of whiskey.
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By AnonymLewis Nordan
Birds are waterproof.
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By AnonymLewis Nordan
In a little while they were kissing. In a little while longer, they made their slow sweet love. The iron bed sounded like a pine forest in an ice storm, like a switch track in a Memphis trainyard, like the sweet electrical thunder of habitual love and the tragical history of the constant heart. Auntee finished first, and then Uncle soon after, and their lips were touching lightly as they did. The rain was still falling and the scritch owl was still asleep and the dragonflies were hidden like jewels somewhere in deep brown wet grasses, nobody knew where. Uncle rolled away from his wife and held onto her hand, never let it go, old friend, old partner, passionate wife.
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By AnonymLewis Nordan
Roy Dale suspected that Mississippi was beautiful. He wasn't sure. He didn't have anything to compare it to. He hadn't even ever been out of the Delta.
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By AnonymLewis Nordan
She said, "Daddy thinks that all the world's magic is almost evolved out." I thought of Roebuck Lake, its swamps and sloughs and loblollies and breaks of cypress and cane, its sunken treetops and stobs and bream beds and sleepy gar rolling over and over and over, its baptizing pools and bridges and mussels and mosquitoes and turkey vultures and, now in the drought, the gray flaking mud-flats and logs crowded with turtles and sometimes a fat snake yawning its tame old cottony mouth like a well-fed dog in a pen. I said, "Is that what the freak show is?" She said, "Dirty miracles.
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By AnonymLewis Nordan
Uncle said, "If love would save him, wouldn't no harm come to him.
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By AnonymLewis Nordan
When I was your age I knew how to listen to television and learn a few things.
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