When we awoke, we found a great curtain of linked metal rungs had been lowered to earth from the sky. The chain mail drape connected land and sky and ran as far the eye could see, across the ocean
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A witch wind was howling out in the desert. I was praying for a storm to scour Coaling Depot 6 down to the ground, wipe it right off the Arizona Territory map. Apart from prayer, I still had a shot
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For all his life, Frank had been at war with the willows. They sprouted in and around the stream, clogged the irrigation ditches, and choked off the water flow. His land, a narrow plain between
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Randall stood before his bathroom mirror – gazing at the enormous, glistening dome that was his head. Creams, lotions, infused oils, battery-powered skull caps; he had deployed them all in his
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My husband's nose changed first—a nearly imperceptible spot-the-difference puzzle on a face I'd known for twenty-two years. Through our kitchen's bay windows, the morning sunlight highlighted his
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A woman who claimed to be a chimera called the library most Tuesdays, on the old line they never got around to disconnecting after the renovations. The call went straight to a yellowed phone hung on
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There is no cheerful clatter of pans, or old Beatles records spinning in the living room. No warm cinnamon smell fills the air – only burnt coffee. For a moment, I'm half expecting Papa to swoop me
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Forty-seven days have passed and the bananas in my kitchen are still green. They remain untouched and unmoved since I brought them home from market. To my eye they appea
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"It's an old building," Becky said, when Peter asked her. "Do you get them in your apartment, too?" She'd given him a look, then, as if she thought he was trying to score an invite into he
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There was an old painting in my grandparents' attic. Neither beautiful nor ugly, it simply depicted an empty room with no figures, an old living room with an armchair, library, and fireplace
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Pa had always had a lot of respect for Sam's grandmother. That must have been at least partly to do with what people in the village used to say about her. Pa used to say that civilization took
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