Birdca/LIO/clari NightfallUtter nonsense

Quit lying to yourself . You are about to die. At least you can salute yourself.
and then, I saw my obituary on line, I had a heart attack. Wheeled into ER, my wife had a similar experience. She was in the hospital beside me.
when we die, it will merely be our presentation self. the True self will live on. Whom am I kidding? When dead you're dead. Period. end of story. Pearly gates nonsense.


A Circling of Wagons
When Eudora Welty, at the end of her writings, made an appearance at a conference in which she said, “Plot is what a story teller sees with”. I’d like to know if it’s true. or is it what a storyteller sees ahead with.

When Pearlean put a hand on Brownie’s shoulder there came a moment of recognition. Not of one to another, not of anything moving unknown to known; but, more something here shifting to the realm of appropriate and proper and possible. Something that was meant to be and so settled upon mutually.
There was still miles between them but also there’d come something familiar, more like home than had been before. And it seemed comfortable and scenic like they were in a play that neither knew whatever line had been or would be. It seemed more akin to being in a foreign film in which they were at ease to see what translation was to come, what it was all about, what it meant.
Brownie placed her hand on Pearlean’s in an acknowledgement that wasn’t of one over another but of a simple thanks and then, she brought her hand away and Pearlean made a harder embrace with her small hand capturing, squeezing Brownie’s shoulder a bit more than it had in the beginning. They stayed still for a moment. They got up and went their separate ways. They never saw each other again.

Soon enough there would be nothing left but the loving.

This was kept in mind when the rumor spread about the death of Watanabe at the business location of the Senzaki’s.


The Neighbors Came Naked
There'd been too many people on the bus. It was stuffy with all those Buddha Heads. Like cattle, we were herded. Someone moaned, "Moo, Moo." You can bet it was Ogawa-san, disrepectful of anything governmental.





On July 2010 Terrell carefully punched holes in the ceiling for his daughter. He filled them in with string lights from a christmas tree they were about to trash. Noticing her sad face, he had saved the lights. As she lay in her lavender scented sheets, the stars twinkled and to her it seemed the ceiling opened up to the sky.
“What are you doing, child?” he smiled as he walked in on her reaching toward the Aurora Borealis.


Brownie Wise realized one day she would spend more days as a single mother than she had been married. The thought of this did not disturb as much as she thought it would. Earl was never around in the first place. He had never been around at the birth or later. Occasionally he had. out of obligation, she figured. Her days working with Earl had brought her to the conclusion that it was all for the good. It was she , after all, that had proposed to him. It being not so much a sexual one but one of companionship, if a man and a woman could engage in such a thing. And perhaps it was not possible but Brownie thought she had to try and she did.
“Listen, Mr. Tupper, I don’t think I’m out of place to say that you and I have chemistry together.”
Earl looked down at his hands and took on what she thought was a blush. She did not feel altogether pleased to see him do so.
“We should live together. Your wife doesn’t need to know of the arrangement. It would just be convenient. Efficient. Don’t you think?”
Earl put down his coffee and tilted his head.
The morning sun laid across his desk and fell on Bonnie’s skirt.
“I think you need to go,” he said.
Bonnie picked up her purse. “Think about it Earl.”




Bunny Mizumoto Waters and her daughter, Kate, found themselves plop in the middle of the Pacific Northwest. That’s to say, the Pacific Northwest Motel and Spa near the abandoned Rainier beer factory out between Airport Way and the I 5. The ‘spa’ part was a misnomer, even though it did have a swimming pool. This motel pool had a small inflatable isle floating in the middle. It was not anchored and drifted lazily about the rim depending on which way the wind blew or how the drain was siphoning.


What were you thinking, Alice Munro, when you announced in 2015 that you would write no more? I remember going to see you and pretending to be the gardener you had advertised for in the Toronto Sun under the false name, Violet, with no surname. I knew it to be you. No doubt in my mind. And so, I responded, giving a falsified history of garden care in the Pacific Northwest which you would surely notice. Goldenrod, wild carrots, star anise, all flora along the trailing marginalia of your fiction. I studied these varieties to be accustomed to any questions that you might ask pertaining to their care.
Including myself, there were six gardeners glancing awkwardly at each other without a word. We were all seated in a row of frayed cane chairs. Half wore grungy overalls like they had just come from poking around outside in the earth.


Her fingers wore steel thimbles so that her playing the steel strings would not cut into them.

Albion is ours, not through father, but by our mother. Had mother been alive today all of Albion would have been our dowry and not be land for father to bequeath to us. We three sisters are rightful inheritors of mother’s property since she had the land before mother married father.




When I saw my obituary on line, I had a heart attack. Wheeled into ER, my wife had a similar experience.




A large boulder came down; then, another. One rolled over the roadway and off the cliff. The other came to a standstill on the mountain road. Kaneshiro screeched to a halt.

When my father died I did not weep but my brother did. It had been 7 years since my mother had passed away and my brother had also wept then. My father was left alone to raise us. We were teens at the time.
Anagnorisis the point in a play, novel, etc., in which a principal character recognizes or discovers another character's true identity or the true nature of their own circumstances.

Two years after my wife passed away it didn’t seem right to buy new clothes. And so, I abstained. For those years I didn’t buy any clothes. I wore whatever was left in the closet. I stubbornly made it out to be a rule. I felt if I had purchased a shirt, pants, or socks it would somehow be tainted with some air of celebration, in the threads themselves. Once I bought a hat and wore it out in the sun. I forgot I had it on until I passed a shop window and saw myself below the hat.
"Forgive me," someone blurted out and frightened all nearby onlookers.
I returned the hat.



The Mark Of Abella

"No".
Catherine looked in the mirror and put makeup over her mark. she wondered, or rather her uncle and aunt did. "Where did this come from."
It appeared on her skin on her 10th birthday. It seemed like a thing to be examined and so she did. It was a splotch. Exactly. Like a painter had shook his brush at the end of an art project and left it there; the dab landed on her face and a bit of her dress. Upon washing, the dress showed no sign of the paint but, the splotch on her skin remained.




.


You said you had forgotten about the forever-place. And smiled like you were looking in a mirror and had been suddenly reminded of that happy time when turtles were scuttling up from below for a meal or whenever grandma Tutu entered the backyard. Then and there you decided not to grow up. That face you see in the mirror is the happy face and sometimes it’s not so happy. But, still, we are one and the same.
Right then there’s a knock on the door. I look at you, you at me. We thought it would be Uncle Coqui. I read your mind saying we should have packed up long ago for the forever-place. One day the tax assessor
But, since then, we have never found or even seen another baby turtle around the area despite all the puka puka in the ground.


I sometimes speak to Alexa when she’s not there. When no one is. I hear no response. It's then futility creeps up and plants her head on my shoulder.
"Alexa, what's the date today."

"Were'd you get that?" my father asked, "Isn't mine is it? Give it here."



By the time my father was a man he learned to protect himself. He had a Browning a weapon he had found on another block. Kept it under his pillow. my father kept a browning next to him

I remember the day I lost my wife to gravity.

Munro's Love of a Good Woman has a longer piece of her fiction. Can we assume it is novellar in its inception? It may be so not only in its length but also in technique: The following down the rabbit hole of details, the enigmatic summary.

One touches the limbs of another, and from (it) there can be no returning



The river Mestizos forms the back of all our houses in this city of Vigan. I know it does mine. The river is were I was near drowned. Had it not been for Ina Luzon I would not be here with ou playing Mahjong.




Devereaux Towers hides my crime. LIttlehouse is buried in concrete in 1963. I wished upon her all the horror of gasping for breath and being held in the arms of suffocating cold of clay and rough gravel. Good for her. That's the way I felt when she made fun and tormented me and my family.


The uncoupled PNW railcar carrying Annie Chen’s body came down the Cascades quick. So quick, as a matter of fact, that it could not d blue was found by a Quinault 10 miles downstream. No Annie for burial. The quinault's name was

Alongside the road to Phnom Pehn the water buffalo lifts its submerged head and shakes. It’s morning and here I am awakening in Los Angeles, California, in Japantown where I have roamed and come to by chance.
The Tlingit man claimed he had seen the cliffs move.

Man chokes goose at Scherer park.



After Harvest
Once a woman’s struck by lightning three things can happen. She can die. She can live. She can stay awhile between the two. In 1977 we were in the orchard harvesting ripe fruit in the San Joaquin when a Santa Anna came with its bellyful of wind.


crawfish etoufee lingered above the stove, along the creases between wall and wall, in unreachable ceiling corners.

Everyone else had gone home from Henrietta’s wake. Even the jazz band that escorted us to the grave site and back here to the house had eaten and gone. Just the six of us left in her kitchen where a whiff of crawfish etoufee lingered about the stove.
It was not by anyone’s reckoning or one person’s consent that we gathered at her wood table. The action took on its own accord, as natural as night dissolving day.

It was a honeymoon sidetrip, a Chinatown, a chance to accompany the sea dragon ensemble that danced alongside the shops and sidewalks. There were dangerous red firecrackers at our feet, the acrid slicing odor of gunpowder explosives. We wished this to be the eternal us, dancing ferociously for awhile, savoring risk and never thinking. Inside we saw and felt the dragon’s ribs made of circles of tied bamboo. We moved this way and that, following the lead-master puppeteer up front as she swooped with her dragon’s head atop a pole. We imagined her rising sometimes above the tallest head in the next farther crowd as they, too, assembled to watch. There was the thunder of many drums, the clang of many cymbals, the pings of primordial abandoned harmonies.
And we were no where to be seen and everywhere . . . we would never die.

“Ahh. Bien bonne. Albert always said ya could sing sweet wit that piano. He’d want ya to keep on like that.” Without turning but with a soft flutter of sun caught in her wave the mother murmured, “Well then, bon vwayaj, ti-chou.” She kept on down the block, turned the corner and was gone.




turns out the car that we past 5 minutes caught on fire. one of those spontaneous combustion things.

dying without notice

nice
jack r horner needs to feel his wife is bout to die will he or continue on the life of adventure. perhaps a wild mix of past and present will bring him to his senses? Is it inherited? for Carol it is. carol is dead already that's why leave taken
"Little Jack Horner sat in a corner eating his Christmas Pie. He stuck in his them and pulled out a plum and said what a good boy am I"

The distance isn’t far, two blocks most. So, we did. I don’t recall any of the trees or the layout of the park greenery or whatever we did at the park. It’s on the way back she starts to pitch forward; her gait becomes a run homeward. I try to hold her back but can’t. She can’t stop her feet. There’s some kind of momentum in her muscles that has been turned loose and can’t stop. I start to laugh because we must look funny running arm in arm from curb to curb in an ever increasing rush but she’s not laughing. Monster that I am, I’m laughing.
My Childhood fear was never anything that came out from under the bed or out behind the closet; but, every once in awhile in broad daylight I would feel the need to run and not toward anything but away. Sometimes I would be in the jungle jim hanging upside down when I would feel this urge to run away. I would spread my upside down body with my upside down arms and hands, my legs fastened to the jungle jim by the crook of my legs. There would come this frozen thing coming towards us, all of us. Strangely enough this fear was no


The day's tough and what we figured. It would be hot and dry as we can predict by the skin. it was four o'clock and boding ill. Something's coming our way and not for our good.


leave the past behind
His naked majesty was all for dancing at noon with his clothes off in the abandoned industrial complex. Then he settled down to figure out his next step. Long Beach had it coming, what he thought , and took a drag from his cigarette. He’d find someone to do his dirty work. And he did. It was Fred. fred noblemeyer worked the night shift out at the airport. Oft times he’d come home all tired

We took off to Mexico. Put everything on hold. Left the kids to their grandmothers. Put the food stuffs from the freezer and refrigerator into my buddy's deep freeze and turned off the water heater. Our chicken dumplings by Stouffers lay next to dead game and fish off the coast of Whidby hauled up some early morning when our nasal passages were clogged with ice and you could hardly see passed an arm held out in front of you in the hopes of bumping into a solid object to keep you from falling. Its all Whidby. N          othing less. O!kkne day it will be gone the island, the bunkers, the memory even. Carol forgot her name   dnd did I minee. We disappeared for ages. we
In the evenings doors opened and for once we were convinced of a better life.

Choppers the thing with knives that go round and around.
A serial killer on the loose in Phom Phehn.
From file “Fugami Revised Novel 1/30/2019 etc.”
JoAnna Novak
Thesis 1/30/2019, 2/6,
Revised Novel - Fugami
The Diplomat’s Tailor

A Fable for
World War II
Try to change and it won't happen.



we are in the path of falling aircraft. our house was asleep at 3am
She felled he floor from trees that she could not remember the names to. she was of a tongue that grew America and she kept her distances which she treasured and held over him.
about four o'clock in the deli
the way was out and they took it.
we told the children that it was not nature but the workings of man and that the thunder and the trembling was man made things which they must never forget and what seemed a lifetime would end.
---------------------
eggs were not eaten unless in a soup. the dishes were not fodder to the cannons. and all around they drank the wine from tomorrow.(yesterday's wine)
--------
In the camp of the maurauders:
they started out in the early afternoon and came back at dusk when the trees appeared like ghosts haunted by the screeching cries of crows waiting in the branches of the sycamore.(oak branches)(waiting aloft in oak branches) They put down their rifles and cleaned them later in the week, oiling them with grease from slaughtered livestock.
"Will you remember to catch the train?"
"I will."


-------------


…
The couple in the holding cell had been arrested in a case concerning the taking of funds from a politician by the name of Borges. This Borges had promised the couple a villa in the seaport of Klaipeda.
-------------
The time
They would bring the frozen fish by the plastic barrels all cold and frozen in blocks of solid ice until the whole warehouse was itself like one air-conditioned hut the size of an airplane hangar. They would huddle around a steel barrel and warm themselves in cold weather when the flakes of snow flew paste the overhang and the temperature couldn't be felt any longer because the surface of their skin had turned to a kind of absence of sensing anything and where it would take a time to reheat the surface of the skin to a feeling state.

Stupid
They had called him when supper was on the table and the sun was at noon and the desert hot.
When Syracuse Fell
On Touching Circles
Archimedes in Love
Archimedes being a man of few talents bathed while his wife listened to the splish splash from the kitchen while she prepared breakfast. The kids had left for school. The sun shone its mellow midmorning face. And somewhere, somewhere a dissatisfaction lay brewing and fermenting in Archimedes' mind like a virus as if one were bodily sick. He was thinking water down a spiral path; remember at this day and age there were no screws. the age of iron had yet to make an impact. And a driver had yet to be invented.

On thedother side of the world it was the same for Plato. Plato was sick of the planets. He'd become disillusion with the fuss. He put the palms of his hands and pressed them hard against his eye lids, held it there for a long time for he wished to see the stars again.

it came in a handful of dust
“Is it snowing in July?” we ask. Our Lithuanian Railworkers’ uniforms are dusted with the white ash from the locomotive’s firebox, yes, that’s true enough; but, white rectangles about the size of postcards also come fluttering down. Their random release from a half open cabin window makes us wonder what’s going on. It’s almost time to depart this Kaunas station. People standing on the crowded railway platform reach
--------------------

The palms grew tall. As tall as the building where they stayed on the fourth floor. From there they could see the sea, a kind of dense blue blue on a clear day and then a misty one in the autumnal haze of California. The leaves of the palm sometimes came almost into the French doors of the balcony and sometimes the sea breeze would push the stout leaves between the cracks of the shutters so that a single leaf of faded green could be seen pushing its way into the room. The room itself was painted white the way the landlord wanted it. No colors at all because he, himself, was color blind and he felt why should the tenants have some satisfaction out of an expensive color scheme that I would have to spend for the paints of so many colors and that I could not appreciate myself. On the floor one story down from us was an old man. He was hard of hearing and he took care of the dogs and cats of the families that lived across from him and the down the hall. He was never paid but did this as a favor for the three families. In the mornings you might see him with an entourage of Dobermans and Chihuahuas. At first it was hard for him to keep the peace but strangely enough he was able to do this the way no one else could. He had a knack. he fed them too as part of his routine for often their owners would be gone most of the day. Sometimes though they would arrange with the old man to watch their dog for quite awhile if they were to go on vacation.

They named him Jack. It was the name of the farmer who had delivered the boy. The farmer had come from One Tree down to Hay driving on a rickety truck. The Eki's had not known him very well but knew he had delivered their ewes twice. The deliverer had not said much but held the woman's hand with his left and in his right, a wash cloth to her forehead.
"She'll do well to rest. The child too,"
Eki shook his hand though the farmer turned away, wiping it.
"Take her to the clinic in Hay. Tell them Jonas sent you." He left in the truck, the smoke rising straight up and gathering in a ball against the arid Riverina landscape.
That's all the couple would have. One child, Jack Eki. he had one eye and ugly at that. He had terrible glaucoma in the good seeing eye. Who's the confidant urged the boy to go into police work, detective work no less. What ill-informed, wreck of a friend urged him thus into a line of work that required both eyes? I'll tell you who and you won't believe it.

-----------
Suitable for everyone who wears a suit and sandals without the socks

------------------

Birdcage

Now, the aboriginal from Yarralin appeared one day beside the truck. He was standing in the middle of oyster shells just like the father had dreamt. The Yarralin came bringing mangoes to the Eki's pearl diving cove this side of Broome. Yarralin said he was told by the spirits to tell the father a secret but he did not know how to begin nor when to. So, Yarralin had brought an armful of mangoes as a reason to come. The Eki family gave four pearls in return, they were so taken by the notion that an aboriginal would come bearing fruit, like omiyage. Only the father and the Yarralin talked. Eight year old Jack, his younger sister and his Mom stood off to the side. The boy toyed with the edge of an oyster shell, digging a trench around his Stonehedge made of shells, glancing every once and awhile at the two as they spoke low.
After Yarralin had left and as they were at the kitchen table aboard the lugger devouring the mangoes, Mrs. Eki asked her husband what the Yarralin wanted, what did he say,why the mangoes.
"He said that sometime in the future I will kill his son." The briefest of sunset lit up the boat cabin. The boy traced his name on the kitchen table and waited for his father to continue. " I told him I would not because I did not know him or his family nor where they lived and I had no reason to harm his son "
"Well, he didn't seem very upset about it, ne?," the Mrs. said.
"He wasn't. So, I told him my dream of him standing on the oyster shells. He laughed and said this is Australian soil and only natural that both of us be in dreamtime."
"Daddy, will you kill his son? How will you do it?" The little girl asked.
"Your father does not go around hunting people down, causing injury for no reason. And neither should any of us. Respect. That's all we can ask to receive, all we can give, "the father replied.
"...besides pearls and oysters", Jack's mom said.
"Besides pearls, ne", he smiled. He brought Jack's sister close and sang into the topknot of her hair.
The Eki family had been pearling at Broome for a decade. They had used Aboriginals at the start but now used Malays for divers So it was not like they had never seen a Yarralin but it was unexpected to have one come among the oyster shells from the Outback after years of absence.
"I thought he might have wanted work." the Mother said.
"So did I."
"He looked hungry. Didn't he look hungry? You might have asked him, Ichiro."
"I did," Jack's father said. "That's why I gave him back one mango along with the pearls even though I know he expected neither."
"It's a shame they can naked-dive but can't take on the deep suits, ne?", she said.
"I can hardly stand the gear myself so I can see why they wouldn't. Being a deep sea diver doesn't make you any better than anyone else."
Then they talked about Mr. Cullen, their big boss, and how he had pushed the idea of deep sea diving for pearls further and further off the coast, deeper and deeper until you got the bends from rising to the surface.
Jack took this all in at the age of eight. Perhaps not understanding the thread ends of conversation, the implications. And what he did not know he guessed at.
When WWII came up, pearling went down. Luggers stood dry beached. They were like skeletons of what had been. Bleached-white and streaked, the black-moldy canvas sails flapped with the gulls and gerygones in fading bel canto. The Eki's were interned for awhile at Hay, NSW. Neighbors called it The Birdcage.
Then one day the Eki's abruptly moved away . You know how it is to relocate, leaving a place with memory still abiding there. It's like you abandoning something alive. It's torn out of you. You recover but one minute you're there and the next, here. They went to California. Might be the move had something to do with the father's attitude but it had started changing. He wouldn't talk much about the internment, held his children more with a grip than embrace.
The boy, Jack, became interested in things of the past and turned to make a living of it as a paleontologist after some schooling stateside at UC under a professor Bakker. Every so often, after his parents died, Jack would return to New South Wales from Los Angeles. Somehow, some way he would be drawn back, to that flat stretch of Highway 75 between Hay and One Tree, to the area where his parents were interned. He would take it very slow, keeping his eyes on the road in a borrowed wreck of a truck. A distance of 30 miles, forty klics. Traverse it over again to gain some clue to what bugged him. His parents had been interned here, but there was something else unnamed. Something he needed to solve, a truth to uncover, something he wasn't getting. It was always like this out on a dig. The teasing of the brain. The investigation of the clue left, the resolution to understanding. He had to know what the earth knew, what the soil said.
It would start with a headache then he would go hunting from there until the headache was cured. So his job suited him. Professor Bakker said he was a natural paleontologist though he never thought of it that way. He couldn't turn it off , this probing of objects and circumstances and what they meant. An upturned palm. Broken tarmack. A hair brushed over the ear. Shoes at an opened doorway. A song unfinished. Everthing unearthed meant something else, contained further mystery. Maybe he did read into things too much. But maybe it made him good at his job, too.
Jack shifted dry dirt in the enclosure of his right hand like a musician playing an egg shaker. He sniffed and threw the dirt into the air, watched it settle. Today it was going to be very hot. Very few cars out on this end of Hay Shire and One Tree.
It would be easy to spot the person whom he was to meet. He might appear like a mirage on the asphalt, wavering a hello amid the heat waves, or a shadow off to the side of some escarpment yet unseen. Jack knew they would meet. He could feel it bone deep. He took a long drink from his bottled water until it made that noise of collapsing plastic. As he finished and put the bottle away he heard a deep vibrato come from the earth it seemed. It came warbling to him as if someone were mounted and making its way towards him. But it did not grow louder but rather faded, out of breath. Then, began again.



His parents had been interned in Hay Shire near One Tree or Hell the folks down under used to call it back in '41. They emigrated to the US after that vowing never to return. That's why there were so few Japanese-Australians from that era to count today. Or so he was told by his father. Jack was 9 by then.


Jack's father agreed to meet him on highway 75 halfway between Hay and One Tree. Jacks father had a pickup , the Yarralin had a ute. When he came the Yaralin was sitting outside the vehicle, in the shade of it. And the way the sun faced there was shade, though not much, from the angle of the sun and the roof of the ute.
"Sit", the Yaralin said.
Jack knelt bedside him and worried a long weed with both hands.
"So you want to know what happened here.


Jack met the Yarralin in the middle of nowhere. It was out on Highway 75 between One Tree and Hay. This was a span of about 40 kilos. Nothing but scrub, saltbush and copperburr. The Yarralin had asked to be met here. He had something to tell Jack Eki. The Yarralin said he knew Jack's father so Jack figured he had to be an old man.

Before Jack reached the area he heard a deep throated warbling sound as if from the arid landscape iltself. At first he thought it from his car.
He almost missed the place except for the vehicle off the side of the road.


"That's right. I called you. Because you are here shows you heard."

My name is Jack.
I know. My father told me your name and that you would not know his or mine. You wouldn't know none of our family.
"What is this? What do you want? Who are you?"
Jack glanced around saw the dusty utility truck the aborigine had come in , saw the flat tire , then saw the didge.
You called me wilth that .
Yes. I play for ceremony. How much do you know about it. Your father was Australian but you don't speak it well.
We left New South Wales long ago. I live in Los Angeles.
Jack bent down and worried an acacia branch between thumb and forefinger, crumpling it to release its resinous odor. Jack brought it up to his nostrils.
The Yarralin nudged a white bearded chin forward.
nd's been calling you back here.



Lio ?

Six gunshots and a hundred or more startled birds rose up and up from the dark terraced farmlands of the Waipio Valley floor. All the way up the two thousand foot ancient cliffs the sound of wing and gun climbed and climbed right over the cliff tops and into the still dark morning sky of Hawaii. It echoed and echoed down the valley forest, above all the valley animals, all around the nahele, green and lush with trees of guava, hala, screwpine. And then it was silent again.
Noelani Uma thought it might be a dream of thunder, was not sure. It might have been her barefeet crossing the lanai made the thunder, was not sure. Might have been the piled up bales of hay out back falling to rest pretending thunder. She hadn’t slept for a long time. For many nights every acre of her pillow had been visited and re-visited. Granpa Tutu grew accustomed to her wakings but that night he might have been sound asleep so she quickly slipped past his doorway and out to the moon. She went as far as the beach by a path through the nahele. It had just stopped raining. Grass and leaf brushed her muumuu with wet as she passed. She spun her body for awhile in the black sand of the beach in a kind of dance. Tracks were made in the dark sand that were hers alone. No one else’s anywhere. And then she saw it.
At first she thought it was not a horse, just some pile of plantings and vines propped up on poles to look like a horse in sand. The waning moon kept it hidden. Perhaps some tourists had come to the beach to erect a mark of their having been. But as she came closer the statue turned its head toward her. Warm sand and water bathed the girl's feet in the early dawning. The electricity of surprise flashed its way up her body. She made her roundabout, slow approach. And as she did the mare breathed heavy with its lungs, given out and raspy, just like an old woman's. The mare was on her stilt legs, unsure, then went down. Noelani felt that the mare would certainly die if it stayed like this and that whatever Noelani did had to matter and had to be of use, so she came and knelt next to the dying mare and placed her hands upon it, touched the steamy hide. It did not smell of farm but rather like the gigantic web of seaweed stretching forth in myriad direction all around them just beneath the ocean surface. It was towards morning and the waters, it seemed, wanted to suck the both of them back toward its sea-self using black sand and quick surf. Perhaps lio had come to land like that, as wet salt hide and plankton and seaweed. Or perhaps this lio had washed in from foreign seas like foam onto strand. No, the mare didn't smell like farm, the world of sawdust and dry grass, of hay bale and cow and sheep and chicken, things that told of the penned in life. Rather, this was wild, and hadn't Noelani been told to take care of the wild horses? Noelani hadn't done her job had she because look, this wild lio was dying here and wasn't she supposed to be in charge of them as her Tutu had instructed her?

“Come next to me, Noel,” her grandpa had once said as they sat on the steps outside their screen door at the end of a school day. It had been three years since her parents had died. “We have each other, our ohana for two, yah? We are family, yah?”
Noelani could stare into the horizon very well. Better than anyone. Better than all the children at school. Better than all her teachers and counselors up top in Kamuela Grade School way up above the valley floor at the edge of the cliffs. Once during recess she had gone to the edge and looked at the horizon as if it had something to tell. She just stared until the horizon owned her. Mrs. Montenegro came to bring her back to class hand in hand. While being led away Noelani looked back once more to the opposite side of the cliff, to the other side. Teacher told Tutu not to bring Noelani to Kamuela any more for the cliffs might draw her so.
“Do you miss them, Tutu?” she had asked her grandpa afterward.
“Sometimes hurt all over, yah?” he said. He rubber-banded his old gray hair into a ponytail at the back, as his square face, his translucent light brown eyes looked to her.
Noelani nodded too vigorously. Then she shut quickly away and gazed out again to the horizon.
Tutu folded her into himself and tried. She felt him put his chin atop her head to make her look away from the horizon and toward his heart as if consolation couched there.
“I need a favor,” he asked when she started to release herself.
“What is it?” She shifted her head quickly to toss a long black lock away from her eyes and lips.
“The wild lio that roam our valley. I put you in charge of them.”
She smiled at the thought. Tutu was the retired sheriff of the valley all right, but even his authority would not extend that far, even if he wanted to, even if he were still sheriff. The wild horses of Waipio were free to roam. They were under no one's thumb.
“I'm serious,” he said.
“Grandpa, why not put me in charge of ants? That would be easier.”

death by clarinet
After WWII the clarinrt died. Sure, you saw them in orchestras and in old time movies but for the most part what they called the licorice stick was dead. With its distinct high wail that made you want to move it no longer appeared on the jazz scene or anywhere for that matter. One day I tried to coax it back to life. It had been hospitalized after having been found unconscious on Minton's nightclub floor. It was hooked up to an IV of modern jazz, Giuffre style. It was only less anemic. But still appeared haggard.

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Second Story-

It was a two story house on a nice wide street in Bixby Knolls. In front of the house there was a yellow bus. It was unusual to see a school bus in the neighborhood but then thses kids needed a pick up to school as well. Rachel came out of the house that morning after having an early breakfast of
And sometimes in the morning a photographer would come by and photograph how the lawn sprinklers sprayed arcs of glitter across the narrow strip of lawn next to the sidewalk. The sun would have been up for less than half an hour and the whole scene left one with a feeling of ease and comfort. The photographer wished to capture this though he never could. It was published in the Press-Telegram but never had quite got it right.
One day he stopped at the house that had the sprinklers and knocked on the door. He could hear music within. He knocked on the door again and shouted. A window on the second story opened.
"Can I help you?"
"Mrs. D? I'm from the Press-Telegram. We talked over the phone."
"I'm not her. Just a second."
The head popped back in. The music stopped. The photographer waited. And waited. He knocked on the door.
Around the corner came a giant schnauzer. It barked and barked and it seemed a larger dog than its size.
He began to think maybe the dog had been sent by that person from the second floor. Maybe. Wasn't it possible? Or was this his paranoia?
The dog stopped barking and growled.
"Easy, boy, easy," more to himself than the hound.
The door burst open and out came a broom swatting at the dog until it yelped and went back around the corner.
"I'm her sister. Nice to meet you." Her hand was cold and a little damp as if she'd just come from the toilet. He wiped his hand on his trouser leg.
"Name's Edith'" as she walked back in and motioned him into the front room.
"So, where's your sister? We were to meet here at this time."
"Oh, she's here alright. I'm the messenger. You have to understand Helen's shy. She 's not sociable like I am. She doesn't like people."
"How dare you. You mind your own business.Press Telegram wants to talk to me, not you. Ain't that right Press Telegram."
"I'm just the photographer,"
"Still all in all it's me and not you." Helen pushed her chin out towards Edith.
"Fine'" and Edith left.
"So. Now. Where were we?"
Helen took a sip from a flask of clear liquid. He looked at it And she looked at him looking at it.
"Medicinal waters," she said, "want a swig?"
He shook his head.
"What? Is that a 'no, I don't want any or no, she's one character."
"I just want to photograph your lawn sprinklers."
"Do you have family?"
"I'm from Colorado. No, I don't"
"People from Colorado don't have them or what?"
"I didn't mean that. I meant that's where I'm from and in addition I don't happen to have a family."
"You must have family. Everyone has family. They might not be much but everyone does. It's impossible not to." She herself seemed to think about it by looking away, out the window.
"I just want to take a photo of your sprinklers."
"What on earth for? What's so great about our sprinkler system? Why us? Why not somebody else's?"
"maybe I can come back later. Now's not the time. I can come back. Later."
"I must have offended you in some way. I'm blunt. That I give you. I'm not delicate. You can tell. It rubs off onto everyone around me. My sister for instance. She's 23. How old are you?"
"I'll come back tomorrow."
"No,seriously. How many well groomed males do we have come by my house.? "
"It's a facade."
"Facade."
"You know."
"I don't need you to explain vocabulary to me , young man. I'm a schoolteacher or was."
"OK"
He waited for the silence to settle and then use it as an excuse to leave.
"So maybe tomorrow I can come back and take a picture of your front lawn . All I need is the curbside. It'll make good publicity for Bixby Knolls."
"So you're like a fashion photographer, only for houses."
"Yeah, I guess you could say. Yeah."
"May I say something and I hope you won't be offended?"
He had a feeling that he kinda would either way.
"Tell, me," and she sidled within her chair as if to inch a little closer into whispering distance so invisible presences nearby might not be privy. "You're frrom afar, like the Orient. It's Christmas, you know

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It's all about Will
Will came out of the tent.
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Linda said, "It's jazz blood.".
"Your father liked it so you must too."
"More than that. Goes beyond liking." She sat at the piano and riffed for half an hour. She would have gone on more but I said.
"What is that you're playing".
-----------------------
Today, you decide what to wear. If the suit fits, wear it. And the shoes, ditto. Today calls for rain and you will want a backup pair in case of showers. At 4pm the day starts.

"I've had my hands full bringing the three of you up."
"Don't we know it. You never let us forget it."
"And well you shouldn't. All three of you , a handful."
She brought out the revolver, place it on the table.
"Why you have to go and say that. As if we planned it that way.

------------------
It was about this time he gives us the stink eye. It kinda surprised us, I mean, the look on his face when he made it. He looked dignified up till then. It was the stink eye all right.
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Upon Nightfall
Deer hoofs were sticking out of the open end of the sack so the boy stuffed as much as he could down into burlap sack and tied the opening with a cord that he carried in his back pocket. He looked up at the sky. It was growing dark. Soon the clouds would come, then the rain, the lightning. Skagit county was like that. He would like right now to be under the eaves of something like a roof, a tree, any kind of shelter. Just to rest a moment.
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Dr. Oyama awoke with his deceased patient lying next to him. It was Kitagawa-san. She had cancer of the lungs and Oyama had treated her aggressively. Was this what it was all about? He opened his eyes and could feel a presence next to him. It had happened once before but the last time he thought he would not have this kind of visit ever again. And yet here it was, come round again. The presence unmistakably hers. He did not even have to see or touch. He knew it to be her. He worried now , that each time a patient of his died he would be visited by them. He wouldn't appreciate that. No, he wouldn't. He began to try to ensure that each patient he treated would be as far from death as possible, that each would be spared pain, that each of them would have an extension of their life no matter what. Anything would be better than to be visited by these ghosts.
The dead lying next to him said nothing , did nothing. They lay there without accusation. But still Carl did not feel exonerated in their death else why were they appearing in his dream. He sat up at the side of his bed. He searched for a smoke. No. He stood up and walked carefully to the kitchen sink. He did not turn the lights on, comforted in a cloak of no sun and no moon.
Once there was a child.
When Oyama walked into the room it smelled of smoke and someone having been.finished
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"I have to get my mother out of jail", he said. Men turned and looked at him. he was going around the bar with his baseball cap asking for donations.
-----------------------------------
It is late spring and because of this the tennis court on Bixby turns dark at 7. Mr. Harada sits in his VW waiting. He is unsure of what he is waiting for but he is sure he will wait until dusk when the automatic lights of the court turn the halogen spots off. When they finally do go off the court and the surrounding park are bathed in darkness except for the few street lights that brim the outskirts of the park grounds. He is sure he is seeing something but it isn't clear enough yet.
----------------------
The whole of it started in the morning when you'd believe there was no darkness come to you.
sirrah
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Bird Calling
He'd spent the night in the corner of Delphine's. Last night was the end of his reeds. He wouldn't keep playing with a split reed. It wouldn't been right, the sound coming out flat and fluttery like it had no business being out in the world. He was tired though, more than he'd ever been in his life. On top of that he was broke. Clean through broke, so much so that he couldn't even stand asking someone to stake him for breakfast , lunch or dinner. He was that broke. The owner at Delphine's let him sit in the corner because...just because. She had known him when his days were better; when he played at Delphine, they had had customers waiting outside to get in-standing room only.
"I think the customers, the ordinary joes, saw something in him that I couldn't see. But it paid the bills. So, I let him play his heart out."
A little later

================
It's not an easy decision to come to. One has to weigh the moral consequences of robbing banks. Especially if you're going to do it with your father.
=====================
Hansen's Disease they call it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++
His father's answer to everything was , "Bakatari". This , that, everything that got in his way, anything that frustrated him. Bakatari. You don't have to know what it means. He was a man once strafed Pearl Harbor. He became popular legion. They took him out back for a beating he'd never forget. He said he knew the man beating him was Irish by the punches he dtrhew.
One day this Mexican comes to the house.
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They had everyone at bay. They carried torches and bombs and music sheets. They sang when they arrived by aircraft. The put their worries behind them. It was hard at first. It became problematic as time went on. Thinking made it so.
----------------
I am in love. I wanted to talk to her but she slipped out of the room. She talked so elegantly while she was seated. When she passed me in the chair I wanted to touch her and I did but she didn't stop as if she had been thinking of what she had said in the class. I wanted to know her and she just left. She's not interested in me. the light's evaporated and I can't stop it. I don't act and that's part of the problem.

the day he was hired as a live in gardner was the day that began his downfall.

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There was a taking things out of turn that riled him. The aspect of someone waiting behind him got him upset too. There was nothing that pleased him when he was standing in line. Everything. The food was gruel, the air was thin, everyone's conversation was too loud, people themselves were too talkative. It weighed on his ears, it irritated his eyelids, it parched this throat though he did not utter one word. The whole of humanity seemed one big mess. He wanted out of the line. "Doesn't matter if I lose my place. I'm out of here." He heard his own voice say this. He hesitated to get out of line because it felt so uncomfortable thinking about getting out of line that he stalled. Someone walked in front of him.
---------------------
I was about to tell you how I felt about yesterday, the day when I took a metal folding chair from a card table set, carried it folded, took it out past the sliding glass door of my sister’s house and into her sun filled backyard and placed the chair legs squarely down onto the grass. For a full ten minutes I was happy and unaware of anything else except the warm chair seat and the paperback of poetry I had in my hands, the book’s dark cover of black and brown taking in the sun, baking the pages just as I also baked. All that energy of an exploding star right there in the absorbing colors of a paperback book and radiating into the person that was me seated away from the shade and being happy. But again I started to figure how just 24 hours before I had visited my nephew and niece and we had sat down for dinner at a fancy restaurant in the city of Camas on this side of the Washington, Oregon border and we ate, feasting on quail and salmon and two small medallions of pork loin and drank crafted root beer and ginger fizz that the restaurant had concocted.The sky was cloudy blue and the air was warm and destined to be in the eighties on Mother’s Day and then tapering off in the week to the sixties. I was thinking that never would I have nothing to sing of and brought the chair back into the house to make sure it would not be left to the rain when the clouds came. If you were me (and you will be some day), you’ll recall there was a brick and mortar post office in Camas that also served as their town hall and had additional space up for rent because the city was evolving and would never be the same as it had been when at the turn of the century an explorer lay on the bank of the Columbia river and thought to himself how pleasant a site for a town. He had figured Camas into existence.
----------------------
The boy had seen his father trade horses, sell them. So, he knew his way around the horses or so he thought. The boy was thirteen and he thought one day I would be a trader of horses and this whole entire island will be of horses once traded by my hand. He had been a precocious boy and sometimes his playmates hated him for it. Even at the age of 7 he was like this, outspoken and not at all like his older brother. One day the mare got loose. The boy came upon her out in the pasture. He walked slow, around her so as not to approach her as if there had been a relationship between them. There had not.

When horses vanish
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By the time they reached Osaka it was raining and people were seeking someplace cool. "Down by the river. There's water, plenty of water." So it became an exodus down to the river bank. There was no leader of the expedition. They just moved like a glob of thought aimed in one direction. People shouted out thoughts about where to go, how to eat, where to sleep.
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Go Unto the Ant
The only thing that matters is the imagined place. And so I went there and never looked back.

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arrange an introduction consisting of dream state coming from sleep then the extent of the novel is the rest of Sugihara's story.
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The country of Lithuania had taken on themselves so that they thought of themselves as Litvak. And so, they began to take on their way of dressing, not in the very old fashion but enough to, if viewed from the back they would be taken on as Lithuanian.
----



There was a murder of them in the tree opposite the barn. He stood looking at them in a kind of wondering when they would take flight. He waited for five then ten minutes and then one of them took off . Then the rest followed making the skyline flush with a withering of black wings. They came back again but this time to another tree and perched. He pivoted about to see them fully. He was certain they were looking at him in a sidewise kind of way that they had. what was the problem
the copse
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I am here and nowhere else.
-----

It was David Dinish who was dead and he was alive. The fact seemed simple enough and yet Henry struggled a great deal with the undersanding of it. He was alive and David Dinish, dead. to make matters worth all those he knew were dead.