“Did you see the birds?” she asked.

I followed the lines of her face. Her skin was pale and translucent, flaking off around her ears and under her chin. Where had I been while she’d gotten so old?

In the backyard, robins and sparrows hopped from the feeder to a small, wooden birdhouse my father built years ago, to the birdbath. A few squirrels dug around in the grass at the base of the feeder, nibbling on dropped seeds. A pair of birds separated from the group and flew upward, dancing together.

“They’re in love,” she said, pointing. “That’s what lovers do.”

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The truth is, ever since he left, she doesn’t wanna do anything but lie outside and listen to her music. I worry, I do, but she blames me and there really isn’t anything I can do about it.

I hear the phone ring and my bones shrivel up a little bit in anticipation of the voice I know I’ll be met with.

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It happened in a train station in Alexandria. I had found myself lost, unsure of the platform I was departing from and desperate for help. I attracted the attention of a young man and a beautiful girl.

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The first part of the summer I was hotter than the sun. Selling was new to me, and it gave me a rush to approach that doorbell, push that button, to hear the buzzer go off, somewhere inside a scrappy dog yapping, the anticipation of the door opening, the fast scribble of my ball-point pen on the sales slips with the carbon behind. Hell, I was glad to be on the road.

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We wandered out into the winter orchard behind Paulie’s house where a few fat brown apples still clung pointlessly to the trees like the saggy little tits of old maids and spinsters and the sun was so low on the horizon—this time of year it just can’t get high—and then it melted and then it smeared.

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Ian had become a wave. This was how it worked: he loved Sandra so much that it had melted his heart, and then melted his body and his limbs to water. The body is roughly two-thirds water, and it does not take a lot for the other third to catch up.

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I get elbowed in the throat. I gasp for breath. My arms are pinned to my sides, but I arch my neck up to the black-painted ceiling, the air thick with cigarette smoke and the odor of fear. Beneath the malleable rubber of my canvas sneaker, I feel the edge of a cheekbone. Suddenly I feel like a murderer.

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I wouldn’t call my dad cheap. He was crafty. With five kids on a teacher’s salary he had to be. I remember going into Macy’s one time with him and my brother Toby to buy Toby a pair of slacks for an upcoming family wedding.

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He’d raised three boys without ever writing a poem. He’d outlived his wife by 30 years, managing all the household chores, and never written a poem. He’d worked as a foreman at a mining pit, he’d run his own machine shop, and after the recession of the early ’90s, he’d kept the books for a number of small businesses, and in all that time, he’d never felt the need to put his thoughts into verse.

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A map can save your life. Say you’re lost midway in the gulf between two known tracks, miles of wilderness around you on all sides. You spot a landmark, you pull out your map and compass, and you can make a bee line for salvation.

My friend Jim has hiked and skied all through the Bridger, Crazy, Madison, and Gallatin ranges—often venturing where people may or may not have ever stepped before—and yet it was a map of his wife that saved him.

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