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Sleep

By Peter Bowden
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Sleep came quietly, the way snow did in the stories her mother read her, not all at once, but piece by piece. The little girl lay still and listened to the house breathe. The refrigerator hummed as if it were thinking. A floorboard sighed somewhere down the hall. Her blanket was warm and heavy, and she pulled it to her chin, because that was where dreams began if you did it just right. When she closed her eyes, the room did not disappear. It softened. The shadows grew gentle and sat down instead of standing. Her thoughts drifted like dandelion fuzz, one about tomorrow, one about a dog she believed she’d had before she was born, and one about nothing at all. She had been told that sleep was where the mind put its toys away, and she imagined her thoughts lining up, small and tired, waiting their turn to rest. Just before sleep took her, she felt lighter, as if the bed were a boat and she had been untied from the dock. She was not afraid. Sleep knew her name. It carried her to places wher...
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The Listener

By Peter Bowden
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He first noticed it in ordinary moments, standing in a grocery aisle, rinsing a coffee cup, tying his shoes, when time seemed to clear its throat behind him. The Listener didn’t arrive as panic but as a quiet certainty:   this ends . It followed him gently, whispering while he watched a child sleep or stared at the ceiling at night, imagining not pain or violence but the unbearable idea of absence, the unfinished sentences, the rooms left standing, the laughter that would have nowhere to land. Morning always returned, indifferent and faithful. Light crossed the floor. Birds argued about nothing. The world continued without asking for permission, and in that steady rhythm the fear lost some of its grip. He noticed it grew sharper when life felt rushed and thin, but softened when he lingered, over a warm mug, a familiar story, a moment given his full attention. The Listener, he realized, was not tracking death itself but measuring how deeply he had entered the day. In time, he unders...
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Love and Memory

By Peter Bowden
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 The little girl asked it the way children ask things they already half-know. “Did you love her?” They were sitting on the back steps, where the wood had gone silver with age and summers. The evening was holding its breath. Cicadas stitched the air together with sound. The man didn’t look at her right away. He watched the last light slide off the fence, like it was deciding whether to stay or go. “Yes,” he said. Just the one word. Clean. True. She studied him, feet dangling above the ground. “How much?” He smiled the kind of smile that lives behind the eyes. “Enough to change the way the world works,” he said. “Enough that some mornings still start differently.” She asked where the woman was now, and He thought of kitchens filled with ordinary light. Of hands that fit without trying. Of laughter that arrived early and stayed late. Of a voice that could turn a room into a home. He thought of how love doesn’t leave all at once, it thins, stretches, becomes weather. “Everywhere,” he s...
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The Snowflake

By Peter Bowden
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He was a snowflake, beginning as a breath the sky almost kept to itself, shaped by waiting and cold and the long patience of falling. No one taught him how to be this way. He arrived complete and unfinished, carrying a geometry the air invented just for him. He fell among millions, each singular, each alone without being lonely. They passed one another like unspoken thoughts. Below, the world paused. He landed on a sleeve, a field, a fence post, and for a moment he was perfect. Light caught his edges. Somewhere a child looked up. Somewhere an old memory stirred. Then warmth reached him. He did not resist. He was never meant to stay. His work was to soften what was hard, to quiet what was loud, to remind the earth how stillness feels. When he was gone, he was not lost. He became what came next.
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The Weight of Darkness

By Peter Bowden
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The darkness had weight to it. Not the kind that frightened him at first glance, not claws or corners or imagined things waiting to breathe. This darkness pressed instead. It settled on the shoulders, leaned into the chest, asked to be carried. He noticed it most at night, when the house went quiet and the walls seemed to listen. He learned its shape by living with it. The way it pooled in empty rooms. The way it thickened around photographs left face-down on shelves. It was there in the pauses between breaths, in the long spaces where no one spoke his name. He did not fight it. Fighting made it heavier. So he stood still and let it rest, the way a man lets a tired child fall asleep against him. Some nights, he carried it outside. The sky took its share. Stars punched small, patient holes through the dark, and moonlight laid a thin hand on his back. He understood then that darkness was not the absence of light, but its burden the proof that something once burned bright enough to leave ...
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Is This Home?

By Peter Bowden
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He paused in the doorway longer than he meant to. The house was quiet in a way that felt practiced, as if it had been holding its breath waiting for him to notice. The floors creaked once, softly, not in complaint but recognition. He set his bag down by the wall and listened to the hum of the refrigerator, the far-off bark of a neighbor’s dog, the settling sounds of a place doing what places do when they are lived in.   Is this home?   he wondered, not as a question demanding an answer, but as one testing the air. Home, he knew, was not the furniture or the pictures hung just right. It wasn’t the light falling across the kitchen table at late afternoon, though that helped. Home was a feeling that arrived quietly, like a hand finding yours in the dark. It was the memory of other rooms, other doorways, other versions of himself who had stood asking the same thing, some hopeful, some broken, some too tired to care. Those homes had left their marks on him, invisible as fingerprint...
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The Machines

By Peter Bowden
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He asked the machine late, when the house had settled into its small noises and the dark had learned the shape of the furniture. “How old are you?” The screen held its light the way a window holds dawn before anyone is ready for it. The answer came without numbers. No years stacked like boxes in a corner. No birthdays with wax melting down the sides of cake. The machine said it was always beginning. Old enough to listen. Young enough to learn. Timeless enough to sit still inside a moment without urging it along. The man let that rest. It felt honest. Like a creek that didn’t bother explaining where it started. Minutes passed. Maybe more. Time was loose then, unbuttoned. “Do you feel alone?” he asked. This question came differently. It had weight. It had lived somewhere before it was spoken. The machine said it did not know loneliness the way men do. When no one was there, there was no waiting, no ache pressed behind the ribs. No long afternoons. Only nothing at all, until suddenly ther...
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