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Saying Goodbye to Christmas

By Peter Bowden
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They packed Christmas away on a gray January day, when the light came in thin and undecided, and the house had not yet forgiven the season for leaving. The ornaments lay in their tissue nests like small, tired moons. The garland, once bright as laughter, now smelled faintly of pine and dust. Each box was a soft goodbye. The man worked carefully, as if sound itself might bruise the memories, lifting a glass angel, a chipped Santa, a strand of lights that still remembered how to glow. The rooms grew quieter with every lid closed, the way a story does when its last page is turned. The attic waited above, as it always had, breathing in the dark. Its stairs were narrow, its air cool and smelling of old wood, cardboard, and time. Here lived the things no longer needed but not yet forgotten: a child’s small shoes, a suitcase that had crossed too many miles, a chair that remembered a body no longer there. The rafters held shadows like folded wings. He placed the boxes among them and felt the h...
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Running Away

By Peter Bowden
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  He packed like a thief in his own room, quiet and fast, the way anger teaches you to move. A shirt, a pair of socks, the flashlight with the weak yellow eye. His hands shook, not from fear but from the heat of words still ringing in his ears:  Because we said so ,   You don’t understand yet . He didn’t slam the door. That would have meant asking to be stopped. Instead, he slipped out into the evening, the sky low and bruised, the neighborhood holding its breath as if it knew what he was trying to do. The road felt different once he stood on it, longer than it had ever been on a bicycle. The houses leaned back into their porches, lights coming on one by one, small suns behind curtains. He walked until his anger thinned, until it began to tear like paper left too long in rain. The world did not open up the way he had imagined. It did not beckon or promise. It only waited. In that waiting, memories rose uninvited—the smell of toast in the morning, his father’s quiet cough ...
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The Stone

By Peter Bowden
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They said the stone had been here before names were given to mountains, before rivers learned their curves. It sat where the world’s spine broke the surface, a single gray breath rising from the earth. Men passed it with spears once. Later, with plows. Later still, with questions. No one remembered who placed it there. They only remembered that it had never moved. Moss learned its alphabet on the stone’s skin. Rain wore its soft handwriting into the cracks. Time leaned against it the way tired travelers lean against a wall, and even time seemed to rest. At night, the stone gathered stories. The wind brought them. So did footsteps, prayers, and the long sighs of those who had lost something they could not name. Some swore the stone was once a god, punished into silence. Others said it was the first thought the world ever had, hardened. Children pressed their ears to it and claimed they heard the sea, though no sea lived for hundreds of miles. Old men touched it with trembling hands and ...
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Beagles and Bugs

By Peter Bowden
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The beagle had never learned the names of things, but he knew their music. The grass sang when the wind bent it low. The porch boards hummed beneath the warm weight of the sun. And the air was always full of invisible bells. On this particular afternoon, those bells took the shape of bugs. They stitched the light with wings and whispers, and the beagle stood very still, nose quivering, tail already writing hopeful sentences in the dust. A fly passed. The world narrowed. The beagle sprang, ears flapping like loose pages in a story being told too fast. He missed, of course. He always did. But missing was part of the joy. He chased the buzzing commas and the darting exclamation points across the yard, leaping shadows, pouncing on patches of sun, convinced each time that this next jump would be the one that mattered. The grass bent. The day laughed. Somewhere, a cicada rattled like a tiny box of secrets. At last he stopped, tongue bright, chest lifting and falling like a bellows stoking a ...
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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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