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The Typewriter -- hunt and peck

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The typewriter sat on a wooden desk near the classroom window, a heavy black machine with round keys that looked like little eyes staring up at the boy. It was September, and the afternoon sun came through the blinds in long yellow stripes. The teacher had told them to place their fingers on the home row, A-S-D-F, J-K-L and semicolon, and not to look down. This seemed an unreasonable request. How was a person supposed to find something without looking for it? The boy had spent most of his life being told to watch what he was doing. Now, apparently, the rules had changed. He pressed the A key. A metal arm leaped forward and struck the paper with a sharp clack. He pressed another, then another, and soon the room filled with the sound of thirty machines hammering away like a small factory making something nobody had yet invented. The teache...
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The Kingdom Beneath His Feet

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The boy sat in the dirt beneath the old oak tree, where the grass had surrendered long ago and the earth was soft and brown. He wore faded shorts, a striped T-shirt, and sneakers that had forgotten their original color. Beside him lay a bent spoon, three smooth stones, a broken toy truck, and a coffee can filled with treasures only he understood. He dug with the seriousness of a man building something important. The dirt was cool beneath the warm afternoon sun, and every shovelful revealed a new possibility. There were roads to make, rivers to carve, mountains to raise, and deep holes that might lead to China if he worked hard enough. Ants hurried through his kingdom carrying things too small to see. An earthworm appeared, pink and astonished, before disappearing beneath the soil again. Somewhere beyond the fence, a lawn mower hummed. A screen door slapped shut. His mother called something from the kitchen, but the boy was busy discovering the world, and the world, for the moment, was ...
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The Things We Leave Behind

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  The old man had begun to notice how quietly the world prepared itself for his leaving. The mornings came a little slower now, and the stairs seemed longer than they had in his youth. He spent more time sitting by the window, watching sunlight move across the floor and listening to the ordinary sounds of a house that had sheltered a lifetime. There were photographs on the mantel, books he had promised himself he would read again, and a clock that continued its faithful work without caring how many hours remained. He had once believed that life would announce its ending with some great revelation, a final understanding of why he had been here. But now he suspected there would be no grand announcement. There would only be the smell of coffee, the sound of rain against the windows, and the afternoon sun resting on an empty chair. He thought about the people he had loved, those who had gone before him, and those he would soon leave behind. He wondered if he had said enough, forgiven e...
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The Long Way Home

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  The dog knew the woods better than anyone gave him credit for. He knew where the creek bent beneath the sycamores and where rabbits disappeared under the blackberry vines. He knew the fallen oak that smelled of mushrooms after rain, and the hollow stump where something small and nervous lived but never showed itself. Most of all, he knew the path. It wound through the trees like an old brown ribbon, and every morning he walked it beside the man who carried treats in his coat pocket and sometimes stopped for no reason except to look at the sunlight coming through the leaves. The dog never understood why a man would stop when there were so many things ahead worth smelling. One October morning, a squirrel changed everything. It came down a tree like a streak of gray lightning, stopped just long enough to look at the dog, and then vanished into the ferns. The dog followed. At first he could still hear the man's voice behind him. Then there was only the cracking of sticks beneath his ...
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The Garden Kept Its Secrets

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The garden had long ago stopped asking permission to grow. Vines climbed over the fence, flowers spilled from old stone pots, and ferns unfolded their delicate green fingers beneath the trees. There was no particular order to things, and the man who tended it had come to prefer it that way. Each morning he walked among the plants with his coffee, pulling a weed here, lifting a fallen branch there, sometimes doing nothing at all. A small white statue stood half-hidden in the greenery, its face worn smooth by rain and summer heat. He could not remember when he had placed it there. Some things became part of a garden so completely that you forgot they had ever been separate from it. In October, the garden began its slow conversation with autumn. The sunlight arrived later and stayed a little less, slipping through the leaves in golden pieces. T...
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While We Sleep

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  He had always thought of sleep as what came when the day was finished. You turned off the lamp, pulled up the covers, and disappeared. As a boy, he resisted it because too much remained to imagine. As a young man, he surrendered from exhaustion. Later, sleep became precious, arriving some nights easily and others just beyond the door. He lay awake listening to the old house settle, the refrigerator humming, a car passing, rain touching the roof. The clock moved through hours no one seemed to own. Two seventeen. Three eleven. Four-oh-six. Strange countries on the map of night. Sometimes he wondered where we went when we slept. Scientists had answers about neurons, memory, and the brain’s strange housekeeping, and he believed them. But sleep seemed to loosen the knots of the day. The dead walked through kitchens. Dogs came running from distant rooms. Mothers were young; fathers had strong hands. A demolished house stood again beneath summer trees. Dreams accepted resurrection witho...
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Does It Matter

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He had begun thinking about it in the mornings. Not every morning. Mostly the quiet ones, when the coffee was hot, and the sunlight came through the kitchen window at an angle that showed the dust floating in the room. He would sit at the table and listen to the house settling around him. There were photographs on the refrigerator, a scratch on the floor where an old dog used to turn circles before lying down, and a small dent in the wall from a Christmas tree carried through the doorway badly many years ago. He had spent most of his life believing that important things announced themselves. Promotions. Weddings. Funerals. Birthdays ending in zero. But now he wondered if a life was measured differently. Perhaps it was measured by sandwiches made for children who were hungry, doors held open for strangers, lawns cut for neighbors who were sick, and phone calls made when there was nothing particular to say except, I was thinking about you. He had known love and he had known loss, and so...
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