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The husband watches the wife sleep. The house is nicest whenever she is asleep because he worries less about her and knows for a fact that she is resting, and for a little while at least he manages to forget that she is dying. This is more bearable than watching her lie awake and worry about dying.…

‘I’m going to find him,’ she spat, and she jerked the wooden spoon from the stew and flung it down onto the stove, dotting the countertop and backsplash with beef gravy. The spoon ricocheted off of the toaster and clattered to the floor. My mother turned abruptly, and her hair swung around to cover…

Roger had no ethical qualms whatsoever about building weapons that could cause massive, instant carnage. I know this because, unprompted, he told me. It was my first week, and I was in our staff kitchen heating up some noodles in the microwave. He was on his way back from lunch. He stuck his head i…

liked Samuel best when he was asleep, though even then his drooling and the curl of his little marsupial hands irritated me. No one had told me it was possible to dislike your child. Or at least if you did, it was supposed to happen later, when they were bratty teenagers and then ungrateful, smug a…

Expulsions are a way that comradeship ends. It’s easy to see this in the case of the expelled individual. Haywood’s recollection of a time when expulsions ran amok, when the party entered into a self-destructive frenzy, lets us see the broader impact of expulsion. Paranoia undermines the trust nece…