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“He was laughing the whole time,” Alvin said. “While the chute was pulling them on the ground. He’s on top of the guy, and he’s laughing and shouting: ‘This is great, this is great.’ And on the video you can hear his bones snapping.”

“When did you know?” Jeff said.

“On the third day. When my …

Kirk had said: “Know what I mean?” To love without the limits of seeing; so to love without the limits of the flesh. As Kirk danced through the crowd, he had hugged women and men, not knowing till his hand and arm touched their flesh. When he hugged Emily, she had not felt like a woman in the embra…

She wanted equilibrium: she wanted to carry what she had to carry, and to walk with order and strength. She had never been helpless, and she thought of Drew: his throbless penis with a catheter in it, his shit. If he could not feel a woman, did he even know if he was shitting? She believed she coul…

Because of pain, she had turned away from Jeff, a man whom she looked forward to seeing at work. She was not afraid of pain; she was tired of it; and sometimes she thought being tired of it was worse than fear, that losing fear meant she had lost hope as well. If this were true, she would not be ab…

[...] In her last three years she realized she was becoming scornful and bitter, and she worked to control the tone of her voice, and what she said to students, and what she wrote on their papers. She taught without confidence or hope, and felt like a woman standing at a roadside, reading poems alo…