A Personal Matter
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Read between January 10 - January 14, 2020
4%
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He was aging with the speed of a short-distance runner.
5%
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(I’ve been in the cage ever since my marriage but until now the door has always seemed open; the baby on its way into the world may clang that door shut).
5%
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Bird married in May when he was twenty-five, and that first summer he stayed drunk for four weeks straight. He suddenly began to drift on a sea of alcohol, a besotted Robinson Crusoe.
14%
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Disgracefully bewildered, like a punch-drunk pigmy, Bird was silent.
23%
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Ask a man to trample a crucifix and make him prove he’s not a Christian: well, they wouldn’t see him hesitate.
40%
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Facing one hundred fly-heads, Bird lifted his eyes and smiled.
44%
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A vegetable existence? Maybe so; a deadly cactus.
44%
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He wished there were a tiny bed or an incubator for himself: an incubator would be best, filled with water vapor that hung like mist, and Bird would lie there breathing through gills like a silly amphibian.
46%
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Bird again dredged the question up to the surface of his conscious mind: how can we spend the rest of our lives, my wife and I, with a monster baby riding on our backs?
47%
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At the same time he blushed and began to sweat, ashamed of the tapeworm of egotism that had attached itself to him.
51%
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Bird lacked even the reckless honesty of the aspiring pervert.
74%
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Long after Himiko had fallen asleep Bird lay awake at her side, his body rigid from shoulders to belly as though he had been stricken with elephantiasis.
76%
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At the moment, as long as the baby was not involved, his capacity for calm detachment was infinite.
78%
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Bird felt as if he had been downed by a bullet of criticism from an unexpected sniper.
79%
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At this hottest hour of the day, he was the only man in the city on the run.