How High We Go in the Dark

by Sequoia Nagamatsu

woolly rhinos

Aww

lists of the constellations she’d spotted, alongside mythologies of those she’d made up, the cousins of the Pleiades, the dipper that was neither big nor little but just right.

Clara’s crystal necklace,

So, when he wanted to leave for the weekend to attend a friend’s wedding, we paid for his ticket, told him to go have fun. Two stab wounds.

Good juxtaposition

Maybe tonight I’ll look at the stars and make up a new constellation for the both of us, a woman standing at the precipice of a great chasm.

When Dave tells me he has a splitting headache, I tell him to take his own advice and not jump to any conclusions. But I tell him this while standing across the room.

“Have you heard of a euthanasia park?” he asked. It was early in the morning. I was pulling on my janitorial coveralls. I paused. Of course I had. Everyone scoffed when the governor first announced plans for an amusement park that could gently end children’s pain—roller coasters capable of lulling their passengers into unconsciousness before stopping their hearts.

There’s a waiting list at the funeral home.

Wow

In the background of the video chat window, I saw my mother walk in and out of my dead baby brother’s room with a vacuum.

Jeez!

billboards advertised funeral packages and antique barns that had been cleared for body storage or triage.

“Skip,” Jamie said, adding extra emphasis on the p.

Good addjtion

“My little Dan the man.”

This is alittle too real jeez ow

her lungs’ cells and tissues had transformed to resemble a liver. Her heart had begun to form the structures of a tiny brain.

Weirddddd

“I’d want to shape-shift so I could be all of those things or anything I wanted,”

One thats the super skrull two forsgadkwing maybe ?

“Dance of the Little Swans”

Didnt tgink about addibg music

A group of waiters sang “Happy Birthday” to an old man dining alone in the corner.

every word like coughing up pebbles.

deep-sea creature.

Foreshsdowing

cannot detect where my body finds purchase in the dark.

Berkeley with his bakery.

Ha

I can see my father taking out his notebook from his top pocket, talking to detectives, telling them to break a leg.

Establush character trsits luke thus

Jeopardy! on the television. Who is Thomas More, her husband says. His voice is barely audible. What are mitochondria,

Good wah to slip in references

The memory shows him at a theme park, putting a little boy wearing an astronaut outfit into a roller coaster car.

NO WAY

Of course, some orbs seem to lack any explanation at all—a silver pod the size of a coffin darting across our solar system, crashing into the ocean; a large iridescent planet like the interior of an abalone shell orbiting three stars; a woman in a cave wearing animal skins and crying over the body of a little girl. We watch this cave woman sing in unknown languages, place flower petals over the girl’s eyes. We watch her walk across a vast plain as she sheds her clothing and turns into light.

I sit down on the ground (or space or whatever it is).

“I’ve never been sure of anything,”

I think about my father telling me about opportunities in life floating in the wind like seeds. May all the blessed seeds find their way to this child, I whisper.

Reiterstion hits hard

There’s a bookmark a few chapters shy of the end of The Return of the King, right as they’re approaching Mount Doom. Fitch had been trying to read it on his own despite the book being much too advanced for him, but when he was admitted to the plague ward, he’d asked if we could finish it together, our words drowning out the sounds of the hospital.

stop im gonna cry

How do you tell a child that he’s going to die?

a grown man making wishes on a sixty-watt light.

And I tell them to smile just once before leaving. I tell them to laugh, to think about one memory.

I am a pig. What job is pig?

Ammie remains silent, looks out the window. Her dangling crystal earrings cast tiny rainbows on the dash.

“It’s not a problem,” she says, but I can tell it totally is.

Charlie Brown is decorating his pathetic tree when I receive an email from Dean Hayes.

I tell him about the hobbits returning to the Shire.

The strnge family home but not sho they once swere

pointing to Hung Solo gyrating his hips across the room. I guess it was Star Wars night.

HA

Clara Searching, a mother and daughter digging in the mud by some Japanese artist named Miki.

:0 a connected world

Festival of Resilience,

I wait for her embrace.

Jeez

but still tells her stories every night through the recordings in Mochi’s memory bank.

Ahhhh

My son doesn’t have much time left. He fights to breathe. The doctors say he’s got maybe a few months. Samson is a part of him.

WHy is thi book so sddddd

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Article fonts

Theresa is a champion at throwing daggers with her eyes. She twirled the purple crystal pendant she wore on a silver chain

dipshit brother, Dennis,

Ahhhhhh

“Don’t pay those nut jobs any mind,” I told Yumi. My granddaughter stood beside me,

OH MY GODDDDDDD

claimed the tip of Florida in 2080.

Rip

people who seemed so peripheral to one’s life yet so incredibly important in the absence of Earth.

Dennis

Ahhhhh

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