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10/2/12

Sarah Tourjee

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A test showed conclusive results, the light in the room was too bright, the white area wrapped legs around the brain like a spider, dust settled in the far corner of a table, and outside there were wars going on, car keys were lost behind the stove, planets were discovered to be merely moons, someone drowned in a river, teenagers touched the bare stomachs of teenagers for the first time, all the missing honey bees knocked on a front door and said, "I'm here." There was an art to lying still, a calm that endures a storm, jackhammering as a metronome for meditation. Lions paced back and forth at the zoo, people stood at the funerals or weddings of strangers, the hills came alive and swallowed a whole village in their fold, birds were washed with liquid dish soap, a fly kept trying to get outside through the same closed window. A machine could see inside a body, could change a life quite simply or make what was already changed known. The polar ice caps were melting, someone somewhere was born again, a coffee table remained littered with water rings, 47 cats were removed from the apartment of a hoarder, and someone was not speaking to his sister. It could explain the oddities, the light when there was no light, the feeling of sleep in a limb that had not slept. They had no questions, what was there to ask that could be asked? A doctor said, "The prognosis is good, for someone so young." People watched movies in which the end of the world is escaped in a car, leaves fell quietly, a sewing machine became jammed, and a big red dog walked down the street with a little girl on its head and crushed some trees like dandelions. 

Sarah Tourjee's fiction has appeared (or will soon) in Conjunctions, PANK, The Collagist, The Good Men Project, Anomalous Press, Wigleaf and elsewhere. A chapbook, Ghost, will be published by Anomalous press in the spring of 2013. She earned her MFA from Brown University and now lives in western MA. Her website is sarahtourjee.wordpress.com.

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