over a little He didn’t ever get to go to the dentist, so his mouth got filled up with green plastic pieces. Amateur pulp shims. Within a week they had pressure cracks that felt like canyons. They didn’t go to the doctor when he snapped his ankle off the brown van. It healed stupid, looked like a wet sack of gravel. One shoe went tight over it so they cut it a little lose with a pocket knife. He wasn’t good at anything and he smelled like dry wax, but he could kick a rock all the way to the bus stop. The snow made the playground poles black. A girl he liked turned his nose into wet chunks of flint. What he did back made him run all the way home. When he got there he heard the oven door slam.
fancy dirt The crickets got together and started talking. She could hear them a little bit. They were talking about new company. They just started understanding about simple things this year. Most of their clicking was unintelligible, but the pill bugs made slight sense of it. There was another box. It wasn’t quite as full though. The top half was lighter, and it didn’t seem to have been open as long. The corners left a little while ago, burnished away by elbows. She had been here a very long time. The company was a familiar except that it had pieces of sick around the top. Pieces of sick that had been shattered off. The company wasn’t comfortable. He swallowed too fast, and slid down without proper procedure. It took a couple more years of listening, but she figured out that he had done this to himself. Over the course of her listening she also noticed a recurring pattern of tapping every week. The tapping had good intentions but didn’t change anything.
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