ppsage
Prolific Writer

(Concluded) (Goto Part One)

Of course Pops never argued directly with her. He just sat in his chair. Overstuffed and reupholstered red, in a modern plastic material. Indestructible. Long ago, Anna had Dee haul the thing down to the valley, to College Village, where she'd discovered the furniture craftsman, after calling long distance twice. Anything out of the Absalom exchange was long distance. "I know it's not an emergency," she'd said, "but Pops' a working man. Deserves

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If you want to know what the Falmon curse actually is, it boils down to Grandpa Falmon's leaving his soul lost. Although Sybil had a lot to do with getting the damn thing sprouted. That's common, needful maybe, in a curse of the "spiritually unsettled ancestor, afflicting its progeny." Needs outside agency. In the Falmon curse, a tree falls on a male descendent, in each generation. In each generation, the tree gets smaller and the injury less. So, following Jonathon, who's in the fifth

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On the last day, Old Whitey wouldn't start. Rain did that, or heavy dew, leaking into flathead sparkplug wells through the hood's hinges. The hood folded up old style; gull wings from each side. Old Whitey was the sort of work truck which made caulk booted lumberjacks careful to carry walking shoes. The men of Uncle Uriah's falling crew called their ride a crummy, same as the disappeared railroad loggers, but usually they rode in the cab and not on a bare flatbed. Old Whitey had sidewalls anyway.

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Many of my readers won't know a figure four snare. Though I expect most to recognize the written numeral 4. In this case, as above, we're considering the closed version of the cipher, where the diagonal line touches the vertical. In the trap, the diagonal stick actually passes the vertical one, which notches into it. The bottom end of the diagonal notches into the horizontal stick, the trigger. Another notch, where the trigger crosses the vertical, isn't sturdy or secure but balanced by a hair's

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A pinch of soul descends to the middle world through the portal of forgetting. There it meets base material ascending and forms a body of spirit-quickened matter. Before exploding out of the starting gate, it must answer the two questions. It must answer the question of its destiny and it must answer the question of its fate, and the rediscovery of these forgotten answers becomes the purpose of that body's life. This portal examination being not always an affair resembling those academic boards

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