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Tinkers by Paul Harding

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The very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into that cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars tingling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vestation at Shelf came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George's confused, obliteration

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Tidying the Shelf
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page 44

They murmured about a place somewhere deep in the Woods, where a set of bones lay on a bed of Moss above which a troop of mournful flies had kept vigil the previous autumn until the Frost came, and they too, had succumbed
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page 47

There was the door, or maybe the books. Or maybe not even doors. Just the curtains and murals of this world and the Star gushing universe was usually obscured by them. The curtains and the murals and Howard, by accident of tasted the raw stuff of the Cosmos
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page 47

It was like the opposite of death, or a bit of the same thing death was, but from a different direction, instead of being emptied or extinguished to the point of unselfishness. Howard was overfilled, overwhelmed to this same state. If death was to fall below some human boundary, so his seizures were to be rocketed beyond it
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page 63

Wild flowers dotted the field. Along with the perennials. Howard collected butter cups habitat, old fields, Meadows, disturbed areas, and small white blossoms that trembled in the breeze in which he could not name these. He wove by their stocks into his wharp of grass, alternating the yellow flowers with the white he threaded 100 blossoms. Deer came to graze in the long shadows
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page 64

84 hours before he died, George thought, because they are like tiles, loose, Cine frame with just enough space so they can all keep moving around, even if it's only a few at a time and in one place so that it doesn't seem like they are moving. But the empty space between them and that empty space is a space that is missing the last several pieces of colored glass. And when those pieces are in place, that will be the final picture, the final Earth
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page 65

I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors. And to their greatgrandchildren I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their greatgrandchildren nothing they ever know about. And so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me until back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass
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Tidying the Shelf
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page 72

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours, but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife. That is better than nothing at all, isn't it?
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page 89

These feelings frighten her so much such that she has buried them under layer upon layer of domestic strictness she has managed in the dozen years since first becoming a wife and mother to have convinced herself that this nearly martial ordering of her household is in fact the love that she is so terrified that she does not have
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page 119

Everything is made to perish the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so
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page 121

It would have been too awful to bear knowing the unkind intentions behind her kind acts to think about their implications, because he had always assumed that their silence over his fits over everything stood for his great to her and her loyalty to him. He had assumed their silence had been one of kindness, offered and accepted
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Tidying the Shelf
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page 124

Light changes. Our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective. And our place in it has changed infinitely. Sun catches cheap plate flaking. I am a tinker. The moon is an egg glowing and it's nest of leafless trees. I am a poet. A brochure for an asylum is on the dresser. I am an epileptic. Insane. The house is behind me. I am a fugitive. His despair had not come from the fact that he was a fool
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Tidying the Shelf
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page 134

These sudden reunions comes as much from your sorrow as what you have neglected as it does from dismay how thoroughly and quickly you came to believe in something else in that other world that you first dreamed is always better, if not real, because in it you have not jolted your lover forsaken your child turned your back on your brother. The world felt away from my father the way he fell away from us. We became his dream
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Tidying the Shelf
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page 136

And the pictures they are making are pictures of Northern stars at different seasons. And the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucien, and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this Apple. And the only thing common to all of us is that I feel sorrow so deep it must be love. And they are upset because while they are carving and plowing, they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels
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page 139

It seemed to me that this was a dream of my father's death, a sort of rehearsal for when it really happened, rather than a simple fact of the waking world
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page 140

In those dreams, I awoke and seeing my father felt an overwhelming sense of how precious he was to me, his having died once I understood what it would mean to lose him. And now that he had returned, I was determined to take better care of him
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page 145

What if there is a storm? What if it is clear and the sky brimming so full of stars that the light overflows down onto the Earth and transforms into luminescent white flowers along the bank, which sparkle and disperse without a trace. The moment the planet passes the deepest Meridian of night and begins turning back towards the sun. What if I see my father just inside the trees, humming softly to himself, content and at peace until he notices me sitting in the mud
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Tidying the Shelf
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page 156

The forest had nearly wicked from me, that tiny germ of heat allotted to each person. And I realized then how slight, how fragile it was, how it almost could not even be properly called heat, as its amount was so small and whatever it source, so slight, and how it was just like my father disappearing, or the house, when seen from the water flickering and blinking out
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Tidying the Shelf
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page 178

He looked at the young man, someone he knew and trusted. As his eyes closed, he still heard the gurgling and felt the nerveless weight of his body, but also felt himself falling away from it, as if he were lying just beneath the contours and boundaries, as of something that had formerly fit him perfectly, in which to fully inhabit, meant to be. In this world. It was as if he lay face up just beneath the surface of water
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Tidying the Shelf
@tidyingtheshelf · 1:19

page 179

For is it not true that our universe is a mechanism consisting of celestial gears, spinning ball bearings, solar furnaces, all cooperating to return man, and indeed what other unimagined neighbors of whom, when we are ignorant to that chosen hour, we know of from the Bible as before the fall, and as an ignorant insect crawling across the face of that clock, who sees not the whole face the full cycle of numbers, the shorthand and the long which pass in his sky with predictable orbits, cast familiar shadows offer reassurance through their very repetitions, but which ultimately puzzle and beg for the consideration of deeper mysteries, but who merely tread over the surface, which hides the gear train and the Springs without any but the most indirect conception of what lies beneath
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