He wouldn’t sleep. It didn’t matter what they tried – quiet music, meditation, sedatives, pleading. He simply refused to sleep. His parents understood, of course – they’d been through so much death and struggle and fear and hope. So much danger. And he was just a boy. If they, with their adult brains that could…
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It felt like a new world to the citizens of the USSR. The year was 1959, and Nikita Khrushchev had formally ruled over the Soviet Union for nearly a year. He had begun the process of “de-Stalinizing” the country, allowing the citizens – many of whom could not remember a time before Stalin’s totalitarian rule…
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It sounds like something out of a story: the pleasant, quiet little town, where everyone knows everyone else, filled with kindly old people, lively yet well-behaved children, and their attractive but not too vain parents. They probably have a quaint library and a diner that serves a really great cup of coffee alongside generous slices…
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The desert was very red, even before the corruption settled on the land from the sky itself – a vast expanse of russet granules, rocky and harsh and very, very old. There were flats and canyons, scraggly desert shrubs low to the ground in some places, the occasional cluster of salt grass or cottonwood tree…
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The room is quiet and dark and a little cool. You’re sitting up on your bed, all of ten years old, and the light rain is tapping against the window, a steady rhythm that is occasionally punctuated by damp leaves hitting the glass in the sporadic winds, making shadows dance across your wall. Slowly turning…
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There’s a grassy field in Elbert County, Georgia, about 40 miles outside of Athens. It’s the highest point in the county and indistinguishable from all other such fields across that general area of America in most respects: green and lush in some places, with barren rocky patches in others. In the middle of this field,…
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In the Enfield borough of London, England lay a neighborhood known as Brimsdown, formerly Grimsdown. Brimsdown is, and was, an industrial and commercial region. Much of the residential area consists of council housing – that is, government-owned housing rented at a lower rate based on need. The Hodgson family – mother Peggy and three of…
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There wasn’t much left of the car when it was all over. Its silver body was twisted and mangled, parts torn and crushed like a flimsy soda can; its passenger, thrown clear through the windshield, was not much better off. Its driver, trapped in the cockpit of the car, even worse still. James Dean died…
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We look at things from the outside, sometimes; we have to, to keep ourselves from getting too close to the horror of a situation, making terrible things cartoonish so that we can deal with them. Cannibalism – that is, the consumption of humans as nourishment – is, of course, taboo, but at the same time…
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Life is, in part, terrifying because you cannot control it. Sometimes it feels like a war between monotony and fear – the odd person might be excited to go to work, but more likely they’re mildly dreading the day out of profound disinterest, or equally as like with a sense of equally profound anxiety: what…
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