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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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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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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Remibias Chua was called “Remy” by nearly everybody. She was a respiratory therapist at Edgewater hospital, and that day she was very, very tired. Health care is an exhausting industry at every level, and all she wanted was to close her eyes for a few short, blessed minutes. It wasn’t unheard of at the busy…
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It often happens as the dusk settles itself gently over the lush rainforest. Farmed animals, confined to pens or herded by human and canine protectors, wouldn’t have a sense of their own vulnerability or the existence of predators, you might think. But somewhere, deep down in their basest primal instincts that reach back to the…
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Yuletide is a season of warmth and joy, at least according to Hallmark. There you sit by the fireside, sipping hot chocolate, bathed in the warm glow of the lighted tree, watching the flickering lights from the menorah or yule log, filled with contentment; but outside (at least in the Northern parts of the globe)…
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A fresh blanket of snow glistens in the cold light of the moon, a contrast to the warm glow of street lamps, wrapping the city streets in the cozy blanket of early winter. Twinkling across the surrounding fields in the night, mirroring the light of the moon in a million broken rays, the landscape was…
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