david b dale posted an article on Very Short Novels - Dec 5, 2009, 9:31 pm
We sit at a table in The Glade, a room named for the sappy paintings of pastoral scenes on its walls. Their grasses and trees are carefully balanced and in them nothing lurks or lives. Their author ma...
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david b dale posted an article on Very Short Novels - Nov 28, 2009, 10:39 am
The children want to learn from me, but not until they know I’m someone with a knowledge. You’ll see at the assembly the moment they turn receptive, at which point you’ll know you’re getting y...
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david b dale posted an article on Very Short Novels - Nov 6, 2009, 11:02 am
We are the family of everyone who means us no harm, whatever the results of what they do. We love Pizza Friday, snow days, and getting into pajamas in the afternoon when we’ve spent the day at the b...
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david b dale posted an article on Very Short Novels - Oct 12, 2009, 9:16 pm
—Nevertheless you did kill him? —I was present at his death. —Present with a knife. —Mine was not the only hand on that knife. —You left the young men below? —As we often had before. ...
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david b dale posted an article on Very Short Novels - Oct 2, 2009, 10:31 am
I had no magic as a child. I would have used it if I had, to stop the Boots from kicking me where I hid. Flat against the bedroom floor with the floor of the sky just inches above my nose, I knew no s...
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david b dale posted an article on Very Short Novels - Sep 26, 2009, 9:41 am
In photos of my daughter’s wedding, I look thinner than I was and not at all as if I wanted to strangle the groom. There stands Sheila, radiant as always against a bank of pallbearer suits. Looking ...
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david b dale posted an article on Very Short Novels - Sep 6, 2009, 9:00 pm
They looked married. In what they took for granted, the other riders saw they had been together forever. He read the map of the system posted by the door, tilting his head to follow the lines, and kep...
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david b dale posted an article on Very Short Novels - Aug 27, 2009, 1:19 am
The Computative Assistant to the Acting Vice-Director of Apportionment Compliance for the local subdistrict stopped counting. For an hour he did nothing but stare at his screen and its pattern of numb...
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david b dale posted an article on Very Short Novels - Aug 17, 2009, 11:41 pm
A simple man named Abraham Kosofsky watched his tiny town of Berezovka grow tinier every day. Fannie, he asked his wife, What will become of us when all our neighbors are carried away by this coughing...
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david b dale posted an article on Very Short Novels - Aug 1, 2009, 10:39 pm
—Dad, are you trying to trade me? —What would make you say that? —Mister Moyer said you offered me for his daughter. —Not just his daughter, son. That was a package deal. —Why would you ...
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david b dale posted an article on Very Short Novels - Jul 22, 2009, 9:29 pm
Although aspects of the procedure must be painful beyond enduring, I’m not among the noisy many who call it cruelty to harvest an essential medicinal from its only source, but I admit I don’t envy...
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