izzy

she liked to clean his ears,
took a strange, almost sadistic pleasure in it.

he hated it, but he let her do it.
years later, when they were no longer together
they still allowed themselves this ritual
when they were handing over the kids.

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sarah

The wheat silos ring when you rap them with your knuckles. Kick them real hard and you can hear the grain shifting inside, rustling across itself in the deep wide dark. Every few years a kid gets cocky and climbs the ladder to the door up top, jimmies the padlock and peers in. Once, Vincent McMahon went missing late in autumn when the silos were at their fullest and they never did find him. Kids from school said he’d boasted about making the climb up the rickety stairs but nobody ever listened too hard. The police thought he might have skipped town, thumbed down a passing truck and made his way to the city, but his mother never believed it. Six months later, Susie Jeffreys broke a tooth eating Weet Bix, and when she dug around in her mouth to find the culprit, she found a crisp white molar, but this one wasn’t hers. Kids all over the country started finding teeth in their cereal, and there was talk of getting them together to form a set of dental records, but it never did happen.

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