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25 My great-grandfather was all short-circuited when he took off his crash helmet. He loved needling more than anything. He did it at a discount. He was a man of many ropetricks, in the habit of a dust collection. He believed in bringing a boxing glove. He said he’d do without the other shoelace, was fine without utensils. His inheritance was engine oil. This sentiment skipped a generation. He drank like his mother. It took her six nips to fly, eight years to drive stick shift. What she wanted most was to be good-for-nothing. She sat you down and told you so. Her brother had a mallet fist. Her father was a flour sack. Before him, a deckhand, a feather-head. Before then, nobody knows. But still, a family. She had three aunts. It’s true; they passed off into different languages—their river with no blood, their canopy sun and their arms the poles to hold it up. The older two chickened out, but the third went on and on. She was insistent. She was a chant. Her words came down through penny wire. Her husband said her star MORE LIKE A FACTORY 26 petered out. It wasn’t like a bomb went off. She was never quite his. She wasn’t exactly anybody. He couldn’t remember if he wanted her or not. He coughed up a manual. He coughed up a hex nut. He kept his distance under a padlock. We keep her fingers album-pressed. We keep a room of him, a fourth stomach, an iron cup. ...

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