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96 Fixed Beasts Say in Vantage we stop for breakfast across the river from the Wild Horse Monument. And I’ll feel bad finishing my two-egg special staring at the bulb-gut of the lone man hunched at the table near us where it globes out from his sweatshirt hem with gray hairs for cloud cover. But you and I will sit on the same side of the booth, like any good pair. I’ll drink half your coffee, all my juice. We’ll talk of what time we’re making, and of how I’d like a mechanical pie display in the library of the home we’ll own someday. When we leave the cafe, and I slow in my rig to take that turn into the high country on Interstate 90, I’ll get fat listening to you blowing your Belcanto, that pink harmonica from Italy I bought in Ireland, before we’d even met. Then you, with your master’s thesis on-file at the University of Oregon, with its title of Why I Hate Horses, will explain: “Sometimes a harmonica can sound like it has two people playing it. Or one person and a horse.” ...

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