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PAPER FLESH Each year I page through my young father’s comics, more jaundiced now, more dry moth but still smelling of smoke from the night the mice chewed the fire to life inside those rented walls. I remember the insulation burning hidden, the hour he had to ransack our past, crammed unexamined in every closet and drawer. Maskless in the smoke, he dropped flimsy cardboard boxes out windows, tossed clothes with hangers still inside, the shape of malformed wings. For a moment I was awake in the car, confused. Then men ran everywhere on the lawn, one hose aimed at the blaze, the dresser open on its side with a white gush of cotton. But the water failed to appear or vanished. Somehow, against all common sense, my father walked into the house. He couldn’t leave these stacks behind. But the bright covers were already half-cooked,  dark as negatives, heroes and villains singed indistinguishable. He never read them again. I do not for the stories so much as the scorch marks, the faint pictures of that boy.  ...

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