Here is a fishing lure, wedged between two flattened rocks at a depth of three feet in a slow bend of a creek called Dumpling Run.
The lure is what boys here call a plug, carved from basswood with an inset glass-bead eye, painted red at the diagonal slash of the mouth with hexagonal dots of yellow to mimic the scales on a minnow trailing back along its tapered length.
A double hook dangles from the front, a triple from the tail.
When the three boys uncover it, they are hunting crayfish for bait. The epoxied wooden lure has been wedged between those unmoving flat rocks in Dumpling Run for more than half a century.
Here is Natalie Burgess, standing alone in aisle seven of the Sunday Walk-In Grocery Store. The sauerkraut she prefers, Mason-Dixon brand, has been moved to a lower shelf.
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Outside the market, cars speed by along South Fork Route. Natalie’s Volvo is parked across the street.
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Here is a handful of dirt—just dirt from a field where I played with my friends on my fourteenth birthday. And here, too, are all the things in the terrible stories we pile and pile in our library that is always at capacity, and also is never full—ice, dogs, cats, coffee, clowns, and crows.
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Here in the frozen room beneath the Empire Hotel, among vast stores of food provisions is a doctor named Alexander Merrie. He smokes a pipe as he sits hunched over his journal and writes an entry to a man who will never read it.
THURSDAY, JULY 30, 1903—NEW YORK
I had to look back in my journals I’d kept during the Alex Crow expedition to be certain just how many years it has been since Mr. Warren and I brought Katkov’s beast out from the ice. How would I have ever guessed where I would be today?
There are times—many of them in my life—when it has been impossible to think about the future.
Lately I find myself wondering more and more about the stories that have been frozen—for how many years before Mr. Warren, Murdoch, and I first caught a glimpse of you?—in the timelessness of your captivity. And it was purely out of the need to allow the one thing that was a certainty be known—that you existed at all, man, devil, or beast—which drove us to bring you back as evidence of our reason, and our stewardship of this world. And so I’ve come more often to sit here among Mr. Seymour’s impossible stock of food, and look at you while I write. It brings me back, in my mind, to that spring on the Lena River Delta when I myself crawled from the ice.
Twenty-three years today! And sadly, fifteen of those years have passed since Mr. Warren was lost to us.
It’s a sort of a birthday, I should say—a birth from the ice, into ice, and now, only to wait to be born once again. And when that happens, what stories we all will have to tell!
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Here is our pet, a crow named Alex, who should not be alive, taunting a neighbor’s cat through an obviously opened window.
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Here is an immigrant kid, a second son named Ariel, who has lived, and lived, and lives again, in a place called Sunday.