Fiction | June 27, 2011

Winner of the 2010 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Fiction.

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The summer I was ten, among other troubles, there was a heat wave unlike anyone could remember, including my mother, whose memory was as strong as most people’s forgetting. Heat is shocking when you’re close to the ocean but not in it. It feels like an injustice, a spectacle—even children do things they might not otherwise do.

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