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Cedar by Donna Taylor Burgess The boy carried cedar in the pocket of his sweater because moths had eaten through his old one, and the smell of mothballs made him sick. He cut a doomed little figure slouching behind the classrooms where it stayed cold all year long. The sun never touched that spot. He ate alone from the big black workman’s lunch pail that his father had used once upon a time. They had found it with his dead and soot streaked corpse at the bottom of a Durham mine. Eggs smelled like farts the other children teased, or like sulfur gas from those mines, but that was what Mother packed him. He did not complain. He could have easily gone hungry, he supposed. He sat away so the others could not smell it. Inside the small and shallow pocket with the cedar he kept other things as well, close to himself so he could reach in with his fingers and feel. Just to know they were still there. Things of which his mother would not approve. Dead things, very small and touched too zealously. Might have been angels or tiny devils or perhaps men from the stars or beyond. The cedar kept them from smelling very much. He told no one, only fingered the tiny tufts of hair gone dry and brittle. He wondered if he would be thought a murderer if anyone knew. He was ashamed. One night he took his little beings from the pocket with the cedar and placed them inside his mouth, under his warm tongue. They went soft, dissolving salty until he felt nothing but tiny sharp bones. He removed the skeletons from his mouth a piece at a time, and dried them well. Then he placed them back inside his pocket, next to the cedar. He prayed no one would ever know.
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