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Kathleen Devanney. A human.'s avatar

This is brilliant Mary. I wish it could be mandatory reading.

"The young girl and the old woman are together, trapped in the warm, dark belly of an unseen beast that has swallowed them whole without leaving a single tooth mark, without disturbing a single hair on their heads."

This description, all the more remarkable for its ubiquitous playing out and full normalization. Goes right to the heart.

"There was no shouting or an attempt to run away; who flees from the invisible? Even now, they don’t feel compressed into confinement; to the contrary, they believe they are free."

Ouch.

"In this world, there’s no moist, hot breath of the beast’s innards, no pulse of a heartbeat not their own. There’s a logic, an urgency to this world inside the beast that overrides all that. In this narcotized new reality, they don’t miss the laughter and the shared intimacy of hair-braiding and jokes and card games; those memories are as remote as a past lifetime."

What an astonishing description of a full take-over of a human life. So many deep lessons embedded in this this updated fairy tale and its updated predator. A false reality imposed over actual reality, via screens and images and we've unwittingly said 'yes' over and over.

That the ex-prisoner is also the hero; he understands how prisons operate - the cherry on top of this delicious story.

And I just LOVE how easy it is to break out! Beautiful. Brilliant. Inspired.

May this story reverberate and ripple out far and wide.

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Michael Warden's avatar

Wow, a real live story teller. I was pulled along to end - which happens with only a minority of ss’s I read. So hear I sit typing my reply on the ‘Wolf’, and too shall have to continue pondering that fact. But we so so need stories, even if read this way…

(As an aside I laughed out loud at your genius in locating this dreadful home in a place called Boca Ratón - then I looked it up and found it exists - truth stranger than fiction!)

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