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Those Snowy Nights You Read to Me, They'll Never Be Forgotten

Works written and produced by Soren Narnia.

The text of these stories is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA.

Email: songofsadbirds@aol.com

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher asked me to sit next to a handicapped kid named Sean and help him along a little if I could. It wasn't easy, because he was quite slow, but I tried. When Sean got especially excited about something, or if he was told he had done something well, he would smile and shout out nonsense words. One of them I remember, which he used to shout many times over the few months I sat beside him, was "Sorinarneeya!" Again and again, it was a harmless word he used when he was happy, and seeing my puzzled expression would just make him say it once more, even more pleased than the first time: "Sorinarneeya!" For some reason that word stuck with me for years, until one day as an adult I realized how neatly and curiously it cut in half. And I thought that was so perfect, how this little gem of a thing had sprung from a bit of the absurd and a bit of the tragic. That seemed like all of life to me: momentary bits of perfection out of all the absurdity and tragedy. And amazingly, they just keep on coming. -SN

Sep 19, 2018

The year was 2007, and conditions in Bello Gardens, one of the most squalid and dangerous housing projects in America, were at their worst. Decimated by poverty, tortured by crime, and suffocated by neglect, the slum known cynically as the Joke faced a lonely, unnoticed death. When tensions in the community rose to...