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The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

The land on which we lived— / the town, the campus—was unceded. / A lawn laid pristinely over theft

The days were long and flickered with uncertainty like the light diffused by leaves through the basement window of my room. The climate, we were told repeatedly, was sub-Mediterranean. That is, not Mediterranean but marketable as such. We lived in a large house with white walls decorated in an unremarkable but cheery style in a neighbourhood that, until forty years ago, maintained property contracts prohibiting people who looked like us. We were scholars and artists, or scholars who wanted to be artists, or artists who had convinced scholars to hire us. The pool in the backyard was filled with a glossy lacework of decomposing twigs: every week its blue level lowered by an inch. The nights were a shade of dark I can only describe as royal. We were a short bus ride from a town with cobblestone streets and a campus planted with delicate copses of maples and katsura. I mention the trees because they seemed a form of solace and a means of understanding beauty in relation to time. The land on which........

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