Malignant Memory

This story, originally published in the Anchorage Daily News on June 6, 1993, won the Dart Award in 1994.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS have come and gone since Margie last visited the old man’s farm. She’s not sure she can even find the place. She’s not sure she wants to.
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Uprooted Man

ONLY CERTAIN THINGS can people count on anymore. One of them is a high-powered attorney partial to bow ties who carries a clown nose in his pocket and a photo in his wallet, not of his wife and kids but of a fungus and a nematode.
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Bodenburg: A beaut of a Butte

IT’S A PLACE of fox dens, glacial etch-a-sketchings, wild stories and even wilder ideas — like Wayne Burkhart’s long-lost dream of seeing a tram built up its side with a revolving restaurant on top. And motor home-hater Steve Kroschel’s fantasy of watching an RV take a header off one of its cliffs and explode in ball of flames.
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Burn victim chases ghost of her past

MARY CLARK HEARD VOICES and drumming the night she threw her baby on a campfire. The voices were from God, the drumming from somewhere deep in the woods.

So begins Gwen Bradshaw’s life story, with the rawest of pain and a mother who ceased to exist.
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The Church of the Flaming Funk explores incendiary media

IN A CONVENTIONAL Eagle River neighborhood — at a tired, two-story rental with peeling paint and tapestry-draped windows — about a dozen friends, all in their 20s, are gathered to make some fun on what might otherwise be a dull Tuesday night. It’s the dead of winter, it’s getting kind of late, and they’re out in the driveway jumping rope. Except that the jump rope is on fire.
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Killer stole victim’s spark, then her life

EARLY IN HIS CAREER, it took Frank Adams a year or two to destroy the women who made the mistake of loving him. This much was clear from testimony at his murder trial. But over time he got more efficient at it. In just four months he put Stacey Johnston in a grave and devastated her family.
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Listening Post is ‘here to be present and loving’

LIKE AN EDDY in the crosscurrent of this busy city, the downtown transit center is full of people waiting — some for buses, others for friends. Too many for nobody and nothing.
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