She wanted to be read to from collections of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Facts weird and true calmed her: that fruit-bat soup was a delicacy in Palau, or a woman survived a fall from the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, or a cat in England can purr as loud as a motorcycle. There were hundreds of thousands of facts, enough to read for hours on end, to speculate on. Immobilized, wasting, she could suspend her belief and swallow novelty, even if she could not suspend her pain and swallow soup.
- from "Stoop," a story excerpt from the novel Tangle Creek, published in Go Read Your Lunch
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