"A Girl Named Zippy" [.]

Zippy herself:

• (learning she was adopted:) I knew my life was about to become tragically clearer to me.
• The story snapped itself clear in my mind, like a mousetrap.
• I stood with my mouth open, imagining the weird and superhuman power which would allow a fifth-grader to know the name of a street in a city thirty miles from her home.
• When I was four I discovered that one (Christmas) present doesn't leave a child much to fall back on.
• Her fingers were like little basset hounds - they had about a foot of extra skin - and if I pulled up a small hill of skin it would just stay there for probably five minutes. It hypnotized me. Sometimes she just really nicely let me do it and sometimes she smacked me, but I was always willing to take my chances.
• I had to admit that the injuries were because of my foot being run over while it was upside-down, by a bicycle I myself was riding. The nurse clapped, and then went and got all the other nurses who were familiar with me, and they all applauded, too.

Others:

• Dad could sit in the truck so still, with his arm out of the window, as if he were already going someplace.
• Now even though my mother almost never left the couch, she was a woman of many gifts, my favorite being her ability to make anything she was eating crunch.
• the thick moment when he gathered himself up and prepared to face my mother... Melinda and Danny and Terri fled so quickly, and in so many different directions, that Mom later claimed they must have evaporated into the walls.
• She was the only person I ever knew who dusted her lightbulbs.
• She was always so clean that light seemed to catch her everywhere.
• She looked up, as if she had come to a decision, or was constructing a new shelter made of resignation.
• Julie had extensive playground duties, most of which revolved around defending her championships in every single sport.

__ One cannot consider, with any real accuracy, the currency of a single moment and its extinction.
__ a quotation from a John Donne poem: "I am a little world made cunningly."
__ Inside I would see the delicate (Christmas) decorations most people chose: candles, a wreath on the mantle, poinsettias on the windowsills. No one else went as far as Shorty; it was his role to please us so much.

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