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Justin Jones

Through These Eyes: Where the Wind Blows

I’m lying under my grandmother’s clothesline, watching the bed sheets overhead billow in the wind. Wafts of Downy fabric softener and Gain laundry detergent mix with scents of lilacs and dogwoods planted nearby. The linens block the sun every few seconds, casting tree silhouettes that disappear as fast as they arrive. The sheets are the…

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Through These Eyes: Bedroom Eyes

In what was perhaps the best pick-up line I’ve heard in the past six months (coincidentally, the only pick-up line I’ve heard in the past six months), a man at a bar, after regaling me with stories of his tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, noticed I’d caught something in my eye and asked if I’d…

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Through These Eyes: Cutter

My room doesn’t have the effects of boys’ rooms my age. There are no posters of pretty girls, no baseball gloves or trophies, no dirty clothes strewn out on the floor. Although, I do have a Nintendo 64 with three games and a broken controller, so I’m not completely devoid of adolescent masculinity. I live…

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Through These Eyes: Roommate

An empty lecture hall in the middle of the night. I’m on my back; he’s on top of me. Kissing hard. Loving rough. I’m wrapped around him, running my fingers through his hair. Until my head falls off my hand and I jerk out of a dream. Economics 110 materializes. A girl sitting beside me…

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Through These Eyes: Gen Hyper-Selfie

Coca-Cola was an everyday thing and we ate McDonald’s twice a week. We hadn’t heard of gluten and didn’t eat organic; we weren’t green; we weren’t medicated. We fought child-killer Freddy Krueger in video games and kept his poster on our bedroom walls. Computers were a school-only thing, thirty minutes, twice a week. We were…

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Through These Eyes: Everyone Inside

Among stuffed animals and bruised toys, near a wall covered by an “Old McDonald” mural, over a giant rug depicting a small town, I sit in a bright green chair. Even at seven years old, I understand that whoever conceived this room tried too hard to appeal to children; he was in too much of…

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Through These Eyes: Salting Wounds into Demons

No one could see him but me. I was six years old when he chased me. The goblin was a tall, disgusting, angry thing: taller than my father, more pungent than a sock, with gnarly teeth and thick, heavy thighs. He’d demand I lie down and please him, then take me behind the sofa, pin…

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Through These Eyes: Cheshire Boy

The Gorgeous Boy has picture-perfect teeth and he picture-perfect smiles. His cheeks rise, his eyes scrunch. His laugh is charming and wonderful; his skin is tan and taut; his hair is full and soft. He’s head-turning, giggle-making, loved, hated, but never ignored. Strangers long to be him, long for him, want him on their side….

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Through These Eyes: Sundays After Church

Uncle Bobby, Uncle Johnny, and my father are sitting in my grandparents’ living room watching NASCAR. I don’t understand the appeal of boringly designed cars — however colorful, however fast — looping around a track for hours on end. I am six years old, however, and the macabre piques my boyish interests. I watch for…

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Through These Eyes: Daddy Issues

Midsummer’s night, 2004. I’m 18. This will be my last year in Fort Lauderdale. I’m with friends at the home of a man we know only as Mr. Gene. It’s “one” of his homes, so he says, and it’s colossal: three stories tall, garage space to house a small fleet of sports cars, a Roman-inspired…

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