More on: Fiction

But it unfolded itself, and, like a long-held secret, its wings swelled wide enough to span her palm. Then she saw the color it had been keeping close: hind wings emblazoned with what shone like blue eyes, rimmed with gold and mounted on a concentric field of black.

My feelings toward Izzy changed by the hour. She was the most dominant person I’d ever known, shorter than me but somehow looking down on me constantly. On her left wrist was a tattoo of a cross. I asked if she was religious. She said no.

A man once told me that chaos must have a voice. A man once told me that language could heal everything. The chambers of my mind are full of wormholes. When it is smashed open, dark things crawl out of it.

One second he was riding on the river and the next he was in it, watching his canoe float away upside down, its silvery hull a bright line on the dark river.

The racetrack, famously built before we knew of such things, straddled a fault line at the joint of two very active plates. As a result, fissures spread through the walls of the old grandstand like capillaries. The world was tearing it apart naturally.

He then went on, as if he were reading from a script, which I realized later he was, to list my severance package, which wouldn’t get me through the new year. It took me a second to realize someone from HR was in the office with him.

Yusef is so taken with the woman in black that he stares at her as she makes her way to the back of the van, and he forgets himself, and Iordannis has to remind him to start the van. Yusef decides right then and there that he will have her picture.

Jessica Treadway spins a tale of rivalry, scandal, and sacrifice in a small-town church community.

Even now, as you sit with the baby asleep in your arms, there are humble farmers amidst those lakes and rivers, their bodies bent close to the soil, and God is with them, the proof of his beating heart present in the summer’s pond lilies and the winter’s great gusts of clean white snow.

I remember when those hands were furnaces burning in the hearts of celestial bodies. I watched the very dust fall to earth and become you.