More on: Fiction

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.

that you commit some part of your mind and heart to an unshakeable belief in the logic of global capital, which means that on a smaller scale you commit some part of your mind and heart to an unshakeable belief in the necessity of placing a two-inch needle into an instrument panel over and over and over again,

“‘Life has become better, comrades. Life has become happier!’” 

Three stories by Diane Williams, master of the form.