More on: prophesy

ARE YOU CONVINCED that everything is going to hell in a handbasket? Down the tubes? Or are you possessed of a more sanguinetemperament? Do you feel that life is getting better every day in every way? Do you believe in progress or regress? What would the make and model of your handbasket happen to be?…

BECAUSE IT WAS a Monday, the day their father, Pastor Eino Hililla, spent eight and sometimes twelve hours preparing the Sunday morning sermon, Lowell led his younger brother Jonas through the parsonage yard, past the cemetery. Past the dark walnut trees, through a thicket of manzanita, down to the dark tongues of water where they…

Embarrassed by the awe he felt as a boy touching a mimosa shut along the vein, tiny leaves blinking into supplicant palms, the man came to understand that astonishment. Beyond vegetable with a reflex— didn’t venus flytrap also clamp, and don’t sunflowers turn?— he grasped the aesthetics of mimosa’s fruitless act, effect which refused its…