"a churning violet cylinder of smoke, a thousand feet tall and growing with no compromise to its proportions, rose off forty smoldering broadleaf acres on a windless morning on the indian plateaus. the second millennium had seventy days left to it."

"those are stories my mother tells. neither you nor i have time for this. we’re looking for worms, something very much like worms, and the exact moment when they touch your body for the first time."

we talk to deb olin unferth, author of barn 8, about heist stories, teaching literature, and chickens.

"barn 8 was the first thing to truly go wrong. later everyone would say so. the mistake of barn 8 would endure. barn 8 would go down as the colossal error that ensured the defeat of the greatest animal heist in recorded history."

"terrible, definitely. but it’s not really an emergency, he thinks, putting on his signal and shifting into the fast lane, if you can drive around it. an emergency would be everywhere you looked, inescapable; some long-submerged animal intelligence would recognize it with fierce instinct. in an emergency, the mind would not drift aimlessly from daydream to distraction as his did now, in search of something to grasp."

"sounds come up and out of nick’s mouth, syllables that mean, loosely, oh, my hopeless jesus. he has seen monster trees for weeks, but never one like this. mimas: wider across than his great-great-great-grandfather’s old farmhouse. here, as sundown blankets them, the feel is primeval, darshan, a face-to-face intro to divinity. the tree runs straight up like a chimney butte and neglects to stop. from underneath, it could be yggdrasil, the world tree, with its roots in the underworld and crown in the world above. twenty-five feet aboveground, a secondary trunk springs out of the expanse of flank, a branch bigger than the hoel chestnut. two more trunks flare out higher up the main shaft. the whole ensemble looks like some exercise in cladistics, the evolutionary tree of life—one great idea splintering into whole new family branches, high up in the run of long time."

"on sunday we slathered brioche with cultured butter, dolloped crème fraîche on daubes, and spooned a pudding of aida’s creation. the interior was so creamy it recalled the molten center of the earth. if the land of milk and honey produced no further milk, this meal proclaimed, then we would sup of the last like kings and queens."

we're thinking local, reading global.

"his name was rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of madison, kentucky."

we talk to david connerley nahm, author of ancient oceans of central kentucky, about "delicate" horror, the editing process, and ernest p. worrell.

"and the boy sunk to the bottom of the sea and the slow churn of the ancient ocean turned his bones to dust and turned the dust to stone and over the silent turning of the bottom of the ocean, no light fell and his name was lost among the shards of bone and shell."

"but dixie-phobes take heart. the southland is not just some spook house, some bigoted hellhole. hollywood gives us a bad rap. for the same unsophistication that leads to belligerence and prejudice in some can produce the finest qualities in others. not far from where the scum of the earth park their trailers, the salt of the earth tend their lawns. the old folks at home."

suck shit, sufjan stevens. (#3)

"... tell them simply that the stone god was here."

"no bros. no mercy. complete and total slaughter."

"they no longer fight for the right. they fight simply to fight, their only foes each other."

"to live (as i understand it) is to exist within a conception of time. but to remember is to vacate the very notion of time."

"boobs would be cool."

we talk to marcos martin, author of the seeds, about hexagons, fake news, and andrei tarkovsky.

"you did it... on purpose..."

we talk to marcos martin, illustrator of the private eye, about forming panel syndicate, cinematic credits pages, and technology that would survive the cloudburst.

"he's gone to ground."

"but why am i like this??? someimtes i feel like my sexuality is broken and my gender is broken."