Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

Right up to the day when hope in all its versions went out of stock, including the crummy discount brands,

Distinguishing herself from the luckless sheep that stood down there in the mud surrounded by the deep stiletto holes of their footprints,

She’d been barrel-round pregnant with Cordelia

The telephone man, as she called this obsession—his name was too ordinary, you wouldn’t wreck your life for a Jimmy—“

Later her mother remembered that was wrong; it wasn’t the Bible, she’d heard it at a craft demonstration at the Women’s Club.

He turned back around and said in a cartoon growl, “I’m Wool Man!” “Wow, what superpowers do you have?”

Preston had stuck his fingers in his ears and was walking in a circle shouting the words to “Willoughby Wallaby”: An elephant sat on YOU! “Do you hear that? That’s my son. He is innocent by reason of insanity.

as the audience heaved into verse four of “What a Friend,” dragging it like a plow through heavy clay.

Her mood spiraled and crashed like a clipped kite.

She was in the same camp with her blithe, cheese-covered daughter here, acting like a toddler with food on her face. Minus the good excuse of actually being one.

She divided Dovey’s massive mane into reasonable paddocks and went to work.

The pasture fence ran so close to the house on this side, its wire mesh spanned her view like bars on a window. The

as if that had been some Appomattox Court House with the scientists on the losing side.

I can train you to lightbulb candlewax drainpipe. The man was speaking in tongues.

It was like telling a story of childhood damage, backing up to the unhappy parents, then the unhappy grandparents, trying to find the whole truth.

She tried on a fitted corduroy blazer, forest green, circa Angie Dickinson.

make physics safe for consumption, in

T-shirt stretched to within an inch of its life across his broad belly, where the letters distorted outward like horror movie credits.

“This is not a good thing, Dellarobia,” he added. “A whole new earth.” “I know,” she said. A world where you could count on nothing you’d ever known or trusted,

She considered what her father must have endured with that kind of diminished vision. Seeing without seeing.

“It’s like I’m standing by the mailbox waiting all the time for a letter. Every day you come along and put something else in there. A socket wrench, or a milkshake. It’s not bad stuff. Just the wrong things for me.”

“Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It’s kind of all one.”

She said it’s no good to complain about your flock, because it’s the put-together of all your past choices.”

Juliet had six or seven years on Dellarobia, plus an education and fashion sense and many things Dellarobia suspected she was not equipped to detect. Juliet’s face, alone, deserved its own audience.

People hang on for dear life to that one, she thought: the fool they are right now.

crudely made ceramic bookends that looked like fists. As if some superhero were trying to squeeze scripture juice out of that thing. A

But he still sounded a lot like a guy at the bank turning you down for a loan: overly benevolent, in a manner intrinsically related to the fact that he’s about to sock you.

The topsoil, the slim profit margin of this farm,