Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

The electric pulse of desire buzzed through her body like an alarm clock gone off in the

After maybe centuries of survival it had simply let go of the ground, the wide fist of its root mass ripped up and resting naked above a clay gash in the wooded mountainside.

Black leaves clung like dark fish scales to the tooled leather halfway up her calves.

She paled at the size her foolishness had attained, how large and crowded and devoid of any structural beams.

The receding waters left great silted curves swaggering down the length of the hill, pulled from side to side by a current that followed its incomprehensible rules.

Dellarobia felt an entirely new form of panic as she watched her son love nature so expectantly, wondering if

Frost lay on the ground in patterns, a white powder so dry and fine it flew up in tiny storms of confetti-frost ahead of their boots as they walked.

Little humps of moss that swelled along a scar in the asphalt like drops of green blood. All these vivid external

These complaints made her feel foolish and exposed, as if she’d been playing house in a structure whose walls had all blown away.

Every object in this place gave off the howl of someone’s canceled hopes.

The multicolored flow converged, moorit, white, black, and badgerfaced silvers all loping together downhill in their lumbering gait, rolling fore-and-aft like an unsynchronized troop of rocking horses.

silver dollar on the floor of a wishing well, begging to be plucked up but strategically untouchable.