“houses destroy and rebuild themselves in a repeating cycle of self-annihilation and regeneration. the neighborhood crumbles and reconstructs in a looping circuit of collapse and assembly, over and over and over again—”
“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.”