Jeffery Eugenides is the author of the novel The Virgin Suicides. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review and Granta.
Underneath the electric microscope frass gathered like a word no one could pronounce, or something children left in a cage. Sugar ants were gorging on the corpse of a cicada next to the front door. Soon four golden mounds were theirs, to carry back in their lemony bellies to the queen. I have a box of nine suns set on spikes, a pair of gray bags concealing speakers. I am your teacher, said the teacher, alone in a room. If there is a predicate to this.
A hole in the sky is what it looks like. Something that will be replaced by color, which is a kind of false answer, and yet the only real truth in this world. The only “real truth” by which I mean forgiving. Fog is made virtually