Rumaan Alam

There was a knock at the door.

There were dozens of deer. Had she been up higher, she’d have understood that there were hundreds, more than a thousand, more than that, even. She wanted to run inside and tell her parents, but she also wanted to just stand there and see it.

can’t get through life dismissing the incomprehensible as divine

The trees knew what was up. The trees talked amongst themselves. They were sensitive to the seismic reverberations of bombs far distant. Trees miles
away—where the ocean had begun to breach the land—were dying, though it would take years for them to be reduced to albino logs.

Trees marked their lives in rings that can’t be seen; people, in the garbage they left everywhere, a way of insisting on their own importance.

She didn’t know that it was worse, that war could not describe it.

Guess what? It was pink like—

“His teeth.” Danny was quiet for a while. “You think it had something to do with that noise?” Danny didn’t know that the teeth in Karen’s mouth were themselves loose, would soon fall out.

. Less than an hour, and everything was changed.

leader of the free world was sequestered beneath the White House, but no one cared about him, certainly not a little girl tripping through the woods and thinking about Harry Styles.