Leave the World Behind

Life was like that; life was about change.

Rose sang to herself, in her head first, and then she felt bold, or different, or fine, or happy, and sang out loud, a One Direction song, the kind of thing Archie would have mocked her for liking
but secretly enjoyed.

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.

. Less than an hour, and everything was changed.

“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.

Guess what? It was pink like—

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

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.

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.

can’t get through life dismissing the incomprehensible as divine