I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
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Doug Dorst lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, the Atlantic Unbound, and ZYZZYVA. His first novel is forthcoming from Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.
Let it burn, Bunk says again, and the deadness in his voice scares you. His mesmerized stare at the flames licking, crackling, devouring — that scares you, too. You don’t understand the hypnotic allure of destruction.