Hi, I'm Lovar Burton and this is Lovar Burton Reads.

Where in every episode I hand pick a different piece of short fiction and I read it to you.

The only thing these stories have in common is that I love them and I hope you will too.

Today's story is by the author Stephen Michelle.

It first appeared in an anthology about Canadian myths and monsters called those who make us.

And Stephen is a Canadian himself born in southern Ontario and has published lots of short

fiction in different journals and magazines.

His debut novel Only the Devil is Here was published in 2017.

Now Stephen's story might bring you back to your childhood a little bit.

It does me.

You might remember learning as a child about Greek and Roman mythology, about indigenous

American tales of how the sun, the stars and other natural things and phenomena came

to be.

When humans are presented with a piece of information and event, a phenomenon that boggles the mind,

we naturally try to tame it by making sense out of it, by giving it a story, by giving

it purpose.

And in the story that I'm going to read today, we meet a young, newly married, quietly

happy couple who live in a world very much like our own.

Then slowly things in that world are uprooted.

They become disorienting.

And the interesting thing about the couple in the story are the reactions to these phenomena.

They don't jump to full-fledged conclusions.

...