Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Prior to the pandemic, we were working on an apocalypse-themed issue that we planned to release

this summer. With so many of the stories we were going to include in that issue,

focused on the deeper themes and questions emerging at this time, we decided not to wait.

Instead, we began publishing that work alongside news stories that responded directly to the pandemic.

As part of our planned apocalypse issue, we had commissioned four authors to approach this theme

through fiction from the perspectives of past, present,

and future.

Over the next four weeks, we'll be featuring short stories from acclaimed writers Lydia Millen,

Paul Kingsnour, Cheon, and Ben O'Krie.

Our first installment, entitled Vyla-Cene, is from the American novelist Lydia Millett,

author of numerous books, including A Children's Bible, Love in Infinite Monkeys,

a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, and Mr. Happy Life, winner of the 2003 Penn Center

USA Award for Fiction.

This short story, narrated by Lydia, explores historical endings as a man seeks the company and friendship of the last Tasminian tiger,

housed in a failing zoo.

Twice a day he could feel peaceful in the house when the tension of grieving ebbed from his body.

The muscles loosened, inside their sheaths of tissue, his bones seemed less heavy, shot through

with the invisible air like the limbs of a bird. And then his mood lifted, levitated by the magic of light.

A sacred magic, he might have dared to call it, if he'd been a good Christian.

...