Remember this. The dog will die; Maytree and I will at best grow old. It will all unroll from now. I am twenty-three and Maytree thirty; before the sea he fools with the living dog and squints. It will never again be like this. I see from our bedroom window Maytree in the yard holding sun everywhere. Just now a flaw of wind the size of a thumb drags a glissando across the sea. The air apparent.

— from “The Two of Them”, a new story by Annie Dillard in the November issue of Harper’s

If you, like me, are an unrepentant and irredeemable Annie Dillard fan, then you will understand the delight of discovery: leafing through the new issue (the pages still cool from a day in our outside mailbox, awaiting my return) and noticing her name in the Table of Contents. Her last book, For the Time Being, was published in 2001 — so surely she must be working on another?