Flying Island

          Between the Devil and the Clear Blue Sky In the Tongass we had ten months a year of the good stuff. At times it came even from an empty sky, the perspiration needling earthward from some source beyond perception. A rain different entirely  from the usual storm clouds that would stoop, blackberry heavy, to lick the walls of the Inside Passage. The kids who lived out at Mud Bight, in the shanty-houses built  on pilings, used to say about that rain that it was the devil beating his wife, the sound of it some precipitous thing we didn’t yet know, standing then on the cliff of childhood before we dove over. Frances Klein is a high school English teacher. She was born and raised in Southeast Alaska, and taught in Bolivia and California before settling in Indianapolis with her husband and son. She has been published in So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Vonnegut Memorial Library and Tupelo Press, among others. Readers can find more o...