A Rhinestone Button by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

said the interviewer.
    “I’ve made them myself. I fixed up this piece of two-by-four with wire stuck through a hole on each end. I held onto the wire and pushed the board down into the grain with my boot. Nothing to it. Leaves that swirling pattern everyone gets so worked up about.”
    “But that hardly explains the molecular change the wheat undergoes in these crop circles,” said Mr. Mayer.
    “There is no molecular change.”
    Job stepped back, out of view of the camera, and looked down at the duck. He couldn’t think for a moment why he was holding it. He listened to the other men talk and talk, couldn’t catch onto what they were saying. Aware of the ache at the back of his head.
    Dave Nash lowered his mike, coiled its cord. “All right, Dr. Fisher, Mr. Mayer, Mr. Sunstrum, thank you very much. I think that’s all we need. Karl, make sure you get a shot of the silos and that barn roof. We can splice it into the interview with Sunstrum.
Jesus is Lord! Hallelujah! This is cattle country. Eat beef
. Christ. And the dead duck. This is too good.”
    Job followed several yards behind the crop-circle experts, the cameraman and Dave Nash as they hauled their equipment back to the van. He watched Ben leap around them like a magpie on an ant hill, pecking bits of attention from them. Mr. Mayer and Dr. Fisher continued to wrangle. Mr. Mayer, red-faced and angry; the doctor, quiet and assured, pulling out a notepad as he got into the van next to Mayer, calmly sketching out his defence as they drove off.
    Job watched the van drive away, pulling a cloud of dust behind it. Held up a hand as Ben waved to him from the stoop of the house before going inside. He wondered again why he was carrying a duck, realized with a sting of embarrassment that he’d held it throughout the interview, though now he couldn’t recall what he’d said. The television crew and the interview—they seemed unlikely. As unlikely as a crop circle forming in his field in answer to a prayer. As unlikely as a dead duck dropping from the sky onto his head. As unlikely as seeing Will kiss another man on the lips.
    Job winced as the throbbing of the lump on the back of his head came sharply into focus. He picked up a shovel that was leaning against the barn wall, carried it with one hand up to the house and laid the duck on the bottom step before scooping out a hole in the flower bed. He laid the duck to rest, and quickly shovelled dirt to cover its one open eye.

Six
    For the first thirty years of the town’s life, Godsfinger was called Hay Lake, after the lake that disappeared in dry years, giving surrounding farmers a fertile field of hay to cut. But then the sky set about renaming the place. A tornado touched down one summer, blasting a swath through town, lifting the church whole into the sky like the body of the chosen on the day of resurrection, before slamming it down again. Everything was destroyed, except for the cement cold room, in which the ladies’ auxiliary kept fruit and preserves for church suppers and pie-making events. Not a single jar of preserves was lost.
    Members of the congregation built a new church on the old foundation that same summer and conducted services until the second tornado hit, exactly a year to the day after the first, lifting the roof of the new church like a great winged bird, casting it a half mile to the corner of Steinke’s farm. Without the roof, the walls fell; what was left looked like a flattened cardboard box. Upon seeing that second tornado approach, the church secretary fled downstairs to the concrete cellar to hide among the preserves and rose from rubble into daylight carrying a jar of strawberry jam.
    The following Sunday the pastor then, Fritz Hofmann, preached a fiery sermon in a crowded tent beside the churchfoundation. He claimed God had roared through town to give them a taste of the end of the world, so believers would know their deliverance was close at hand, so sinners would have no excuse on