Dear Reader:

Dear Reader:

There’s an old saying: The Devil is in the details. I heard it first when I was a very young child.

At that time, I spent my Sunday mornings between my kneeling parents, cowering under the watchful eyes of stained-glass martyrs and the crucified Savior. I was very conscious of angels and devils; I fretted over what this Devil-detail connection meant. My mother casually remarked that my grandmother’s chest of drawers was full of details; for some time, I steered scrupulously clear of that fearful presence in Grandma’s bedroom.

I grew older—and smarter, thank the gods—and I discovered that details were complicated things. Devilishly difficult, if they were done well. Any journeyman carpenter could have made Grandma a chest of drawers. But those claw feet? That rising back with all those minute flourishes and curlicues?

Details separated the craftsman from the artist.

So it is with writing. The writer is bedeviled by the task of getting those pesky details right.

But when he does, the reader finds Angels in his creative, precise rendering.

In this issue, five writers offer excellent stories. But the Devil is in the details: Moth-fluttering headlights; Playboy models who look like parfaits. A parrot with a “nasal voice, surprising in a creature without a nose.” The small, potent insight that the subject of an argument sometimes has nothing to do with its purpose. And a little story that is all about details carefully observed and meticulously recorded.

Savor them, dear reader. They are quite divine.