The Presentation of the Virgin

My short piece “The Presentation of the Virgin” is now up at Thirty First Bird Review (scroll down a bit), a site with a focus on cultural/religious interplay. It’s an old piece, and I’ve always  had a bit of a soft spot for it—it’s based off this wonderful painting by the fifteenth-century Italian artist/monk/engineer Fra Carnevale.

As a boring, quiet tale about a man loitering around The Temple staring at the Virgin Mary, it’s not the kind of thing one tends to see published in the online literary scene, which more often feautres contemporary tales of relatively unhappy regular people (you know, people just like you and me) doing unhappy and probably damaging things to themselves either physically or mentally, usually told in first person with a forceful, energetic writing style.  But hey, it’s short—so read it anyway.