“Honeydew” was first published in the September-October 2011 issue of Orion. It was collected and is currently most readily available in Honeydew: Stories (Little, Brown).

Within this masterful story, Edith Pearlman tells a tale that is both sacred and profane. Not only that, she keeps flipping the two, sullying the sacred and elevating the profane. She starts by listing the grounds for expulsion from the esteemed Caldicott Academy, located in the fictional Boston suburb of Godolphin. Essentially, “drinking and drugging and having sex right there on the campus could supposedly get you kicked out; turning up pregnant likewise.” And then she introduces us to Alice Toomey, hallowed headmistress at the private school for girls. Alice has turned up pregnant from having sex “right there on campus” with a married man, father of the school's most troubled and gifted student. The other girls admire that student, Emily Knapp, for how much she knows about bugs and how little she eats. “This tall bundle of twigs that called itself a girl—Alice's palms ached to spank her.” A few times each year, Emily swallows a hallucinogenic drug alongside Mr. da Sola, who grinds the powder from a grub he raises in the Caldicott greenhouse. All this at the school recognized two years in a row for having the Most Effective Director.

Actually, Pearlman's sullying starts earlier than the first line, with the very title. “Honeydew” alludes to the manna from heaven that sustained the Israelites in the desert as Moses led them out of Egyptian bondage, but eleventh-grader Emily Knapp reveals the flip side to what heaven provided. According to Emily, most things can be explained through the biology of the gut, specifically bug guts: “Of course the manna, which Exodus describes as a fine frost on the ground with a taste like honey, was thought to be a miracle from God, but it was really Coccidae excrement…. Nomads still eat it—relish it. It is called honeydew.”

See what I mean about the sacred and profane? Depending on how you argue it, edible bug poop falling from the sky might well be evidence of the highest or the lowest order. Unless we're all of the same order.