Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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Summer 1989 • Vol. XI No. 3 • Fiction |

A Little Piece of Star

In 1934 a meteorite about the size of a softball fell from the sky over Kearney, Nebraska, where my grandfather was living, and pierced the roof of his 1932 Packard. And although it was just, as my grandmother described it, a little piece of star, it convinced my grandfather that he had a destiny.

He reacted immediately and in a way that changed his life and ours forever. He did the unthinkable. He sold the farm. Sold his land for a piece of sky, my father always said, bitterly. My father was the older of Grandfather’s two sons and might have had the family farm for his portion instead of a narrow desk in the claims department at Mutual of Omaha, where he worked for forty-eight years.

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