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# tara isabella burton, "the destroyer" - Doctors Without Boredom
- URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/matthewloftus-2018-02-08-tara-isabella-burton-destroyer/
- Published: 2018-02-08T00:56:24.000Z
- Updated: 2026-04-22T16:54:21.000Z
- Description: A short story by Tara Isabella Burton about science, the body, and love.
- Author: Mere Orthodoxy
- Tags: Matthew Loftus, Art

Tara Isabella Burton is one of the sharpest religion writers out there ([here’s her Vox page](https://www.vox.com/authors/tara-isabella-burton?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)), but she’s also a damn good fiction writer. I have longed for years to say, at year’s end, that I have read a novel that was published in the past year and I may manage to accomplish this with her upcoming novel [Social Creature](http://www.taraisabellaburton.com/social-creature-a-novel.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). I say this based on how much I enjoyed her short story “The Destroyer”, which you can find [here](https://www.tor.com/2016/04/20/the-destroyer/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com).

> Long before my mother destroyed the world, her experiments were quieter, more contained. They did not obliterate continents. They did not rack up the dead.  
>  
> She began as a domestic researcher in the household of an Umbrian merchant, engineering fish with mirrored scales. She told me how he loved to see his own face reflected, one and then a thousand and then another hundred times; how he filled the fountains with so many that there was no room to breathe or swim; how she woke up one morning to find that they had devoured one another, and left the fountains overflowing with blood.