Hello fellow strange pilgrims, it is the day before our new theme is announced for August’s micro challenge, so I hope you’ve been sharpening your internal and external pencils (did that sound weird…probably, but oh well!). To help bring about some charming inspiration, do spend time with Lucy’s brilliant short story today, the seventh (!!) short story we’ve published in our Substack-y pages. Ever grateful for your readership.

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When the bellies of Thread women swell with children, the women must not step outside. Threads can sense the young and will strangle the embryo from within. After all, Threads give people here life—not food or water or sunlight, but rather the energy of microscopic waves pulsing in the atmosphere. So when you start formulating an organism without the consent of Threads, they self-correct for the unsanctioned heartbeats. Stepping outside while pregnant is a death sentence.

At least, this is what Saya’s mother tells her the moment Saya’s monthly bleeds stop. But what can you do indoors besides sweeping the floors, wiping already dust-free cabinets and countertops, and picking at the bowl of dried, fermented fish strips rotting in a clay bowl? She’d go crazy if not from the aimless roaming in this limited surface area, then from her mother’s insistence that she eat yet another bowl of plain sardine gruel. Perhaps it was a mistake—to live with her mother, to let her womb fill unnaturally, to defy the Threads. She has already carved seven scratch marks into her room’s walls out of sheer frustration, a beast trying to claw free of these confines. Then just take this stupid thing in my belly, Saya wishes to the Threads silently.

“You aren’t thinking about going outside, are you?” Her mother asks again. Saya looks away, her breath fogging the window as she presses her forehead against the cold glass.

“Never,” Saya says solemnly. She drapes a blanket over her stomach, covering the slightest bump that becomes visible only after she’s eaten all her meals for the day.

“It’s dangerous out there, for both you and the baby. Threads are hostile to those with wills of their own.”

“Then why even bother to have a will?” Saya is willing to sacrifice this “will” to go outside.

“It’s an honorable duty to have a child,” her mother lectures. “You’ll only know true happiness once you see this delivery to its conclusion.”

“Could it also be will if I will myself to go outside?”

“It’s dangerous,” her mother repeats. “The Threads will seep into you and rewire your innards. The baby will die. And don’t assume that you’d be spared from the damage.”

“The thing inside me is growing just fine. At this rate, I’ll die sooner from the mental stress you’re creating than anything else.”

Thread women are built delicately and meticulously—one wrong wiring and you end up with a deformed mass of organs left to decompose in the forests. Most come from the confluence of Threads into one functional, complex system. A rare few unnatural ones, like Saya, come from mothers. In fact, she’s not sure why the Threads never attacked her when she roamed outdoors, since her existence too defied their instruction. Saya’s mother never explained much, operating more on anecdotes from dubious sources than true experience. Saya suspects her death is imminent anyway. None of those born from women rather than Threads survive long enough to birth their own. And if they do, the later children are even shorter-lived. Like little squares of frayed silk waiting to dissolve back into the atmosphere.

“I won’t go outside,” Saya reassures her mother who prepares to leave the house with a bag of fish bones. The bones sell for a decent price since they can be cooked down to collagen and fed to livestock in cubes.

Saya waits several minutes before her mother disappears around the corner. She ties a scarf around her neck, buttons her jacket to her throat, holds her hands to her stomach for several seconds, and then steps outside.

Women have lived here for a long time, so long that no one remembers who is the eldest or who has been reabsorbed. Most forget Threads exist in their daily lives. But if you quiet your heartbeat, close your eyes, and listen carefully, you can sense them moving like strands of wind, weaving between your goosebumps and humming quietly. In a sense, it’s more harmonious to exist outdoors than indoors, the way a plant bends toward sunlight.

Freedom is more than worth the death of the organism in Saya’s womb. She hasn’t even taken three steps away from the house and already feels some semblance of living again. Her mother should know better than to keep her cooped up. Saya has been a wild thing since young. “Thing,” not “girl.” She’d roll around the swamps in a thin sundress and pick bayberries alongside the Forbidden Pond, guarded by dense layers of Threads that she always felt buoyed her forward more than they dragged her down. Threads are life forces. They fuel her so she can spend hours digging up wild mushrooms, foraging odd flowers, and following ant trails. As a child, she’d stay out until the sun disappeared, relying solely on Threads guiding the way. If you pay attention, you can read them. But only if they want to be read.

Saya escapes to the Forbidden Pond, which is really only forbidden because people fear the Threads as much as they revere them.

“A pond of too much desire and greed,” others call it.

Silly. There’s nothing greedy about Threads unless Saya were to say that the desire to live is greedy. How is that greedy when she never had a choice?

She bends her head near the calm water surface and sips. The water tastes more like nectar than water. It feels like eons have passed since she hydrated with anything but gruel, and since she tasted anything sweeter than rice she’d hoard in her mouth so the starches would break down to sugar.

“If I could have this forever, I’d give you this baby for free,” Saya declares to the open air, knowing no one can hear. Threads don’t respond to wishes anyway. They operate beyond her level of understanding—gods who don’t speak the same language. Saya rubs her abdomen, pressing over the harder part of her stomach. She had thought she’d be soft and plush like a cloud, not dense and springy like an overfilled milk sac.

“There’s no softness to bringing a child into this world,” her mother would say. “It’s a testament to your endurance.”

The unborn child’s father had wished Saya would become softer. But he’s out of the picture now: Thread men don’t associate with pregnant Thread women, taboo creatures bound to hasten ends to their long-lasting lifespans. But he had been a good man. He would’ve stayed with Saya had the elders not pushed him away and her mother not siphoned her into the house under the guise of protection. He would’ve loved her unnatural, dense, cramping abdomen bump once it grew large enough to distend past her breasts. At least, so she imagines. She can’t quite remember his face anymore. Individuality is unimportant among Thread people. They all come from and return to the same source. After staying in the house for so long, the only face Saya remembers is her mother’s, and even that grows fuzzy now that she leans over the lake, watching ripples shake her reflection.

But Saya possesses common sense and self-restraint. She hurries home well before her mother finishes bargaining off the fish bones. Her mother can spend hours arguing and tiring her opponent into submission. By the time her mother returns, Saya is sitting by the window, sipping a new mug of hot water, her body an immovable accessory attached to the wall.

“Five bags of lily buds in exchange for those bones!” Her mother declares triumphantly as she steps inside. She stops suddenly and scans the house as though detecting an imbalance in the atmosphere. She takes three large strides toward Saya and immediately clasps Saya’s stomach.

Saya jumps and slaps her mother away.

“I need to make sure my grandchild is alive!” Her mother demands. “Something is wrong here. Why are there more than trace Threads indoors?”

“The thing is alive. Don’t be paranoid,” Saya replies while shielding her torso away. “What can you sense anyway? It’s not like you can hear a heartbeat from outside my stomach.”

“A mother’s intuition. A sense you still lack,” her mother tsks. “Now let me listen or else I’ll have to call several Aunties to hold you down.”

“Not necessary. I know it’s alive. I have this…mother’s intuition.” Saya is just saying whatever will get her mother to stop pulling at her arms. “Mother’s intuition” probably doesn’t even exist. It’s certainly not something the Threads would design into their systems. Like how childbirth was something they came up with all on their own, deviations from their origins.

Her mother swipes at her arm again, scratching Saya’s eyelid in the process. Saya’s hands fly to her eye to nurse the sting. Her mother immediately swoops down to press an ear to Saya’s stomach. Even though her mother’s ear rests on Saya’s stomach for only a second before Saya knocks her mother to the ground, her mother shrieks. A long, shrill sound that resembles nothing Saya has ever heard before.

“Dead!” Her mother despairs. “The baby is dead and gone. A life clipped short, before it even had a chance to prosper. It’s gone. There’s nothing we can do to get it back. Gone gone gone.”

As her mother’s moans fill the house, Saya can’t help but feel a tiny bit of relief. So she can step outside now without her mother freaking out? She can eat the wild mulberries and bayberries without hearing about poisoning the baby into delirium? It’s a blessing. The Threads must be on her side.

Her mother kneels on the ground, swaying back and forth. “What can we do if you don’t give birth to a child? What is there left to do? Is there anything? Anything at all?” She murmurs. “In the end, must we still bend to the will of the Threads?”

Yes, Saya is certain that the will of the Threads is definitively better than the will of her mother. Saya approaches her mother slowly and crouches next to her like taming a wild cat.

“I’m ok,” Saya soothes. “The Threads will claim an unnatural existence like me sooner or later. I’m sure this unborn child wouldn’t have lived long anyway.” Her mother ignores her and starts hitting the ground with her fists in staggered gestures.

“You would’ve lived! Your child would’ve lived. I’d make sure of it. But all that surrounds me is now death.”

What death? Proper Thread people live so long Saya might as well describe it as infinite. Not that she is a proper Thread woman.

“I can make you another one,” Saya promises even though she desperately does not want to make another one. But the immediate task: stop her mother from bloodying her hand and brushing her knees.

“Can you?” Her mother asks blearily. “It’s a lot, you know. One is an honorable undertaking. Two…no one has done two before. That gets dangerously close to playing god.”

You should’ve thought about that before you decided to have me, Saya thinks. “I’ll get you some fresh water from the springs. That’ll help. You’ve gone too long without submerging yourself with Threads.” Her mother, at least, is a proper Thread woman despite engaging in taboo acts. Submersion in Threads should help her regain her sanity.

She rushes out of the house, not sure if her mother has registered her words or disappearance. Likely not. Her mother acts like Saya is already dead, a ghost carrying a once living womb. Although now, Saya is just a ghost with a ghost womb.

Saya carries a bottle with her to fill up at the pond. As much as her mother hates living according to the whims of Threads, she is still a Thread woman. A creature who needs revitalization outdoors more than Saya and her body of blasphemous origins do. Saya still loves the forbidden pond—the way it nurtures with a warmth and calm of the whole land supporting you.

“Please let my mother recover quickly. Let her stop dreaming of a grandchild. Let her forget that one once lived long enough to be heard from within my stomach. Let her think I’m dead,” Saya asks of the Threads as she places the unsealed bottle at the pond’s edge and watches the water fill. Even in the bottle, the water glistens clear.

The Threads seem to beckon her forth. Saya holds the full bottle to her chest as she wades through the waters. The bottom of the pond drops steeply, more than she imagined from such a light blue-green-colored surface. The water level rises suddenly from her ankles to her waist, but the sudden submersion into the cold hardly bothers her. Rather, Saya feels buoyed, a sensation so contrary to the denseness in her torso and heaviness of her limbs that she’d argue this is as close to flying as she can get.

Saya has never thought she was empty: not after her womb emptied, and not because she lacked the Thread’s blessings. But now, sinking into the water with each step, she decides there must’ve been a lurking emptiness within her, else where does this feeling of fullness come from?

“Are you accepting me?” Saya asks. Was her child deemed an adequate sacrifice in exchange for welcoming Saya into the Threads’ governance of the natural world? Maybe this is what her mother should’ve done instead of birthing Saya. Maybe her mother would’ve been happier. Without the delusion that she had to deliver Saya.

“She’ll be upset if you decide to cut my thread now though,” Saya laughs, though the sound rings hollow. Her mother would simply become like all the other Thread women sane enough not to get pregnant, letting their undying existences stretch until neither past nor future existed anymore.

Thread women embrace nature as an extension of their bodies. They roam naked at dawn and dusk, and braid thin grass blades into their hair during the day, only for those blades to shake loose to the ground, surrendering the rest of the day to braiding and re-braiding. Might as well be straw instead of human, her mother would scoff. Saya doesn’t remember a single moment when her mother wore braids. Her hair always hung loose and freely, without even a sprinkling of jasmine flowers, an accessory so easy to adorn that even the most careless Thread women would still cover their heads in petals.

Saya likes to braid her hair, but only because the loose strands get in her face and mouth when she eats. She has tried to learn to weave grass into her locks, but the grass would always fall out the moment she released her fingers. Properly braided hair should retain at least one blade of grass by the end of the day. But Saya has never been a proper Thread woman.

This is the deepest and furthest she’s ever gone, but she knows better than to roam too deep. It is said the pond is where Threads circulate life, which sounds fine and invigorating, but you can’t underestimate an entity with neither a sense of self-restraint nor fair exchange. She brushes a hand against her abdomen. If you lose a life, you should be able to gain life, right? Saya tightens the cap on the bottle and begins wading out of the pond, back to her mother kneeling on the floor, hair sprawled over wood planks like undone yarn. Saya would rather get this bottle of water to her first.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

LUCY ZHANG: I’ve been a writer since at least middle school. I’ve always been a fan of stories in any form: novels, anime, manga, word-of-mouth. I like the written form above all else because it 1) has the capacity for imagination (in a way that visual forms mostly supplement) 2) allows the creator plenty of time to pause and examine avenues of expression 3) connects with people without the burden of physical socialization, an introvert’s nightmare.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

LZ: I usually start with a voice or image. Rarely do I know what I’m trying to tackle thematically or philosophically from the get-go. But that part comes naturally when the characters I create end up paving paths down more complex roads of conflict.

I suppose I prefer “wildness” over “structure,” especially for short stories. However, I’ve found that I need some structure when writing novels, else I create a dumpster fire that is incredibly difficult to revise.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

LZ: Isolation, family, motherhood, coming-of-age, and the desperation that comes with the aforementioned things.

I have long since come to terms that I will always be writing about these themes until I die. What’s there to abandon? It’s part of who I am as a writer :)

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

LZ: The same me, minus the writer part (aka the anime fan and engineer). Maybe I would dabble more in the illustrative arts. Who knows!

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

LZ: “This is jaw-breakingly bad” —my English professor on a piece of fiction I submitted.

It was a fantastic slap-in-the-face to me. I learned I had pretty tough skin early on. I was able to take that feedback (with no actual constructive substance) and somehow, improve my writing significantly. All I knew was it was “bad.” The rest was up to me to find out. I liked the challenge.

At a broader level, that was probably the last most traumatic thing anyone has said to me. Since then, I’ve had little regard for higher authorities in all aspects of my life.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

LZ: I was working on a fourth novel manuscript, but must now return to revising the third novel since it needs a lot of work. I continue to put it off by writing short stories. Procrastination finds its ways.

I am also working on my day job work (the work-work) as well as raising an infant (the real work).

I guess all of these things are ruining my life in a good, necessary way.

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

LZ: “No Longer Human” by Osamu Dazai

“Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End” (the anime)

“March Comes in Like a Lion” (the anime)

I can’t say these “rearranged” the way I see the world, but they definitely left a lasting impact on me. I revisit all of them every few years.

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

LZ: It will only take ~6 minutes of your time to watch/listen to “Shelter” by Porter Robinson & Madeon :)

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Ithell Colquhoun’s Scylla (1938)1. I must say I feel slightly ashamed that I didn’t know this existed before I started digging through differnet arts archives to find the perfect pairing for Lucy’s story. But I’m so happy that I now know! The title evokes the myth of Scylla, a sea monster from Homer’s Odyssey as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Emma Jones in this lovely essay writes:

In a letter from 1977, Colquhoun writes that Scylla was borne out of ‘what I could see of myself in the bath’. She saw cliffs and a channel, a homeric myth, but also the potential to cause destruction. It is that boat I keep returning to, so small against the cliffs and attempting its futile passage. According to Colquhoun’s ex-husband, Toni del Renzio, the work is part of a series of paintings inspired by an affair she had with a fisherman while on holiday in Corsica.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, our Micro theme last month was CULTISH and we received hundreds of creepy, cool, hellishly funny, and also just plain pun entries. I hope you enjoy our pick as much as we did (how Aliyah packs so much in just a few lines is a feat to be witnessed).

We open for August’s Micro of the Month submissions in less than one week. The new theme will be announced via our newsletter sent out Sat, Aug 1st.

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The sound of the siren, and then girls were just meat. It was droning, like a firetruck, only made of her voice; her cigarette-singed lace-made melody. I’d been in line for eight hours when the frenzy hit. I was in red ballet flats, ribbon to my knees. Still, I ran. Beside me: carabiner bleeding keys, dye-stripped jeans, skinned shins, bleached pits, bloody nose; we ran, ran. We ran. Rapturous scrum, our bodies splitting like red yolks; one river, one thrum, one beat, one immaculate desire. We ran. The stage was gated off when we hit it, but the barricade was made of nothing but metal and men in hi-vis yellow who saw us and thought, perhaps: pigs. Or babies with pig faces, trick-or-treaters, witches. We stared at those men, and the men stared at our sequins, and we all played the same fairytale make-believe. That we were in our microwave safe-container, ready to be heated, to be squeezed dry like a tomato paste tube, tired out, depleted. That we would go home in our trains and on our phones, and we would unstitch our bodies from the burning, prophet-polished thrill of it. We were waiting for another two hours before she came on stage, and as soon as she did, it was done. She was our Diana, Artemis, and in our gin-sticky wilderness, we were her tree-free nymphs. She pulled apart like warm, moist pork in our fists, and as soon as we had her, we ran, ran.

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Contributor’s Note

The word cult is derived from the latin cultus; ‘worship.’ The word fanatic (from which the word fan likely developed) comes from fanaticus (also Latin), meaning ‘mad, enthusiastic, inspired by a god,’ which in turn comes from fanum (Latin again), ‘temple, shrine, consecrated place.’ So, worship. Then, who are our worshippers? Who are our idols? Who are our false gods?

When writing Fanatics, I wanted to dissect, dramatise, and poke fun at our cultural obsession with fangirls. In blessing a type of person that is perpetually at the centre of this conversation around idolatry, fanaticism and parasocial relationships with the literal traits and powers they are often perceived as having, I hope to offer an almost mythic look at young women who are imbued with ferocious passion; one that cannot be overlooked. When the concert stadium is a temple, and the popstar is a god, madness becomes divine intervention, song becomes ritual, and suddenly these ‘crazy fangirls’ are seers, oracles, prophets. And then, of course, when the switch flips, they are warriors and cannibals, armour made of friendship bracelets and tank tops and glitter. Either way, they are formidable.

Throughout Fanatics, our narrator refuses to stop moving. Yes, she runs, but she also evolves. When we meet her, she is one girl in a box-wine-dark sea of girls. She doesn’t stay that way for long. Swallowed by the crowd, our narrator becomes a voice of many. That switch is why I wrote Fanatics. I wanted to ask: what is there to fear in a collective of girls?

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, this week has been one of many mini meltdowns due to what I sense is overwork, but might also just be…well, life, which is mostly work. And that’s alright. I’m happy that I can still find space to read beautiful writing like the short essay you’ll read below. Ailsa is the kind of writer whose voice feels at once calming and stirring which is to say I can bet you 10 birthday cakes you’re going to want to write after reading her piece.

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When I open the front door of my apartment, the darkness and airlessness of its windowless hallway seems to seep into me. I feel like I’m living in a puddle just looking at it. So I keep the lights off. I pretend it doesn’t exist. Of course this doesn’t work. I have to walk eleven steps along it to get to the bathroom, twelve to get to the bedroom. The hallway is visible from the sofa. It’s visible from the sink.

This place has bad bones, I said to my husband when we moved into the building three years ago. In those first weeks, I tried washing the hallway walls with soap. As I cleaned in the darkness, I imagined how much better life would be if we lived in a house by the sea where every surface was touched with light. In such a serene place, I would always feel clean. I thought about this as I went over beige carpet with an industrial cleaner. When I was done, the dark hallway still refused to sparkle, and those stains would not come out.

Now I think it’s better if I stop dreaming about seaside homes. Generational predictions suggest this rented one-bedroom apartment may be as good as it gets.

Albert Camus wrote that people often “refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.” I want to take away the conditions I consider pertinent to my happiness, until I have no conditions at all, until I love everything.

As a way of learning to love this hallway, and therefore my life, I was thinking I could bring more of what I love in. I could attach all of Jasper’s branches and twigs to my walls. I could drag whole conifer woods in until I’ve hidden every part of the rental that could be described in a paint catalogue as being magnolia or biscuit. But taking the outside in is against the “leave no trace” rules of the national park, so I cannot do that.

John Cage said “begin anywhere.” So the new plan is to gather bunches of clover from crown land. I can dry them out in bunches in the apartment. And they will love the hallway’s darkness, its airlessness. And they will make the hallway smell like a bee keeper’s kitchen. And I will love it.

This is not a grand or a well-thought-out plan. I’m making it up now, in a damp B.C. meadow on a Sunday morning while watching oxeye daisies wave like fried eggs beside a silver tongue of lake. Their shallow roots are creeping just under the earth. The twinflowers are out and the thimbleberries have petals soft as crepe paper.

These sweeps of mountains could be from Norway. I could be in Scotland. I could be home, if home contained the screams of dirtbikes and ATVs as well as rivers. If home was cut with logging roads and lakes formed by megadams. I don’t mind this noise and the artifice. The sky is a low wash of pink and everything is misting and rippling, the tall purple clovers especially.

I was only meant to pick one clover to press in a book, but somehow I ended up with fistfuls of flowers in my pockets and I can’t put them back. Now I’m as bad as the short-tongued bees that bite their way through the flower’s wings and keels without pollinating them.

I feel indifferent. This lake is the length of Wales and there’s clover in every direction. I could pick for ten thousand days and still I wouldn’t make a dent in the surface percentage of these weeds endemic to Eurasia and Africa. Clover now grows from the top of the earth to the bottom and all around, in nearly every location on the rotation. I wonder if these ones miss their original homes.

I get up off the warm pink stones I’m kneeling on and go over to the car. I place the flowers over the backseats, then wake my husband. It’s already eleven. The wind outside is picking up. I make coffee on the stove of the Boler. I bring the puppy up onto the bed and lie top-to-toe beside these two warm bodies. Sunday morning with the birch leaves swaying green against the windows, with the mountains rising over the lake like a fjord. I’m lying on a sky blue duvet. I’m covered in dirt and fur. I say to my husband when I was a teenager I imagined this age would involve cocktails and shoes. I say what happened? My husband looks up from his book and says you chose happiness. I see two tails wagging and think, yes.
Back at the apartment, once I’ve put the camping things away and cleaned the dishes, once I’ve messaged my mum for flower drying tips and she’s replied “hang in bunches upside down xx” from her house filled with glass and light, I snip some twine and place big bunches of clover in groups on the walls.

Broken stalks get cleared from the melamine table I’ve covered in gingham, and now the chipped linoleum resembles a florist’s shop floor. This mess I love. Using clothes pegs, I string more flowers along a line of twine above the putty-coloured light switches. This is so easy compared to pressing flowers, which requires, for tiny petals, a grace necessitating tweezers. This is such good work for a short-tongued bee.

I place another line of flowers over the grey fuse box where a previous tenant has sharpied the words ‘Car Battery Plus Here’. I am in love with all this clover, with their roundness and their scent.

I am such a good flower drier. For years already, I have been so good at making cheap plants wither in their pots. I turn to the internet and learn I have done everything wrong.

I should never have picked these flowers on a wet morning. It is a “must,” announces the author Elda Haring, that they “be picked on sunny days between noon and 3 P.M.” I should be microwaving the flowers with blue silica gel, says a New York Times article from 1981. I should be preserving them with hairspray. I should be peeling off their leaves to speed up the drying process. Otherwise I risk the potential of rot and mildew.

I should be sourcing palm spears and cotton stems from florists, says an interior designer in the Irish Independent. They would look “great in a kitchen full of raw wood, heritage paint and crumpled linens.”

I pull down my twine strings. The flowers look sad, like purple rags on a line. I strip their leaves then place the clover back up in smaller, less crowded bunches. Now they look delicate. Now they look elegant, like a keepsake of things I love: light and dew and sky. How beautiful it is, to stop time like this. Bees and fields and happiness, this is what I’ll think of now when I open the apartment door and see clover. Dragging driftwood over rocks to the fire,using a rock for a pillow and listening to mosquitoes burble in the aspen trees, I’ll remember that too.

I want more memories in the hallway. I could string honey mushroom mycelia to the wall like night lights. I could watch them bioluminesce. I could make this place magic. I could find all the fermenting, bubbling living things of the world that need the dark. They’ll love the hallway’s darkness and airlessness, and I will too.

What is this need to keep things, take things, hoard things? This taking of flowers to keep them forever feels so Victorian. But now I’m reading that people were buried with flowers in Egyptian tombs at least four-thousand years ago. I’m reading about the bones of a prehistoric man in the Middle East who was discovered among preserved posies. Maybe this desire to keep beautiful things through to the end is simply human.

I read that in the Middle Ages, when human waste flowed into the rivers and houses were dark with wattle and daub, when cleanliness was something few could afford and those in power did little to make things better, people carried nosegays, posies of flowers — violets and lavender and marjoram — to counteract the odours of everyday life. These nosegays (literally, something to make the nose gay) were viewed as a protection against disease in a time when people believed illnesses came from bad smells.

Sniffing a flower to withstand the horrors of walking through an unclean street seems absurd. If only these medieval people knew to stop throwing human waste from the windows out of chamber pots! If only the butchers had stopped casting entrails in the ditches. Then they would have no need for such things.

Covering a sad hallway in clover is absurd too. That I’m getting real joy from this superficial change in appearance seems so sad. Why don’t I really change my circumstances? I don’t know how in a town where trailers go for half a million. I’m burned out by a landlord who raises rents in a pandemic, who ignores my messages about the mould in the bathroom.

My husband’s heading out with the dog for a walk. He’s switched on the hallway lights to get his raincoat. I’m pleading turn it off before he’s even done in the closet. Your thing with the lights, he says, I can’t keep doing this.

But these lights are a sad white. They’re as bright as strip lights, as a fridge light. How could anyone stand them?

I could change them. Three years with this hallway and it’s taken this act of actually looking at it instead of hiding away to realise there are things I could change.

The next day I buy some low-wattage bulbs from the hardware store. I screw them in and switch them on. In one sense it’s glass and light. In another it’s a nosegay. It’s absurd, and it’s almost enough. This change in light, it’s making me feel something unnameable. Something hopeful. Imaginative, and bright.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

AILSA ROSS: I kept a diary from about the age of twelve, but I drew and painted much more than I wrote. I then spent much of my early twenties travelling, and stopped painting, as horsehair brushes and paints and paper are expensive and take up a lot of space in a rucksack. Then I began writing much more than I painted, a yellow legal pad and biro being both light and cheap.

Can it be that I started writing seriously because I was too cheap to continue expressing myself through painting? I think it is so.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

AR: At the moment, I write while my baby sleeps – so for two to three hours in the middle of the day. Before the baby, who is really a toddler, was born, I wrote everywhere and at all hours. I wrote outside on summer afternoons. I wrote in the bath on winter evenings. I wrote while I was meant to be doing the fact-checking and editing work that paid the bills. I wrote alone in bed, while drinking a French press. And then I would transcribe the words that I wrote onto my computer. I procrastinated a lot as I did so, because I truly hate transcribing and get distracted easily while doing such work.

I don't procrastinate so much anymore. Now that I only have a couple of hours in the middle of the day in which to work, I feel I have to utilise those hours effectively.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

AR: Time, mystics, animals, plants. The way the past intertwines with our existence today. These themes prevail in my novel HOVEL, which was published by Strange Light/Penguin Random House in spring. They prevail in my thoughts. As does daydreaming.

The act of daydreaming is a skill downplayed in the modern world. I suppose it’s seen as unproductive. Yet according to Wouter Jacobus Hanegraaff, professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, the imaginative state engages a particular sense of being in the world, one that leads to a more transcendent understanding of the universe.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

AR: Since the baby, who is really a toddler, was born, I have been baking and cooking so much, because making food is something an infant can be involved in, and because it stops me from looking too much at the clock (looking too much at the clock slows time down, as anyone who has ever worked in retail knows).

Would I really like to be a baker or cook for money, though? It seems unlikely, on the days when the cardamom buns come out dry and underproofed. But to have used my law degree seems unthinkable too. If I was a lawyer, I would never sleep for worrying I had done wrong by my clients in some way. Honestly, I don't know what I would do. Become a nun?

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

AR: Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that readers have come to believe individual heroism is the point of a story, and proposes a different kind of storytelling in ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ – where the author picks diverse things of meaning and value and gathers them together, like a forager rather than a hunter. I love that, and can think of books in that vein, such as ‘Flights’ by Olga Tokarczuk.

I'd recommend reading ‘Flights’ as a means of seeing new possibilities for how a novel can be.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

AR: I am writing about some artists whose physical bravado shaped their inner landscapes. For example, Marina Abramović lived for many years in a campervan. She walked half the length of the Great Wall of China in a red coat. And then there was Agnes Martin driving about America in a campervan for a couple of years while thinking about what to paint and where to lay roots. I'm trying to find out how those solitudinous experiences affected those artists.

My own story, of trying to embrace solitude while living on an isolated part of the prairie, runs through what I'm currently writing. I play the sincere clown as I attempt to emulate aspects of these women’s lives. This is not easy for me. I don't find it easy to eschew conventionality.

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

AR: When I think of literary books filled with historical research, I think of W.G. Sebald, Emmanuel Carrère, Geoff Dyer. This kind of book, which sits near the academic, gets associated with men. My voice is not like Sebald’s or Dyer’s. Maybe it is more like Marlen Haushofer’s? Her sentences seem simple. But striking images build up within the sentences. They create a particular atmosphere. This kind of writing, which has the feeling of a fable, gets associated with women.

To have the historical content of the former meet the sentence style of the latter, that’s what I’m most interested in achieving on the page.

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

AR: The 2000 film 'Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse' ('The Gleaners and I') by filmmaker Agnès Varda, which I wrote about in my novel HOVEL.

You don’t get the France of the movies in this documentary. This is a France where millions live in poverty. It’s where anti-consumer activists are fighting with supermarket managers who pour bleach on the bread they leave in skips at the end of the day, so no-one can eat it. Varda speaks to both sides. She opens people up. She opens up the doors to her home in Paris and films the mouldy ceiling. She films close-ups of her aging hands.

In a field of old potatoes, she looks for ones shaped like hearts. She holds them up to the camera, up to the light, and seems to say look, everyone, and everything, matters. She takes some potatoes home, where they grow arms.

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The Rituals

From Ailsa Ross, author of HOVEL, a novel, out with Strange Light/Penguin Random House // Scottish // In the Canadian Badlands

By Ailsa Ross

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams (1900)1. It’s an empty room. Bare panelled walls, a wooden floor, a single window on the left, a door on the right. Nothing has been brought into it, not a trace of furniture in or out, not even flowers…no attempt made to un-dull, so to speak, the greyness. Light comes through the window and lies on the floor like something solid, falling diagonally across the door. Ross spends her essay trying to make a dark hallway lovable by hanging clover and imagining mycelia strung up like night lights, and then the thing that actually works is something she’d overlooked for three years: she changes the bulbs. Light elevates without a third thing, and I find such simplicity to be a cooling splash of water in our modern, often cluttered spaces (online and, let’s face it, offline too).

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today’s essay is part-history, part-review, part-meditation, part-mythos, and all of it enthralling. It’s the kind of writing one can spend a whole day with and still feel there’s more to be read, somewhere in between the letters perhaps, and the white space. Enjoy!

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The prisoners are led into a courtyard, where the sun beats down. Rivulets of sweat and anxious, darting eyes. The guards carry Mauser rifles—bolt-action, built in Germany—or perhaps FN Fals, a semi-automatic manufactured in Belgium. Even the Kalashnikov has found its way into 1970s Iran. No need for automatic weapons. The prisoners—nine in all—are lined up against the wall. Their crime: belonging to the National Spiritual Assembly, a democratically elected administrative body of the Bahá’í Faith. Now that the Shah has been overthrown, Islamic fundamentalists have altered the requisite legislation: Bahá’ís can be murdered with impunity. There are no clouds. The sun reigns in an empty sky.

No hollow cartridges to provide psychological relief, as in the case of some firing squads. This will not be a moment, as it was for Dostoyevsky, in which the soul is changed. If God is present here, in this place, he is silent. The rifles are loaded. One or more take aim at Atta’u’llah Mogharabi, a general in the army whose belief in a post-Muhammad prophet renders his high-ranking status moot. In this moment, is he thinking of God? Is he beseeching him to watch over his wife, daughter, granddaughters? One of the latter—you—just yesterday asked him to take you down to the market for a pair of shoes. He obliged—his last act as caretaker. The soldiers ready their rifles. Atta’u’llah closes his eyes, inhales his last breath. A clap of man-made thunder. Nine bodies on the ground. The bullet in my great-grandfather’s chest has shattered. Pieces flung outward, a fatal propagation.

Like most people, I saw Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in the summer of 2023, at the height of the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Unlike most people, I did not see it in conjunction with Barbie, which I watched in a crummy Croatian theatre with foreign subtitles (long story). Instead, my father and I drove out to a theatre in Langley, BC, the only one for hundreds of miles that showed IMAX in authentic 70mm. Oppenheimer’s three-hour runtime, combined with its non-linear storytelling, made it difficult to appreciate as anything other than a massive, overpowering spectacle. It wasn’t until I revisited the film a year later that its meaning began to unfold for me.

Oppenheimer—like most of Nolan’s filmography—is not designed to be legible on first viewing. It’s too ambitious. As Tom van der Linden explains, Nolan wasn’t interested in telling a simple, moralistic story, one that could have been summarized as “Man creates bomb, man feels bad, man gets punished.”1 While this would probably have gratified our collective desire for scapegoating, such a film would not have asked the much more serious and terrifying questions Oppenheimer poses regarding the individual and their relationship to history.

A number of formal elements collude to this effect. For one, Nolan eschews the use of composite characters, a device typical of most biopics or historical dramas whereby real-life figures are lumped together in order to facilitate audience comprehension. He says he “did not feel comfortable”2 disregarding the historical significance of individual physicists on the Manhattan Project. The result is a sprawling cast that decenters Oppenheimer, contesting and negotiating his importance. Linden also comments on how the film’s structure—Memento-esque, with two timelines converging in the middle—creates a loop. “If time is a circle, then eternity is endless repetition.”3 The film ends as it began—an ouroboros, devouring itself. “Here, Nolan’s non-chronological approach allows us to experience the bomb and its fallout all at once,” writes David Ehrlich of IndieWire, “thus making discovery inextricable from devastation, creation inextricable from destruction, and the innocent joy of theory inextricable from the unfathomable horror of practice.”4 By revealing the future before the past, Nolan dislocates causality from agency. This is not to pardon any choices that were made. Rather—and more unsettlingly—it is to regard the individual as but one particle in the chain reaction of history. When German scientists split the atomic nucleus in 1938, every physicist around the world understood the implications: a nuclear chain reaction could be weaponized to devastating effect. Suddenly, every able-minded American scientist was recruited in a race against the Nazis. For Jewish scientists on the Manhattan project—including Oppenheimer—the race was an existential one.

Can we escape our antecedents? In Nolan’s words: “If a mistake is unavoidable, is it actually a mistake? Or if someone facilitates an inevitability, do they actually bear meaningful responsibility?”5 Is history an aggregate of individual choices, like a mosaic of distinct shards, or a tapestry in which a single fiber is lost, threaded into an oblivion of meaning? Are we subsumed by history, like tiny atoms in a chain reaction of fissionable nuclei? Nolan’s circular story structure suggests a harrowing determinism: no matter how many times Oppenheimer was given the same set of circumstances, he would commit the same sin. In other words, he could never escape his antecedents.

Hasty whispers as the TV flickers, showing crowds of men with their fists raised, bearded mullahs in white turbans discoursing into microphones.

“Pack only what you need,” your father says. “We’ll be back soon.”

The first of many lies.

“Why?” you ask. There are no tears. You feel only a vast emptiness, like radio imaging of a black hole—a hungry maw of darkness chewing warmth and light inside of you.

“It’s not safe,” he says for the nth time. You and your sister scramble to pack suitcases. At 10 years old, you have no idea what to bring. You don’t understand what is happening. Your mother’s face is stony, a shoring up of grief with silence. Her father has just disappeared, along with the entire National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Iran. Nobody knows where they are.

The four of you leave the next morning, only to get stranded in Luxembourg, the necessary documents forgotten in a collapsing country. You apply as refugees for entry into anywhere. Canada is the only nation that will allow you to be human again.

There’s a scene early in Oppenheimer when the young Robert flings glasses at the corner of his apartment, watching intently as the shards fly out across the room. He closes his eyes and tries to picture the same thing happening to matter in space: a star explodes, dispersing itself. It’s a speculative cosmology, an imaginative feat of memory. The film’s script, written in the first-person, describes Robert’s thought process: “galaxies of particles disperse and reform, […] I smash a glass, and another, and another, watching the shards skid across the floor, catching and refracting light.”6 As glass after glass is hurled into the corner, Robert comes closer to visualizing an atom’s structure. Quivering belts of energy rotate, locking into place. These observations lead Robert to “write furiously at a desk, […] write furiously on a chalkboard.”7 Fragmentation as precursor to revelation. Discovery as inextricable from devastation. When a star goes supernova, it self-detonates, scattering tiny pieces of itself across the cosmos, pollinating the void. My right hand is comprised of atoms from a different deceased star than my left. We are composites of shattered stellar entities—celestial cadavers. Elegy for cosmic lightbulbs. Our violent stellar ancestry can be traced down to the subatomic realm, where matter is mostly empty space, unstable and crackling. The atom as synecdoche for star.

We are sitting in a garden you have made. Mugs of dark roast in our hands. Clay pots, dark soil spotted with perlite. Some are plants I brought here, to Surrey from Vancouver, having picked them up on the way. You found them on Facebook Marketplace ads, which you scroll idly during remote tutoring sessions as dyslexic children struggle with their sentences. Once, the woman who handed the potted plant to me said I was a good son, but all I could think was how the act was nothing—a wink of light against the vast darkness of your sacrifices. A breeze carries the scent of pine from a nearby playground. The lemon plant beside me releases its citrusy breath. The sun is shining down, so rare for this city, even in May.

I tell you about my therapy sessions. I broach the subject delicately, uneasy on this new terrain. I say that, growing up, your unreserved disgust toward displays of intimacy on film and television was hard for me. You and dad having separated when I was only two didn’t help. I had no positive examples of intimacy to supply me with a counterpoint to your revulsion. I grew up thinking all expressions of desire were grotesque. Inside me accreted the belief that love comes with terms and conditions.

Your eyes darken.

“I won’t apologize,” you say, “for trying to protect you from this cesspool of a society.”

I watch your lips form the words, a wingless bird in me.

The day grows a little darker, though there are no clouds.

Newton’s law of conservation of matter states that in a closed system, matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed via physical or chemical processes. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² describes how matter can be converted into energy and vice versa, though this requires a tremendous degree of violence, as in nuclear fission—the tearing apart of the very fabric of reality. Except for the Big Bang, nothing in the universe was actually created; only a series of transformations have taken place, matter and energy continuously recycled, a chain of successions leading to the present moment. The past is always conserved, no matter how mutated or changed.

Although Newtonian mechanics are valid in a macro picture of the universe, at the subatomic level, chaos reigns. In Oppenheimer, a lecturing Heisenberg puts it succinctly: “One might be led to the presumption that behind the quantum world, there still lies a real world in which causality holds, but such speculations seem to us, to say it explicitly, fruitless.”8 According to one principle known as “superposition,” subatomic particles exist in multiple states simultaneously until observed, whereupon the wave function collapses and the system settles into a definite state—an irreconcilable paradox so radical that Einstein himself refused to acknowledge it, famously insisting that “God doesn’t play dice.” This phenomenon applies especially to light, which is both a particle and a wave until an observer conducts an experiment.

Every cause has an effect. Is it not meaningless to speak of Free Will—that is, of a will that is free—if one’s very desires are predetermined, traceable to an original antecedent? Schopenhauer’s formulation: “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” Does quantum paradox provide an alternative to causality? Is it foolhardy to hope that, given our subatomic composition, there exists a way to circumvent the causal chain? Are we both free and unfree, made and unmade?

You open the door, my cousin’s pants around his ankles.

Light streaming in through the bathroom window. Silence in the house. Our bodies—strange, innocent.

Your eyes are wild with rage.

“What are you doing!?”

“Taking a shower,” he says, his voice pale and small.

“Don’t lie to me,” you snarl.

You grab me by the wrist, wrenching my body from the bathroom. You drag me into the hall.

Later, you and your sister converse in hushed whispers by the door, deciding our fate.

My cousin and I avoid each other’s eyes.

To this day, neither of us has spoken of it.

A star is a burning furnace in space—“fire pushing outwards against its own gravity.”9 When the star cools, it shrinks. Gravity and density increase. Usually, the imploding star goes supernova—star shrapnel. “The bigger the star, the more violent its demise.”10 If the star is massive enough, the implosion produces a singularity—a single point of infinite density where the laws of physics cease to exist.

In Oppenheimer’s time, black holes were purely theoretical entities, answers to problems presented by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. In 1971, the first ever black hole named Cygnus X-1 was discovered based on x-ray emissions and the behavior of a nearby star. In 2015, gravitational waves produced by colliding black holes were detected, and in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first ever image of a black hole. Oppenheimer himself was one of the first to hypothesize the singularity. In the film, he describes it poetically: “Gravity gets so concentrated it swallows everything, even light.”11 Not even light, travelling at nearly 300 million meters per second, can escape the devouring appetite of a black hole. Because of this, nobody knows what lies on the other side of the event horizon. There is no light to tell us what is there.

Did you know what you were doing? On that afternoon when my cousin and I, curious, studied each other’s bodies. Did you know that your wrath was changing me, one atom at a time? That I was aching to be different—to be erased. A small step from disgust to mutilation, as in Anis Mojgani’s poem where “I wish I was dead” becomes finally “I want to kill myself.”12 What is the antonym for despair? All I can do is wonder if I was destined to become someone else—someone unafraid of their own body, who never learned the language of shame.

Light was all around us that day, but I wished it wasn’t. I wished that I could be extinguished—a lightbulb snuffed out by gravity, in a place beyond the reach of any eyes.

We’re playing backgammon and drinking tea—your mother’s signature blend of bergamot, earl grey and cardamom. You bite off a piece of sugar, holding it between your teeth as you sip the scalding beverage. I roll snake eyes and laugh. “Sorry,” I say, trampling your pieces without mercy. It’s mid-afternoon. Light fills the room from the balcony, stretching across the Persian carpet that is older than me. To our right, a cabinet filled with antique plates and glasses. In the living room, the television blaring. A life built up from nearly nothing, long before I was born. I came into this world, heedless of the lack that preceded me.

Your words, casual as you take the dice from my hand:

“Deep down, I wish I had never been born.”

I watch you say this.

Your mother in the kitchen, dicing cucumbers.

Your father in the living room, watching Wheel of Fortune.

Oppenheimer eludes us. Despite a script written in the 1st-person and oceans of screentime devoted to Cillian Murphy’s piercing blue eyes, somehow this man’s soul slips through our fingers. “The closer we got, the more obscure the picture became,” says Christopher Nolan of the historical figure, “like a newspaper photograph becoming incoherent under magnification.”13 Throughout the film, we witness Oppenheimer deploy various justifications for what he is doing. As Manohla Dargis reminds us, the Jewish physicists on the Manhattan project “saw their work in stark, existential terms.”14 Why is violence so easy to justify? Why do our eyes distort suffering into virtue, right up until the moment of detonation? It’s never clear to what extent Oppenheimer is deluding himself. As director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema says, “The face is like a landscape,”15 and the landscape of Oppenheimer’s countenance remains clouded in mystery. It becomes, in Dargis’ words, “both vista and mirror.”16

The closer I come to you, the farther you recede. Who are you? Where does the wrath-filled despot end and my mother begin? How do I separate the trauma from your resilience, the darkness from your light? It would be so easy to blame you. To say: You are the reason I feel disgust when someone tells me they love me. Because of you, I confuse closeness with terror. A partner runs their hand along my arm and I can feel only fear.

It would be so easy.

But what would it solve?

Scapegoating you accomplishes nothing. The momentary catharsis gives way to a vast emptiness. In renouncing you, I deny half of me. You, in all your broken humanity. Both particle and wave; my wound and my light.

After the divorce, dad moves to West Vancouver while you stay in Richmond with your parents. He insists I attend high school in the former, promising sports enrolments that never materialize. You get a job there just so you can drive me the 45 minutes back and forth each day. On days when you work longer hours, I take two buses and a sky-train home. All of my friends live near school, a 1.5-hour transit ride away.

One night, I’ve had enough. Enough of my loneliness. Enough of the poverty I’ve come to associate with our family. Enough of this tired routine.

I tell you all this, sparing no details, my words unending and harsh.

You who studied English literature instead of something more lucrative because my father insisted you’d never have to worry about money.

You whose parents shipped you off to an uncle in L.A. while they worked tirelessly, buying only what was on sale at the grocery store so they could afford to send you and your sister money.

You who felt unwanted in your uncle’s house, his young wife openly irritated by the presence of children not her own.

You who began hating herself in 1979, ever since the day your wanting—that pair of shoes—caused the world to end.

You who has struggled with PTSD and eating disorders ever since.

You who are standing in the doorway as my words bring you to your knees.

I tell you it’s not enough.

I say: I want a different life.

I watch you fall, clutching the doorframe, as if the weight of my words is too much.

You say: “It’s all I have.”

Composer Ludwig Göransson threaded the same melody throughout Oppenheimer—a leitmotif that changes, reflecting the protagonist’s inner transformation. “Can You Hear The Music” comes first, scoring the montage of Robert’s time at Gottingen. Here, notes swell in a flurry of exhilaration. The tempo increases, culminating in a crescendo as Robert visualizes the atom’s true form—“the innocent joy of theory.”

In “Theorists,” a once-flourishing optimism mutates, acquiring an ominous subtext, the notes sliding into an uncanny register. Oppenheimer and his team race against the clock to construct the first atomic bomb. A line has been crossed. The gorgeousness of the previous tracks is being weaponized, recruited into a system of power and annihilation. The same chords sound harried and anxious, as if fretting over their terrible purpose—“the unfathomable horror of practice.”

Finally, in “Destroyer of Worlds,” both timelines converge at the moment when Oppenheimer finally grasps the terrible process he has set in motion. He is standing by the pond, conversing with Einstein. The music transforms into an ominous portent of doom as he visualizes the stockpiling of atomic weapons, a literal cascade of neutron fractures that never cease, setting fire to the atmosphere. The score is foreboding, yet familiar; it’s the same notes as before—as if, lurking inside that beauty, such horrors lay in wait all along. Despite his best intentions, Oppenheimer can no longer deny having catalyzed an arms race that will change the course of history. And now, the same chords that once expressed euphoria are distorted beyond recognition—each note like an unstable isotope, forming a crackling, paranoid score. It surges, just like it did with “Can You Hear The Music,” but now the crescendo connotes something far more sinister: the chilling revelation of apocalypse.

It’s a coalition of opposites—beauty and terror, each held in abeyance. But I can’t help wondering: Does it go both ways? Can the process be reverse-engineered—the atom reconstructed, the particles fused back together? Can I make myself the antonym of your despair?

Somewhere in the past, a fire-breather battles the darkness with torches. Faces in the crowd appear carved, like ancient statues—Zoroaster, Persepolis. The flames leave thick orange smears across my vision that fade into purple streaks, vanishing like the sloughed skins of snakes in an underwater dream. You hold my hand. Dad stands behind me, kneading my shoulders. He kneels, pressing his mouth against the back of my shirt, exhaling slowly. Warmth spreads through my body, joining the warmth of the fire-show, of our togetherness. It’s the only memory I have where you still love me as my father’s son; where both pieces of me are still unified, as one. A pre-fission wholeness I have spent my whole life mourning.

A black hole is not a point in space, but an end in time. If one were to look back at the universe from the ledge of the event-horizon—the threshold of extinguishment—one would see all of time passing in a few seconds, as though the universe were playing out on fast-forward. Does this mean, somewhere in the void, everything has already happened? Is someone out there as we speak, watching the tape at maximum speed?

Your fists left me scrambling for witness—a hole in my self-knowing that only other eyes could fill. I know you did it in the name of a religion for which you lost everything—one that bade sexual symmetry blasphemous. The ultimate sunk cost fallacy: admit that God isn’t real, and you lost home for nothing. You did it to give meaning to what went missing. Such expensive significance, purchased at the cost of who I was supposed to become.

There are pieces of a bullet lodged in your grandfather’s chest. There are pieces of your grief lodged in me. All of us exist due to a primordial detonation, indebted to cosmic calamities. How do I disentangle myself from your despair? Where does your darkness end, my light begin? I come from your suffering. It’s folded into me, in the shape of broken wings.

Maybe I am trying to ask: Is there a future in which I love myself?

Christopher Nolan has long been interested in characters whose obsessions threaten to bring about their downfall. From Memento to Inception, his protagonists have been forced to make ontological gambles without epistemological certainty—to barter their souls without knowing what the outcome will be. They are, in Ehrlich’s words, “potentially self-destructive men who sift through the source code of space-time in a desperate bid to understand the meaning of their own actions.”17 Oppenheimer represents the quintessence of this internal struggle—an “uncannily perfect subject”18 for a Nolan movie. Ehrlich continues: “At first, I thought that if J. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t exist, Christopher Nolan would probably have been compelled to invent him. […] In fact, Oppenheimer is so perversely well-suited to the Nolan treatment that I soon began to realize I had things backwards: Christopher Nolan only exists because men like J. Robert Oppenheimer invented him first.”19 In other words, the future dictated—made possible—by the past.

Pearls of rain on the window. My small body curled into yours, The Chronicles of Narnia open before us, our eyes imbibing page after page as the seven-volume saga draws to a close. We will cry together when it’s over, as if grieving a living thing. As if grieving a world. The fire crackles beside us; dusk a blue pressure against the window. It will be years until I encounter Proust’s formulation that, when the weather is cold and harsh, a fire will “add to the comfort of reclusion the poetry of hibernation.”20 It will be years until I read Knausgaard writing of Proust’s work: “The novel was like a place, and every morning I longed to be back in it.”21 Both of these authors will save me, and I will find them only because of a love for literature I learned through you. Narnia, Harry Potter, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—to say nothing of earlier works you whispered to me as the night fell. The Giving Tree stands out, a controversial celebration of sacrifice which, after everything, I now read you inside. You have always been a lover of stories, and you passed this love down to me. It was chemical, nocturnal. I have you to thank for becoming a writer. Every word on this page, indebted to your heart.

I only exist because you invented me first.

In cosmology, most celestial entities are so staggeringly far away that, by the time their light reaches us, many stars are presumed dead. The night sky is a stellar graveyard, a ghost impression. If anything, it demonstrates the persistent intangibility of light—something that can be witnessed but never captured, known but never held. An object of mournfulness.

Astronomers have determined that the universe is expanding because of a phenomenon known as red-shifting. The oldest regions of the universe—her most ancient light—shift red in the color spectrum because the light rays are being stretched away from us. Accordingly, the nearer the star, the bluer it appears.

In this way, the past escapes, fleeing our fingers.

Time too old to touch as light.

I have a picture of you on my wall. You’re four or five, sporting a comical bowl-cut. Your smile is broad, untarnished. The future exerts its pressure on this moment, like a hand blocking the sun. In half a decade, the Revolution will happen—splitting you in half. I look at your joy—pure, untrammeled—and I wish for other outcomes, alternative eventualities. Could it have been different? The photograph is smears of your light, stranded on this page. Here you are, red-shifted into a limitless nowhere, a borderless place beyond death and dreams, where you and I never wanted to be anyone else. I am pieces of you, flung into the void.

Mother, I am your star shrapnel.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

ATA ZARGAROF: Not counting the Star Wars FanFic I wrote as a child about a Jedi named Marcus Jale (lol), it wasn’t until my first heartbreak in high school that writing became the emotional ventilation system it is for me today. Writing draws on the most unassuming of materials--language--to connect us with one another. This, combined with the form's intimacy, is what makes it truly unique for me.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

AZ: I try to write first thing every morning, when the dreamworld's associative powers are still in reign. Writing by hand slows me down. That + a little bit of coffee and my writing playlist = chef's kiss. I know a piece is really taking off when it latches to a single song. In the case of this essay, I had "I Wanna Know" by Phantogram on loop like an insane person. I'm talking hours and hours. I can no longer casually listen to that song as it's become fused with Star Shrapnel for me.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

AZ: Memory is my Roman Empire. How do we remember the dead? What do we get wrong when we write about them? Does writing about the past justify the violence of representation? Particularly as the child of immigrants, these and other adjacent questions have haunted me for years.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

AZ: A chef, probably. I'm a bartender, which already feels like a fusion of the culinary and the creative. I love drawing on the longstanding history of various spirits and liqueurs when remixing cocktail recipes (Chartreuse monks, anyone?). Still, nothing compares with the aura of a chef. Or maybe I'm just The Bear-pilled.

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

AZ: When Elissa Washuta came to speak at my university, someone asked how she managed to finish a project as long and researched as White Magic. Her advice was to "touch the project every day," even for only a few minutes. Doing so helps maintain momentum while also lowering expectations. Sometimes a few minutes is all we have, and that's enough.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

AZ: I'm currently working on a meta-fictional novel about a philosophy student who discovers a translation of an ancient text written by one of his ancestors. It's also a braided narrative that jumps back and forth in time, because apparently I'm a masochist.

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

AZ: Speaking of memory, I'm forever indebted to Marcel Proust and Karl Ove Knausgaard for the way their sprawling bildungsromans have shaped my understanding of the self, how time creates and distorts us. Also, shoutout to Maggie Nelson's memoir Bluets and Heather Day's paintings, both of which made me a student of fragmentation.

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

AZ: The music video for Weval's song "Someday," directed and edited by Páraic McGloughlin, is probably the most exquisite audiovisual mindfuck I've ever experienced. You won't be disappointed.

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Anselm Kiefer’s Sternenfall (Falling Stars) (1998)22. The canvas is dark and thickly built up, closer to scorched ground than open sky. White points are scattered across it, each marked with a number, some strung into constellations by thin drawn lines. At the foot of the canvas, broken glass lies on the floor—stars that fell out of the picture and shattered. This essay moves on a similar plane I feel, but full of more characters than the lone figure…many star-like iterations of that one elusive unit, family. So much happens, fades, erupts and yet the stars stay where they fell, beautiful and iridescent, and something entirely other yet ours.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, the flash you’re about to be treated to below is something that made both Karan and I say FUCK out loud more than a few times, and I feel like that’s all the preface you need from my end for this one.

As you know we are also open for general submissions right now, so if you’re sending us your work then with a gentle push we also ask you to read/catch up on what we’ve published so far.

Short Stories ✶ Essays ✶ Flash Fiction ✶ Flash CNF ✶ Micro

Submit here →

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I own a man. I don’t fuck him—what would be the point of owning him if I did, but I pay for him with my tears and laughter and he lives in my spare room and stands in my living-room when I want him to, dressed up or down, depending on my mood.

To be fair, he’s more of a rental. I buy his labor, and every single emotion he feels during these fresh, honeyed hours. Some people do poppers and twentieth-century movies to get off, I do whiskey and an hour of him reading Anne Frank’s diary, sobbing his eyes out. An eye for an eye. After all, why wouldn’t I buy myself a healthy dose of what I sell?

People call me the quintessential post-modern porn star; I say, I’m Marilyn born anew, performer of the forgotten art of feeling too much in public, one of the last remaining flesh actors in the time of AI-only movies. I am exquisite dishevelment, rage, heartbreak, excessive pleasure… and people pay a pretty penny to watch me burn from it all.

My man, I met at one of the most exclusive live shows for the rich and notorious. There, with the glacial face of someone who knows the currency of a smile, he bartended for a silly fraction of what I make from a single lash bat on stage. Raw from telling the audience how, seven years ago, my one true love abandoned me in a shady motel half-way to LA, on what was to be our one-way trip to life unbound, I asked for a whiskey sour.

My voice clipped in places like someone fighting a panic attack. Patrons crowded me, offering the empty comfort of words mingled with praise for my art, while their fingertips crawled to my forearms or thighs, all greedy for a bit of me.

Bartender extraordinaire shook his head at my order, face unfeeling, and poured me an Irish mule, with such disinterest for my feelings, immediate relief flooded me. I offered him the job on the spot.

The man has a name but I never use it unless he performs. Unlike movie stars made of pure code, he also has a body, more attractive for how imperfect—real—it is, and he uses this instrument very well in his own art making. There is something magnificent in a handsome, substantial man, ranting in his floppy briefs, only to fall to pieces on my crimson and orange rug, as rain tumbles from the sky.

Unfortunately to believe this man doesn’t expect something of me would be delusion. Because he wishes neither to fuck me nor to see me cry as my patrons crave, doesn’t mean he wants nothing from me. What he wants obviously is a career, and in the moments that follow his best performances, when my own body stirs with the need to touch him, console him, make sweet, gentle love to him the way I don’t do anymore these days, I offer promises—the silken words on my adept tongue the closest thing to a stroke I will allow myself. Yes, he can be my opening act, my protégé, but not until he has truly learned the craft.

How convenient: I am the only judge of his talents. Deep down, I’d rather not share his art with others.

My act exhausts me and leaves little space for the gentle swaying of calm emotions a happy daily life requires. Most days, I come home cried out, fuming, or blanked into nothingness. I ask him to mirror my emotions to me, and he does, while fixing me a plate of eggs and bacon or a glass of straight whiskey.

We scream at each other about nothing at all, and it sounds almost like a game. We stare at each other in silence, weeping. We stare at each other, aroused and disturbed. We don’t touch but when I head to bed alone, the frustration reassures me that I can still feel when I am not performing.

We never touch—like me, he doesn’t have sex for money—but as time passes, I ask him for increasingly private and vulnerable slivers of him and he doesn’t deny me. How could he, when I never deny my own audience? He trusts I am training him.

I ask for an account of a day when he truly wanted to undo someone, not with his words, but with his hands, and after he swears there were none, he strangles a pineapple for my pleasure, laughing all along at my absurdity. I request a replay of his last act of sincere violence and the laughter dies as he destroys a simple sheet of paper, his features quietly twisted. I demand he surrenders the harshest words his father had for him, demand he speaks to me as if I was his mother, demand he tells me he loves me the way he did to the last person who left him.

When he does, holding me out a glass full of ice cubes, I crack and slap him, throw the glass at the window, calling him a liar, a devil, a performer.

Then I tell him he’s fired.

After that scene, I don’t go to bed; I go back to work and give my audience all of it: the rage, the lust, the loneliness. They drink my face like I’m champagne, lick my instrument with brilliant eyes, dripping with envy. Why don’t you watch each other I want to ask them. But I don’t, because I am glad to be their idol, for at my altar they lay precious tributes. A deity of truthfulness, woven, like them, from live matter—not a disembodied and unfeeling icon who cares nothing for their worship.

I come home, pockets full of diamonds—the kind that twinkles on fancy credit cards—to the wind whispering through the splintered glass of the window. On my couch, my jack-of-all-feels lies asleep, his expression fleshly, divine, volatile.

Human.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

DIVYA KERNAN: It sounds incredibly corny but I wrote my very first story the year I learned to read and write. I was terribly chatty so I would often get held indoor at recess as punishment, and I started writing then. During adolescence, I also wrote that shameful (or shameless?) first novel many of us have where we’re the main character and everyone realizes how awesome we are.

More seriously, my brain processes emotions in a delayed, non-linear manner so, early on writing became the safe space for dissecting all that mess at my own pace, and through the safe distance of speculative fiction. And with practice came more intentionality: now I get more leeway to choose what complicated feelings and ‘what-ifs’ a story will explore early in the process, instead of tumbling in only to discover what it is actually about in the twentieth draft.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

DK: For short stories, the voice almost always comes first. I’m out there minding my own business, when suddenly those opening lines ambush me. After that, things start to assemble on their own, concepts that had floated around in my mind for a while but had no container yet, suddenly claim they belong in this particular story… and who am I to deny them? Sometimes these opening lines stay stranded in a file for months before the rest of the story has brewed long enough to emerge.

For novels, I start with a speculative premise that mirrors a question I have about our world and my identity within this world.

As for my routine, when compatible with my daily life, I try to have time with my writing in the morning as often as possible, a fixed time-space when my brain is allowed to do the dreaming into words. For longer work, I plot a little but not so much that the magic of discovery is lost.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

DK: Well, my (still) short list of publications doesn’t do subtle (laugh). So yes, I’m obsessed with the complicated connection between physical intimacy and emotional vulnerability, probably because I grew up with Christianity as the backdrop. I’m fascinated by the dichotomy of how physical intimacy is often easier, more straightforward, than real vulnerability, yet our society turns it into a vehicle for shame. Sometimes I feel this part of my writing is the least original, but on the other hand it has found the most outer resonance.

This also ties into another motif of mine: the body as something independent from the mind, uncomfortable to inhabit, even foreign or hostile at times. I suspect that’s a reflection of my personal experience of being neurodivergent.

In an oddly specific way, flowers often show up in my stories too, tinted by my lyrical obsession with beauty as both enticing and toxic.

Last, identity (and how we perform it) occupies a big space in my writing. My identity sits at the edge of a lot of things, which has made it hard for me to find a sense of belonging—so I’m always chasing it through dreamworlds.

I don’t think I stand a chance of outwriting any of these obsessions!

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

DK: Artistically, I’ve tried a bunch of things including dancing and singing (sadly, though I love dancing and karaoke, I suck at following a beat hahaha) and acting (to work on conjuring those feelings in the body and in the moment), but writing is my medium. Still, I love to touch ‘stuff’, so if I had the skills to craft with my hands (instead of with my mind!) that would delight me. Maybe a glassblower, a sculptor or a potter then?

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

DK: Annie Hartnett, who taught the GrubStreet Novel Generator for my cohort, told us that to write her novels she “told herself a story,” and, thus, encouraged us to write chronologically when drafting a first draft. I don’t always abide by this rule, but this is the one piece of advice that has enabled me to finish projects. Before that, I would discard drafts once I’d written all the tasty bits.

As for advice from my practice? I’m terrified of being trite. Yet, what does it mean to produce something original? In response to that anxiety, I aim for a sense of truth. When I edit, I listen for this grating sensation, when a word, a phrase, a line feels untrue to the story, emotionally or otherwise. I don’t always know why or how to fix it immediately, but I know I must come back to that beat and dig deeper. In the end, I think we love artists for how they offer a sense of connection to their deep, authentic truth and how experiencing someone else’s emotional landscape can help us feel our own feelings. To me, nothing authentic and sincere is ever trite.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

DK: I’m wrestling with a horror novel that blends girls on bikes, neurodivergent girlhood body horror, and the gaslighting of women. This is the third novel I’m working on (not counting that self-aggrandizing teen novel!), and it is the one that draws most directly from my growing-up experiences. This makes me love the story in a more tender way than my previous stories and feel fiercely for its characters, but it takes away some of the escapism. So, there: very necessary ruining of my writing life haha.

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

DK: I’m still deeply enamored with my childhood and teenage formative reads and can’t help but torture them into new forms on a regular basis, namely fairy tales, gothic romanticism (Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and early vampire novels), and period pieces focused on the complex relationship between beauty, love and power dynamics (Dangerous Liaisons, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Chéri by Colette). In that vein, Guillermo Del Toro’s movies have fed my aesthetic a lot, particularly Pan’s Labyrinth or Crimson Peak.

I obviously love very many contemporary writers, across fiction genres, but I don’t understand well enough yet how they inform my writing. In non-fiction, however, Girlhood by Melissa Febos has profoundly supported me in my writing of the horror WIP mentioned above, and so have a number of Green Day songs (I’ve been a fan since forever!).

Complex speculative movies like Inception, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and one of my absolute favorite movies of all time: Arrival (based on the even better short story by Ted Chiang) have inspired me to get comfortable with layered complexity in my own writing, trust the readers to pluck all the small pieces to collage into meaning. I view this as a very impressionist way of writing stories. Series like Maniac and The OA (season 1) on Netflix also thrive on layered meanings and duality of interpretation. I love how far they go into the weird, while their core remains emotionally simple (and brutal).

On the gentler side of things, I hope to someday conjure the sense of wonder of Howl’s Moving Castle and Chihiro in my own writing without the grim fog of old-time fairy tales creeping in. About Time and Your Name are also aspirational, should I let myself write a rom-com (and not let it turn into a dark yearning creature). I even have a premise...

Last, one piece of worldbuilding I am in awe of is from the manga/anime/live-action One Piece: the use of snails as telephones is so incredibly unnecessary and whimsical—I love it! It reminded me of how as worldbuilders we have more freedom than we sometimes grant ourselves!

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

DK: PSYCHE REVIVED BY CUPID’S KISS by Antonio Canova at the Louvre. A personal favorite since my college years!

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Leonor Fini’s Chthonian Deity Watching over the Sleep of a Young Man (1946)1. A black sphinx looms in the dark over a young man asleep, nearly naked, a strip of pink fabric across his hips. Her gaze is fixed on him. She could be guarding him or deciding what to do with him — the painting doesn’t say and in a way…we don’t ask it, we don’t feel like there’s anything missing (or well at least I don’t). I love how Fini reverses what we might generally see in art… the body on display is the man’s while the watcher is the female character here. Therein lies so much of the wild heart of this beautiful flash piece too, I feel.

There’s a bliss to it, of course, and we feel a lot happier (and safer) than when we were in the US, but it also means that some things were just very hard to squeeze into our schedules of working full time, parenting fuller time, and… * gestures at the thing called life *

But not to despair. We are now OFFICIALLY OPEN for our free Summer window. One thing we’ve changed is that you can now send us stories and essays up to 10,000 words as opposed to the previous limit of 5000. All the other details are below in case you need a refresher, or you can just hop on over here to submit (and you might notice our submission portal got a little makeover, so any and all praises for that are heartily welcome ha).

take me to the submission portal!

◉ Send us

Short Stories (1001-10,000 words)

Essays / Narrative Nonfiction (1001-10,000 words)

Flash Fiction (100-1000 words)

Flash CNF (100-1000 words)

Each piece will be published alongside a short interview with the author.

◉ Payment

$200 for long-form

$50 for flash

• Deadline: July 20, 2026

• Eligibility: Open to anyone writing in English, anywhere in the world

• Restriction: No previously published work (but self-published on your blog/Substack/etc. is fine!)

• Evaluation: All submissions are read by us, Shannan Mann & Karan Kapoor, the editors of Strange Pilgrims (& ONLY POEMS)

• Response time: Within 4 months

• Optional: $10 Fast Response (response within 4 weeks)

Full guidelines + submission portal →

General submissions are — and always will be — free.

To run a magazine that doesn’t charge fees and pays writers, we rely on our readers. If you’d like to help sustain Strange Pilgrims, you can:

1. Become a paid subscriber

2. Leave a tip when submitting

3. Request paid editorial feedback (via the submission form)

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May the alphabet sing to you,

Shannan & Karan

Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

We’re back again for another Micro of the Month writing challenge with a new theme. In case you need a refresher on what this is, here ya are:

☆ Details for the July challenge ☆

Opens: NOW!

Closes: July 3rd midnight EST (we’ll keep it open another 12 hours for anyone in a different time zone as I know this can get confusing, but please do try to get stuff in by this official deadline).

Rules: Send us prose (not poetry, please) 300 words or less in response to the month’s theme revealed below (however loosely, however strangely).

Money: As with our other general submission calls, the Micro of the Month is fully free to submit to though you can choose to pop something into our tip jar or request paid editorial feedback if you like. We do not give more weight to subs by folks who do go for these paid options, but being an indie, ad-free lit mag all such support helps us keep going. The winner receives $30.

Timing: Everyone will hear back from us by July 25th at the latest. The winner will be published on the last Sunday of the month, so this time around that’s July 26th.

Theme: Cultish

Submit Now →

Can’t wait to read your micros!

Yours,

Shannan & Karan

PS: For some inspiration, check out the previous winners here:

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, June’s Micro of the Month theme was Love & Sex because June is stupidly hot (unless you’re in New Zealand and Australia…or I guess the North Pole…anyway). And well, boy did y’all deliver. Evan’s micro below rose to the top of our heated (pun very much intended) discussions because of just how wonderfully wild it was. By now, you might have picked up that we here at Strange Pilgrims love the outrageous and…uh…strange….Alright, get on with reading this fantastic piece and don’t miss out on the new theme announcement for July on Tuesday!

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The phone sex only starts to get interesting after the chainsaw comes into play. Months of long distance burns quick through the vanilla until all that’s left is the fun. It’s the last thing that Demi wants to wrap his hands around, but his boyfriend Arman whines about it, “want to hear the purr, honey. Taste the exhaust through the receiver. You wear it like perfume, y’know? When I’m there with you, we’ll hookup behind the sawmill, and I’ll lick the dust off your throat.”

So, fuck it.

In his moment of rest after jumping across continents, Arman sheds his flight attendant’s uniform and rests in the mess. He tangles the hotel’s landline between his fingers and presses the plastic to his ear until the cartilage is flat and flush. “I want the blades.”

Demi kneels in his bed, the phone laying before him adrift in a sea of white sheets. He holds tight despite sweat-slicked palms and hovers the whirring belt above the microphone. Veins throb as the two-stroke engine hums. He can’t hear his love from so far away, but he must be close. The blades are singing to him.

When his grip slips the choir crescendos as they cleave through glass and black plastic.

They don’t even get to say goodbye, goodnight.

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Contributor’s Note

There’s a certain romanticism to a desire left unsatisfied. It keeps us hungry. Demi and Arman are starved, and desperate to circumvent the barriers between them however they can. They each, in a way, em

body these specific sexual tropes and the elements that draw them together and keep them apart are derived from the professions that define them—the lumberjack and the flight attendant. That’s the kind of dysfunction that I find interesting, the kind that makes my mind spiral, and it works well for a micro. The form allows you to erect new barriers, and it invites the reader to linger in the lust alongside your characters.

From there, Arman brings the distance, and Demi the toys. Together, they make the phrase “fuck me with a chainsaw” into a nice fantasy.

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today’s short story is, if I’m remembering correctly, the first short story we ever accepted for our lit mag. I remember reading it through once and then a second time and knowing that this is indeed a Strange Pilgrims tale. I hope you love it as much we do!

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I should have listened to the man in New Orleans who told me I needed new shoes. He shouted at me from the door of his shop like an angry Jack Russell, telling me that he could see the soles wearing thin even from there. He was a shoe salesman, so I ignored him, dismissing his warnings as a sales tactic. If I had bought new shoes, I never would have found myself in Chicago, dying barefoot on the cold marble floor of the house of God.

That was my first sin, and it was a bell tower.

I crossed the Swamp Bridge in my mom’s old Pontiac and made it all the way to Jackson before she broke down. 327,017 miles on the machine, but the last 200 were enough to kill her. She died in front of a late-night bowling alley at two in the morning, conveniently across the street from the bus stop. The bus to Memphis would be there in an hour.

I think heaven and hell started their battle in Jackson. One of them killed the engine, and the other sent the bus.

I went inside and ordered the fries. They were crinkly, soggy, and a concerning hue. The bowling alley manager had a bird tattooed on his shoulder—a falcon, I think. It looked like he had done it himself in a poorly-lit bathroom in front of a foggy mirror. He wouldn’t let me sit at the table unless I changed into bowling shoes, so I asked for the fries to-go and ate them on the curb while I waited for the bus. A couple staggered out behind me, laughing, and she vomited on his truck tire before they peeled away.

I said goodbye to my mom and her broken Pontiac, leaving them next to the bowling alley dumpster. She might have been haunting that goddamn car, because the door cut my ankle as I closed it the last time.

This was my second sin, and it was a radiating chapel with a relic.

On the bus, I sat crisscross and bled on the seats.

I used to stack blocks when I was young. Little wooden blocks, given to me by my uncle. They were simple—unpainted cubes, cylinders, and pyramids cut from pine. They were the only toys I had apart from my imagination, but those are really the only toys a girl needs. They taught me so much about the world, although I didn’t realize it at the time. They taught me how things fit together—how atoms become space become experience, and how experience shapes the body. I learned how everything must be built from the ground up, and how everything falls.

Charlie used to play with the blocks alongside me. That was back when the only thing people expected us to be was children. That was before he grew old enough to put on boots, open a Bible, and see himself differently. Back when we could run around barefoot and no one would bat an eye. When we grew tired, we could sit in the dirt out behind the porch and stack the blocks in as many different ways as we could imagine until our fingers were sore.

There was one block in particular—an arch, proportioned just right so that it fit neatly against the rectangles—that we would fight over. We called it “the Steeple.” Both of us wanted to place the Steeple at the top of our towers, like we were building some holy place. We climbed trees for the same reason. Same reason humans started walking upright. Some invisible thread ties us to the earth and to the sky. We were hardly four feet tall and already knew about the axis mundi. Truths like that are rooted in our DNA, but sometimes those roots grow sideways and tear up the garden.

I always drew my axis mundi from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head. I did that when I was a kid, dirty and barefoot, then again when I wore shoes, then again when my shoes fell apart. Charlie found his world tree inside a church. Or maybe he never had one.

If I had given Charlie the Steeple a few more times, he might have been around for me when I needed him. But I had kept the Steeple for myself. That must have been the reason he went chasing after God. I tried to be happy that he had dragged himself out of the swamp into some kind of faith, but he had left me behind, just like my dad left my mom.

The pattern on the seats of the bus looked like someone had taken my uncle’s blocks, painted them with bright colors, and thrown them into a bowl of bright blue macaroni noodles. On the road to Memphis, after I learned I couldn’t sleep, I searched the pattern for a shape that looked like the Steeple. The street lights came by in flashes, so I searched in the same rhythm. I found it at the top of my seat, right behind the head rest. To find it, I had to sit on my knees like I was in prayer.

This was my third sin, and it was stained glass.

The bus driver woke me up in Memphis, saying “ma’am” a few times and gently touching my shoulder. The first thing I saw was a mosquito on my hand.

The nearest car rental was a quarter mile from the bus stop. That quarter mile was all it took for the shoe salesman’s prophecy to come true. Apocryphal blues in Memphis.

First the right shoe, then the left—anarchy set loose on the sidewalk in front of a strip club, beneath a billboard warning me about hell. That kind of shit only happens in cartoons. I shrugged and left the soles behind like the fossilized footprints of a dinosaur.

I kept wearing the top half of the shoes like a cardboard facade on a movie set. I doubt they would have rented me a car without them. If I had taken my time and used the two legs the Lord had given me instead of getting in that rental car, I would have arrived in Chicago at a ripe old age. I could have spent all that time eye-level with other people instead of flying right past them. Maybe then I would have finally understood what Guthrie was singing about, or maybe I would have just died barefoot along the way.

That was my fourth sin, and it was a buttress.

As I crossed the Mississippi for the second time and looked out onto the flat fields of Arkansas, I thought about the Pontiac again. I wondered how long it was going to sit next to that dumpster. Maybe the man with the falcon tattoo would take it home and fix it, or maybe it was just as dead and lifeless as Mom.

Mom may have died only a few days before I left, but she started dying before I was even born. It was a slow death, 327,000 miles of it. It started when Dad lured her to Louisiana, back when she was in love. He stayed around just long enough for her to get pregnant and start to sink in the mud, then disappeared.

Dad had poisoned Mom’s world tree the day he left her, and then she spent the next twenty years taking an ax to the roots of the tree to put it out of its misery. She hacked away until there was nothing but churned swamp, then she watered it with Bushmills until the quicksand dragged her down. After her cardiac arrest, I was left with nothing but her piece of shit car, my piece of shit shoes, and a boat-load of hatred for a man I had never even met.

I stopped at a diner just short of St. Louis. The waitress looked like she belonged anywhere but there. Her silk-black hair, high cheekbones, and burgundy lipstick made her look like those LA actresses from the 90’s—the kind you would expect to see dancing in a Lynch dream. She sure sounded country, though, and I saw her take four smoke breaks during my thirty minute stop. I thought about asking her if she would let me take her away from all of this, as if we were in some kind of movie, then I remembered my shoes and I laughed.

I did tip her a little extra, not just because she was pretty, but because she was probably burning all of her cash on cigarettes. I had to slide past the other things in my pocket to get to the cash—that slip of paper with a name and an address was still there, and so was the gun tucked into my belt. I handed a wad of bills over to her. She thanked me with a pretty smile, and tucked the bills into her own belt, in the same place I had my gun.

I forgot about her when I saw that my car was stolen. Shards of glass shimmered in the parking spot, sparkling like stars telling me where I shouldn’t go.

There were two other cars on this side of the lot. A Tacoma with Arkansas tags was full of furniture, stacked twice as tall as the truck itself in a game of Jenga you would find in a Seuss book. It had truck nuts and an NRA bumper sticker.

The only other car was a hearse. It was all black, which I think is the only color they ever come in. It was parked in the handicap spot.

Truck nuts had left his doors unlocked. I was twisting the wires of the Tacoma together, trying to get a spark without much luck, when I felt someone behind me and turned in a panic.

He was shorter than me, even with boots on, and lanky. His head looked too large for his body, but it might have just been his long, tangled hair and wild beard that framed his face like a lion’s mane. A camouflage cap mashed his hair down and a pouch of tobacco pressed against his lip. I remembered the NRA sticker and braced myself for a quick death.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

He brushed past me, setting his spit cup on the roof of the truck and taking the wires in his hands. A few seconds later, the old machine rumbled to life. He nodded at me and spit into his cup. He walked around to the back of the truck, jostled the truck nuts off, and carried them across the lot where he attached them to the back of his hearse.

Attempting to steal the Tacoma was not my fifth sin, but it did come a few moments later when I followed the lion man toward his hearse. I forgot about my bare feet, and the broken glass.

A minute later, I was sitting in the passenger seat of the lion man’s hearse, tears streaming from my eyes while he pulled shards from between my toes.

This was my fifth sin, and it was a confessional.

Lion man’s name was Pete. I held Pete’s spit cup between my thighs while he cleaned my wounds with rubbing alcohol. Pete had been living out of his hearse for a year. He had bought it from a bankrupt funeral home for cheaper than a bicycle. He assured me there was no dead body or coffin in the back. There wouldn’t have been room, anyway, between his boxes of mass-market paperbacks, skateboards, and the dirty twin mattress he slept on. It may be the only hearse in the world that smells like weed.

Pete was headed to Sault Ste. Marie. I didn’t ask why, and he didn’t ask why I was going to Chicago, or why I was barefoot, or why I was trying to steal a truck. He just offered me a ride.

As that ugly arch fell away into the horizon behind us, he asked me to tell him stories. I thought it would be painful to talk about Mom, even more to talk about Charlie, but it seemed to help a little. Pete was a good audience, and asked me good questions.

Once, when we were in sixth grade, Charlie tried to kiss me. I think he did it because he felt like he was supposed to. I didn’t know what to do, so I pushed him away. We didn’t talk about it until high school, and then we both laughed until we couldn’t breathe.

Sometime after the kiss, I asked Mom why people kiss each other. I got way more than I wanted in an answer, since she decided that was the time to tell me about how my body worked, and how other bodies worked. I’ll give her credit: she was sober for that conversation, but still just as angry.

One thing she kept telling me was that my body was a temple. I didn’t understand that at all, but I remember hearing her praying it to herself some nights.

Pete asked me about my dad—his first bad question. I flinched, and I think he could feel that he had made a mistake. Mom—or maybe God—answered for him by splattering the hearse with rain. The storm picked up fast until the wind was howling and the wipers were sprinting to keep up.

I didn’t remember much of the Bible—certainly not as much as Charlie did. And the parts I did remember were the ones Mom used as a belt. But I remember one story about how God used a storm to kill damn near everybody. He was disappointed with what he had made, and what they had made, so he sent rain to wash it all away and start over. Like Charlie knocking over his blocks when it was time to go inside for dinner. I thought about that storm when the radio started playing that strange, wailing tone.

We almost made it to the outskirts of Chicago before that storm became truly Biblical. Pete pulled toward a highway rest stop, but he couldn’t see where the road ended and the mud began. We ran the rest of the way to the plain gray building. I imagined that I was the last of the sinners running for the gates of the ark. I wondered how many of them were running on bare, wounded feet.

I didn’t look where I was running and stumbled face-first into that sweet flood water. I thought about lying there and letting it baptize me into something new. The water was too strong for me to fight—too heavy for me to draw a line between my feet and the sky. Lion man wouldn’t have it, though. He heaved me up and dragged me toward safety, breaking the latch of the building with his shoulder.

The storm raged outside of our ark for hours. The sky was so black I couldn’t tell what time of day it was. Pete broke the glass of the vending machine, and we ate Bugles while we watched the world fall away.

My shirt was torn and covered in mud. After an hour, I was freezing, so Pete took off his jacket for me to wear. He turned away to let me change, but I just took my own tattered rags off and waited for him to turn back around.

In the dim light of the vending machine, drenched in rain, mud, and sweat, our bodies didn’t really look like temples, but we said our prayers to each other all the same. After we worshiped, I somehow managed to fall asleep with Pete’s arm around my waist, the storm lulling me to sleep.

This was my sixth sin, and it was a baptismal.

I had a dream about my dad. He wasn’t in the dream, not in so many words, but I could feel him. I was on a spaceship sailing up into the heavens. No one else was there—only me—but somehow I knew I was the last hope of the human race. I was supposed to find a new planet to colonize and keep our DNA going. Keep his DNA going, though. I felt him in my blood, salty and bitter, poisoning roots like he had done before, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the flood again. About Noah and his ark.

I found his name and address carved into the floor of the spaceship. It looked just like it did on the little slip of paper I kept tucked away in my pocket. Mom never knew that I had found that in the pages of her Bible seven years ago.

Charlie told me he was going to leave only hours before he actually did it. I was furious he hadn’t told me sooner, although looking back, I don’t know if it would have made much of a difference. He tried to explain—said something about divine calling and holy purpose—but I just kept asking him why. I needed a friend, I told him. But he needed God.

After he was gone, I found Mom’s Bible hidden in her nightstand behind the liquor. I thought maybe I could understand Charlie better. The book fell open to a page in the middle, letting loose this paper. I read the paper first and saw the name. The only thing I had ever learned about my father was his name and the pain he had caused. Mom had told me she didn’t know where he went, but there I was, staring at his name and an address in Chicago.

On the Bible page beneath it, I read only one line.

“Thou dost lay me in the dust of death.”

That little piece of paper became my Bible. I kept it in my pocket for seven years, waiting until Mom finally died, so I could finally do what I needed to do. I read it over and over to myself when I bought the gun and etched it into the metal, when I ignored the shoe salesman, when I drove the Pontiac over the Swamp Bridge, when I kept sinning along I-55.

I read it again on the floor of my spaceship while it touched down onto a new world. I realized in my dream that I was barefoot. The letters were burning my feet.

Around the name and the address, a poem was written. I had heard the poem before, but it never meant anything to me then. In the dream, though, I understood that the words condemned me.

The walls of the spaceship peeled open in front of me, forming three steps down onto green grass. The sky was blue, and I could hear birds chirping. Sweet, fresh air—cleaner than I had ever felt—filled my lungs. I was supposed to leave the spaceship, but I stayed there until I woke up.

This was my seventh sin, and it was a clerestory.

My gun was gone in the morning.

The birds woke me up first. Pete was a heavy sleeper, still snoring in harmony with the vending machine. I left him there to dream about whatever spaceship he was on.

The first dim lights of the sun sparkled on the swamp outside. I was a thousand miles from Louisiana, but a vision of a bayou had followed me even here. I started looking for the gun like I was fishing for mudbugs—jeans rolled up to my knees, ankle deep in the muck.

Something was sticking up near the root of a tree—the body of a turkey vulture, turned stiff and cold and bloated with rain. I thought it had drowned in the storm, but I saw the hilt of my gun rising from its beak. I pried it open like a clam, fighting against the stiff jaw muscles, until I held the weapon in my hand.

That was my eighth sin, and it was a monstrance.

The Mississippi River once flowed north for a brief time, centuries ago, when earthquakes rocked the land and sent the currents backwards. Anyone who knows the river knows how impossible that seems, but it didn’t seem so impossible to me that day. I looked out on I-55 stretched out in front of me, winding through the hills and sparkling with rain water, and I could feel its current pulling me north.

I stole a clean shirt and some food, but I left the hearse behind. I told myself I left it to be kind to the lion man, but the car was stuck deep in the mud. It wouldn’t have gone with me, anyway.

The skyline of the city rose up toward the heavens in front of me.

All around me, as the darkness fell again, axis mundi of glass and metal stretched upward. I no longer cared about the pain in my feet. They had become a reflection of myself, smearing blood across the land. They carried me over sidewalks and streets so potholed they looked like Swiss cheese. They carried me over sharp rocks and broken glass and still-hot cigarettes—all of heaven and hell still trying to keep me away. My body was one stigmata, from my broken feet, to my tired thighs, to my hunched shoulders.

They were hunched against the misting rain that filtered through, and against the weight of my sins. I’m sure if someone had seen me—although I saw no one around—they would have thought I was a creature of some kind. My humanity had been left behind in pieces along I-55. I was a rough beast, like the poem told me I would be, my hour indeed come ‘round at last, but I was not slouching forth to be born. I was slouching forth to die.

The shadow of a bird passed over me, so large that she blocked out the rain. I turned my eyes upward and saw the steeple of a church turned blood red in the dying light.

This was my ninth and final sin. I thought it was a steeple, but it was a crypt.

In the middle of the empty city, this house of worship seemed small, but I didn’t care about the size. I cared only for the ground that it sat on. My father’s address was not a house, or an apartment. He was a church. Above the door were words etched in Latin, like his name had been etched onto my gun.

EGO AVTEM SVM VERMIS ET NON HOMO

The door was not as heavy as it should have been. The air inside smelled damp and cool, and herbal as the last smoke of incense trailed away. Nothing moved there except for me, and the wind that I pushed.

Humans are born head first, which means our feet come last. The whole picture must take shape before our feet can, and from then on, we spend our lives placing weight onto them, forcing them to carry all of our baggage while we get to look up at the sun and the stars. Mine finally gave up when they touched holy ground. They were nothing more than bloody stumps by then, but they brought me down with fury.

I crawled from there, dragging myself along the aisle, beneath the flickering candle light, toward the holy place in the center. The house of worship told me where to go, built long ago by careful hands who never knew what crimson stains would later come.

In the center of the church, beneath the highest dome, I found that name carved into the floor. My father lay buried beneath me, six feet or more below. If not for the earth between us, I could have kissed his cheek.

I think whatever we put beneath the soles of our feet becomes our worldview. If we walk in shoes, life is supported, commodified, isolated. If we walk on asphalt, life is painful, immortal, cracked.

If we walk barefoot on dirt or grass, life is familiar.

If we run barefoot in a storm, life is wrath.

If I’m right, changing your life is as easy as changing your shoes.

I never heard his voice. I was too close to death for sound to reach me. But I felt his hands on my shoulders—gentle and caring—and when he rolled me onto my back, I saw his eyes. Charlie had grown since I had last seen him, but his eyes were the same. They looked down on me from above his white collar, first with concern, then recognition, then shock.

There was a time when his eyes would have brought me comfort, but that time had slipped away from me.

My feet were broken, but I made one more axis mundi, my arm raised up toward the sky with a steeple made of metal. I gave the rest of myself to heaven and to hell, but all I had left to give was sin.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

J. NEWMAN PRITCHARD: When I was very young, my grandparents would sit with me and my sisters on a swing in their garden and we would play a storytelling game. We would each say one sentence of a story before passing it along to the next person until we reached a satisfying ending. That's certainly where I began as a storyteller. When I was much older, I began playing roleplaying games with friends. That was like unkinking a hose. Stories started to spill out faster than I could keep up, so I began writing them down, just ideas or loose outlines. At some point during undergrad, those ideas turned into true prose, and I have been writing fiction ever since. I think, because of those origins, storytelling is always inherently a collaborative process for me. I might be alone with my thoughts and the page, but I am hearing voices of other people as I write. I am hearing idioms from my southern family, strange comparisons that a friend once pointed out to me, or the weird notes that I discovered in the margins of a library book. All of that is blending together and forming the voices of my characters that sit in the room around me and whisper. I am the only one writing, but I am never writing alone.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

JNP: I think I treat my creative mind like a horse I am trying to tame. It needs to have the space to run wild and show me something I never would have guessed, but it needs a gentle hand at the reins or it might buck me off and leave me in the dust of an indecipherable draft. Each new piece often begins with just a visual or emotional image. I will jot that down quickly. If I think the piece is a short story or flash fiction, I will just start writing it. If I feel like it wants to be something longer, like a novella or a novel, I will toss around some outlines before I start working on the prose. Outlines aren't to box me in, but just to keep me focused on the story I am trying to tell. "Nine Deadly Sins on I-55" began with a mental image of someone's shoes falling apart one after the other. That was the image that kept me anchored throughout the writing process.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

JNP: There is nothing that I circle back to more than the physical space that human beings inhabit. We are embodied creatures. None of us have ever had an experience that wasn't defined by the space we occupy—the confines of our body, the limits of the walls or sky or forest, the smell lingering on surfaces, the emotions carried in the air that we breathe. When I walk into a room, the first thing I notice is the way the new environment pushes and pulls me. I want my characters and my readers to experience that vividly when they enter a story. Regardless of what kind of story I am trying to tell—whether it is horror or fantasy, grounded or speculative—I will always tell a story that “Takes Place.”

If not a writer, who would you be?

JNP: Before I started writing prose, I was (and still am) an artist. Charcoal, graphite, and ink were my mediums of choice, but I dabbled in most visual mediums. For several years, I was on track to be an architect. If that had worked out, I might not have ever tried to write prose. I am grateful that I am a writer instead of an architect, but I do consider myself to be both, even if I use a word processor instead of a CAD software these days. I still draw frequently, often illustrating scenes from my own fiction. At this point in my life, my art rarely leaves the walls of my bedroom, but it helps me spend more time in the worlds inside my head. When I can’t find the words, I can often find a picture. My love of art and architecture is certainly closely related to the embodiment I discussed above.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

JNP: I still consider myself an emerging writer, so I don't have answers to “solve” writing, and I hope I never trick myself into thinking that I do. But I have learned quite a few things. There is no correct way to be creative, so long as you are turning inward before you ever turn outward. Your creative mind is like a pot of stew on a stove. That pot is larger than you think—it is vastly deep and wildly hungry. You have to feed it. Toss everything in there. Vegetables, roots, meats, seasonings, fats. Read so many books, talk to so many people, watch international films that you have never heard of before, wander in an art museum and pretend you are someone else for a day. Or, you can take my personal favorite: sit in a crowded restaurant and eavesdrop on neighboring tables. After your creative pot is so full that it is overflowing and you simply can't handle it anymore, then you write like you are never going to stop. And keep writing, even if you think what you are writing is bad (it isn't). You can always edit a terrible first draft, but you can't edit a blank page. Lastly, never, ever, ever go near artificial intelligence: not for brainstorming, or writing, or editing. Don't touch it with a ten-foot pole. If you do, I will find you and I will fill the inside of your computer with a gallon of Nutella.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

JNP: I don't like discussing too much about works in progress: my main motivation for writing is sharing my story with an audience, so I need to keep that motivation close to my chest to push me forward. What I can say is that my current project is a postmodern gothic horror novel. It tells the story of several individuals affected by a person's disappearance. There is a small cast of characters, a mysterious theater play, and a garden full of stone statues. This novel has already been trying to ruin my life as I have been working on it for a couple of years, drafting outline after outline. The current draft looks like a completely different story to the first one, but it still has its roots buried deep in something true. I am close to uncovering an outline that I think will carry me to the end, but I still need to toss some more things in my stew pot. Soon, though, I will be full-steam ahead.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

JNP: Ursula K Le Guin stands out above all of the rest. She was everything I admire in a great writer, artist, and person. Every time I discover something new from her, I feel entire worlds open up within my mind, like rooms I hadn't given myself permission to explore. Ever since I started reading her work, I do not think about genre in the same way. I also have an undergraduate degree in religious studies, so I have read many thinkers from many different faiths around the world. This has had a profound effect on my writing, I think, allowing the voices of my characters to bend and shape their worldviews in ways reflective of human spirituality. Other writers consistently make ripples in my writing: Mark Z. Danielewski, Shirley Jackson, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, among others. The only storyteller I think about as often as Le Guin is David Lynch, especially when I am working on the realm of postmodern horror.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

JNP: If you enjoyed reading "Nine Deadly Sins on I-55," I can certainly recommend some films that may strike the same chords in your mind. 'Red Rock West' (1993) is a delightful noir western crime thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Lara Flynn Doyle. 'The Outrun' (2024) has been an inspiration for me this last year since I first saw it, and Saoirse Ronan delivers a spectacular performance. The Coen Brothers are my favorite directors and have influenced my writing in many ways. 'Inside Llewyn Davis' (2013) is probably the most relevant comparison to "Nine Deadly Sins on I-55", and I think you would enjoy it. One of my favorite films of all time is Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Adaptation’ (2002), and I think more people should watch it. For music, John Prine and Emmylou Harris were on repeat when I was working on this short story and will always have a permanent place in my library. I have been listening to Sunny War a lot this year, especially her songs "Ghosts" and "Whole." As for other artists, I have found so much inspiration and peace from the work of Christian Watson (@1924us on Instagram). The animation style is both startlingly unique and strangely nostalgic.

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1601)1. A man lies flat on his back, arms flung up and open, eyes shut, his sword fallen in the dirt beside him. The horse fills the entire top of the canvas, one hoof raised above him, and the only other figure, partially obscured, grips the bridle and tends the animal, untouched by whatever has happened. Though the story shows no holy presence outright, we do witness a light falling upon the man and there is some sense that there is something miraculous taking place (indeed this painting depicts the conversion of Paul from someone violent and “unholy” to apostle). There is a similar propulsive, wondrous energy channelled throughout this story…and it’s one that will stay with me for quite some time.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today’s published piece does not have our usual interview alongside it because the brilliant writer of the piece has just given birth to one of the most beautiful babies in the world and, friends, creating and bringing life into this world is a pretty good excuse to skip an interview, ha. In many ways, though, I feel this critique speaks for itself and I can’t wait to hear what y’all think, especially on this topic!

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I’m not one to shy away from challenging conversations. In fact, if you were to ask my friends and family they’d probably indicate I actively seek them out. Speak with my Catholic grandmother about abortion rights? Sure thing. A conversation over drinks with my female jiu-jitsu friends about why they voted for Trump twice? Bring it on. Discuss the rise of cancel culture and sterilization of language in the literary world with other writers? Absolutely.

As a writer, these kinds of conversations feel natural to me—I believe words carry power, and that as artists we have a responsibility to engage our art with the world we find ourselves living in. We are products of our environment, after all. That’s why I write about violence against women; about climate change and environmental degradation; about religious abuse and control. The written word has always been a way to engage in conversation, to present ideas, perspectives, critiques, opinions, and lived experiences to a wider audience than our own social and familial circles allow. And, as readers on the other side, to be exposed to these things outside of our own, often small bubbles of existence. This has been true since humans first started putting pen to paper—from Dante to Machiavelli, Voltaire to Paine, Stowe to Melville, Wright to Orwell, Atwood to Morrison, and into the present. Their works (and works by many other writers) changed the conversations of their times. As a testament to the potency of such efforts, we’re still talking about their writing today.

It’s now 2026, though, and I’m worried about the state of art as a means of conversation. In particular, as a writer and a reader and a member of the publishing world, I’m worried about creative writing—whether fiction, poetry, or nonfiction—as a way for us to engage with the uncomfortable, with things outside of our own opinions, beliefs, or values.

In my first creative nonfiction workshop at my MFA program, I turned in an essay about having Guillain-Barre syndrome at the age of twenty—an autoimmune condition that led me to be temporarily paralyzed among other complications. It was a vulnerable piece, and one that I was proud of, as I had experimented for the first time with point of view in an attempt to capture the feeling of disassociation. I was eager to get feedback on whether or not it was working. But instead of focusing on the craft of what I had written, or trying to understand the intentions behind my approach, the conversation pivoted to a critique that the piece was inherently flawed. I didn’t acknowledge my privilege as someone who could access good hospital care in an emergency, or who could travel to Rwanda while taking time off from college, and as a result, a reader apparently wouldn’t feel empathy for the narrator (me).

In many ways, I am privileged—I am a white, cisgender woman who grew up in a financially well-off household. But that wasn’t the point of my essay, nor did I think it necessary to include that I worked two jobs for over a year while a full-time student to afford my international travels. I left the workshop that night feeling upset and confused. Having never been in a creative writing workshop before, I began to believe this analysis of work was the standard, an analysis not focused on craft but on the individual behind it (and whatever opinions, privileges, or beliefs they were presumed to hold). This idea was reinforced as I began to work with various literary magazines and engaged in conversations about whether or not to accept pieces of work. Why were we willing to publish writing that spoke badly of Christianity, but not anything that felt overtly religious? Why was a straight author not “allowed” to write a queer character? If an author had publicly held an anti-vaccine stance, or refused to wear a mask during COVID, why did that mean we shouldn’t publish their story on a completely unrelated topic? If a poet was a Zionist, why did that automatically mean their poem was “wrong”?

The conversations we were having about writing were often not about the quality or craft of the writing itself, but its alignment—and the author’s alignment—with what we believed was “right.” If a piece made anyone uncomfortable, if it challenged our own held beliefs, if the author identified in a way we disagreed with, then it was often dismissed as not being a good fit.

Looking back, it’s not surprising to me that this is where we’ve found ourselves. We are living through some of the most polarizing times in recent history, where differences in opinion and belief are more often a catalyst for disengagement (and hatred) than conversation. From cancel culture to book banning, to the shit show that is US politics, the effort on both sides is to silence anyone we disagree with rather than seek an understanding.

To me, this is a dangerous place for us to be.

Speaking with writer friends, many feel afraid to share or seek publication for anything that steps outside of what has been deemed “acceptable” in literary circles, even if it is true to their existence. And for those in the publishing sphere, there is a fear of publishing something that is later deemed to be controversial. But where does this leave us? If art is meant to be a form of conversation, what does it mean for us if that conversation has become increasingly one-sided and “safe”? What does it mean for us as artists if we are falling victim to the same narrowness of thought that exists around us?

To be clear: I don’t believe there is any reason to publish work that is inherently hateful or violent, that is racist, sexist, or promotes harmful rhetoric. But I do believe that art is for everyone, and that a diversity of opinions, perspectives, and beliefs make for a more well-rounded and compassionate society. I think, for example, that we should be willing to read and publish the work of someone who voted differently than us, or who holds beliefs about the universe that are different from our own. We should be willing to listen to someone’s experience even if it doesn’t fit our view of the world or how one should live in it.

I’ve been vegan for over a decade, and my husband is a voracious carnivore. We don’t agree, clearly, on what the best way is to eat in this world. I believe that a vegan diet is the best choice I can make as an individual to combat climate change, and that if I can get sufficient sustenance elsewhere there is no need for me to kill an animal to meet my needs. He believes that human beings are meant to eat meat while acknowledging that killing an animal for food is not an easy thing to do (he cried the first time he killed a chicken), and asserts that animal agriculture is an essential—and natural—part of a sustainable ecosystem for growing food. We’ve spent hours discussing what we both believe, sometimes heatedly, but it hasn’t changed our diets. I’m still vegan, he still eats meat. But through the conversations we’ve come to understand each other and why we each hold the beliefs that we do. We respect the freedom each of us has to eat how we want to. He makes me vegan meals, and I buy him meat from the grocery store.

More often than not, engaging in conversation with someone you don’t agree with won’t change your own opinion (nor theirs)—but it will help you to better understand where they are coming from and to see them as a whole, complete person rather than “the enemy.”

In “The Witch Trials of JK Rowling,” a podcast with Megan Phelps-Roper (an activist who was a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church), she presents listeners with five questions to ask in order to see if you are open-minded or not:

I think these are the kind of questions we should be asking ourselves as writers and readers, as ,publishers of other people’s work. These questions don’t ask us to change what we believe, but to be open to conversation. Imagine if we started workshops or editorial meetings with these questions at the forefront?

I hope to be engaged in the literary world for my whole life, but I think we need to move away from a fear-based approach in our writing, reading, and publishing to one rooted in curiosity and compassion. If we don’t, we risk losing the potency of our art form. We risk contributing more to the problems of our times than rebelling against them. Art is meant to be a conversation—we just have to be willing to engage with it as such.

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1559)1. I’m sure there are countless literary and art-criticism-y explanations you can read about this painting, but what it simply evokes for me is the strangely pleasant chaos of coexisting in society…of being alive together. And I think in a way this is what Justine’s critique above is asking us to be okay with also.

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

We’ve now been a living, breathing lit mag for six whole months. When we first created Strange Pilgrims, we really didn’t know if we’d be able to last the year. As you all know, we’re a two-person team and do pretty much everything ourselves. We love the world of indie lit and have been involved with it for over a decade now, so it’s something that feels like home. And though we know that the amount of work it takes to sustain even a small subsection of the arts is a heck of a lot than it might look from the outside, we are…inherently, fools, and obsessed with trying to innovate, create, and uplift the practice of reading and writing, especially the weirder stuff and folks (like us) who might often be overlooked by the more “mainstream” spaces.

We’re grateful that we now have 290 paid subscribers, which allows for us to cover contributor payments and artist commissions as well as pay for platforms like Tally, Notion, Figma, etc.

Your support & enthusiasm has also allowed us to dream of new things we can try, and one of those things is what we’re announcing today (weird sentence sorry not sorry?):

The inaugural $3000 Strange Pilgrims Prize for

Story of the Year & Essay of the Year!

Submit Here →

How it works

Send us your best (or strangest, wildest, craziest, purest, est-est) story or essay (or both!) — up to 10,000 words — by August 31st. Two pieces shall claim victory and be named the Strange Pilgrims Story of the Year and the Strange Pilgrims Essay of the Year.

TIMELINE

Opens: July 1

Deadline: August 31

Reading Period (to evaluate submissions): 8-12 weeks after closing

Results Announced: November

Winners Published: December

We will respond to everyone before the results are announced publicly.

AWARD

• Story of the Year: $1500 USD

• Essay of the Year: $1500 USD

Aaaand, we have partnered with Curtis Brown/UTA — one of the top literary agencies in the world. Both winners will also receive:

• A one-on-one conversation with a Curtis Brown/UTA agent about their work and writing career.

• A six-week Curtis Brown Creative online writing course (worth £250) of their own choosing

• Guidance on your path to literary representation and if the shoe fits, then an offer of representation from one of the Curtis Brown/UTA agents

SUBMIT

• Stories & essays up to 10,000 words in any genre and style

• Previously unpublished work only (though social media/personal Substack publication is alright)

• Do not include your name or identifying information in the document or the title of your submission

• All submitted work is considered for publication in Strange Pilgrims

• All writers who submit their work are considered for representation by Curtis Brown/UTA Agents

• Simultaneous submissions are totally fine, but please let us know promptly if your piece is accepted elsewhere with the words “Withdraw” in the email somewhere.

  

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FEE

• Early Bird: $18 ^{until Jun 30}

• Regular: $22 ^{Jul 1-Aug 31}

Perks: Everyone who enters gets 3 months of Strange Pilgrims membership free (with no annual commitment requirement), effectively making the entry free + an extra month. You can see all the paid subscriber perks here. The reason we’re doing things this way is because we believe that a contest entry should also offer you more access to the place you are submitting to and thus supporting. If the fee is a barrier, please refer to our waiver policy below.

JUDGING CRITERIA

• Judging process: Your work will be solely human-evaluated. We, the editors (Karan & Shannan) will read each and every submission ourselves. Within the first few weeks, we’ll longlist a selection of stories and essays, which will then be shared with the team over at Curtin Brown who are working with us. In collaboration with these agents, we’ll come up with a shortlist. The final winners will be selected by us, Shannan Mann and Karan Kapoor.

• Judging criteria: In evaluating submissions, we look for originality, an authentic voice (something that only you could’ve written), emotional intensity, musicality of language, cohesion of plot, characters & narrative.

AI POLICY

Writing is an act of imagination, research, and memory—one mind reaching for another. Artists hold the pulse of the human condition in a way machines never will. They catch what algorithms miss—the contradictions, hesitations, tiny human errors that turn into revelation. An artist’s work carries the weight of lived time, of memory and forgetting, grief and joy that can’t be squeezed into a template.

For that reason, we only publish work written by humans. We’re utterly uninterested in outsourcing imagination. Literature has always been a conversation between people across time and place, and we intend to keep it that way.

For more details on the nature of literary contests, our full Transparency & Fairness Statement, and contest disclaimers, please read this post:

Yours,

Shannan & Karan

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The inaugural $3000 Strange Pilgrims Prize for Story of the Year & Essay of the Year is now open for reduced fee early bird entries!

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A little background on contests + lit mags

The marriage of literary contests and literary magazines happened a long time ago, likely before you or I were ever born, probably around when our own grandparents found each other. The most basic reason for this was and remains is: funding. Funding for the arts has always been precarious (particularly in North America), but it’s only gotten worse over the decades. And most often, when there is funding available, it gets scooped up by non-profit (even if well-meaning) organizations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars who pay incredible salaries to their grant writers for this very purpose. For example, and saying this without any shade whatsoever, organizations like CLMP and Poets & Writers have received huge sums of governmental grants funding which they can then decide to distribute and allocate to other lit mags and orgs as they choose to. Over the past several decades, some of the magazines that have consistently received funding from these bigger conglomerates are places like…The Paris Review, Granta, and Narrative Magazine.

For newer mags, then, or even just for any mags that aren’t as big as these aforementioned ones, getting arts funding is extremely difficult if not virtually impossible. This has been the primary reason, then, that lit mags hold contests that charge some kind of reading fee. Such contests allow for:

• Fundraising for the lit mag’s annual budgeting needs

• Potentially expanding offerings and projects the lit mag and its staff can undertake

• Recognizing and creating exciting opportunities for writers

• Helping promote and platform writers and their careers

In recent times, places like Patreon, Kickstarter, and of course, Substack have stepped in to allow for creative and innovative ways for artists and the projects they create to be backed and supported directly by their audience, and the best platforms (like Substack) also allow for expanding that audience right on the platform itself.

Now, there are many ways a contest can go wrong. As a part of the Chill Subs team, we vet and review many mags and writing opportunities and contests on a near-daily basis. So ensuring that our own contests are scam-and-slime free is of utmost importance to us.

Strange Pilgrims Transparency & Fairness

We take contest ethics seriously. All judging is blind, and every piece is read by a human (it’s sad we even need to say this). Final decisions are made with care.
‍
We also maintain a strict conflict of interest policy: we do not consider work from friends, students, or colleagues.

All winning pieces are published in Strange Pilgrims, and prize amounts are paid promptly upon publication. All our winners (& often finalists) will be nominated for prizes like the Pushcart, Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, Best SFF, Best Spiritual Literature, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American/Canadian anthologies and the O. Henry Prize wherever applicable.

Curtis Brown is our our partner, not our sponsor: they run the agent conversations and offer the free course, they don’t pay for the prize, and the final call on winners is ours alone.

We believe contests should sustain a magazine, not exploit its writers. As an independent, ad-free, reader-supported publication, entry fees are one of the ways we fund our prizes and cover the costs of paying contributors, keeping the magazine and our newsletter alive, and supporting the editorial labor that makes the magazine possible. That said, we’re writers ourselves, and we know how tough fees can feel, and accessibility matters.

On that note, here’s how we handle fee waivers: generous entrants sometimes choose to cover the cost of another writer’s entry. Those sponsored spots go into a small pool of waivers. If you’re in real financial need, you’re welcome to email us to ask if one is available. If it is, we’ll happily honor it; if not, we’ll be transparent that the pool has run dry until more support comes in.

If you’re in a position to sponsor another writer’s entry, please consider it. This collective approach allows us to extend waivers where they’re most needed while still keeping the magazine sustainable.

We also include a 3-month Strange Pilgrims Membership for each entry. Submitting should connect you with resources and community, not just the contest. After you submit, we’ll send you details on how to claim this comp.

Disclaimer

Please read all guidelines carefully before submitting. We’ve worked hard to make the process for this award transparent—outlining the submission period, reading stages, selection process, timeline, and when you can expect results and publication of winners.

We will ALWAYS choose winners. As writers and submitters ourselves, we don’t take your trust for granted. At the same time, please note that we cannot issue refunds for submissions once they are made.

If you have questions about the process, you are welcome to email us. We ask that all queries remain professional and respectful—there are people behind this screen, and many common questions are already answered in the guidelines above. Most of all, we value kindness and community, and we’re always glad to hear from our readers and submitters.

Curtis Brown/UTA Partnership

The free course has to be one on Curtis Brown Creative’s course page — it can’t be put toward anything that isn’t listed on this web page. The course must be redeemed within 12 months of the award, and it cannot be exchanged for cash.

A one-on-one agent conversation is included in the prize. After this, any further communication will happen at the agent and writer’s discretion and we will not be involved in facilitating anything further.

The specific agents we’ll be working with include but are not limited to: Lily Kovacs, Liv Bignold, Ciara Finan, Rachel Goldblatt, Rosie Pierce, Flo Sanderson, Elizabeth Milne and Clare Conville.

Entering or winning this contest does not guarantee representation. All finalists get read by a professional and experience Curtis. Brown/UTA literary agent, and if one wants to take a writer further, that means a full submission package — manuscript pages plus a synopsis and cover letter, and your work would be placed at the top of of their consideration cycle.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, there’s something special and secret and so exciting brewing behind the scenes over here at our indie lit mag and we can’t wait to share it with you, but you’ll need to wait just a few more days! For now, here’s a heart-stoppingly (no but in the best way) luscious alive essay to help you ride the waves of time.

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I told my friend I want to visit Antarctica. She said you love cold places and I said no, I love expanse.

Antarctica, it turns out, was once green. Deep down in the guts of the ice continent, there are deposits of amber, smaller than grains of sand. Amber comes from trees, and not just any trees. Rainforest trees. Antarctica was once a temperate rainforest.

Who was there, is my first thought. Second thought is, I was. This is how people get it into their heads that they’ve been reincarnated. One day a self-aggrandising little thought occurs: I was there. And they can’t undo it. They think, this explains so much. It explains a whole range of desires, the foremost being immortality, but also, in my case, emptiness.

They think: if I was alive then, it explains me now. And now, thankfully, I am relieved of the burden of explaining myself.

From this perspective, then, a belief in reincarnation could be useful. It might finally shut me up. Launch me out of my head and into the world where I belong. Even if it isn’t true.

Especially if it isn’t true.

Or maybe it is true.

I was in Antarctica when it was a rainforest.

I was not in Antarctica when it was a rainforest.

In times like ours, we want to tell the truth. We want to eschew relativism. Relativism has been dragged semi-conscious to its fated end, fucked every way, cut up, reanimated, become evil. No, we want to be able to say: this is wrong, this is true.

We want to say no.

No, you cannot tell two lies and have that make a truth.

No, I don’t need to question myself on matters of evil.

We’re done questioning and want to make a stand.

So the difficulties begin. As an honest person, I can’t help admitting I might be wrong. As a thinking person, I think. The more I think, and the more I say what I think, the more flaky I sound. For example, if pressed: I’m not completely certain if I’m alive on this planet right now, or if I’m dreaming.

Are you?

Go ahead, pretend to be sure. I’ll call you a liar.

Some degree of relativism is necessary for the sake of integrity. Even the question of whether relativism is useful or harmful calls for relativism. And this is what keeps tripping people up and preventing effective opposition to liars, thieves, and killers. No decent person thinks they know the absolute truth.

And yet, look what becomes of us without any kind of institutional truth. Look what happens when we discard history, burn down the library. Look how stupid, what dogs we are.

All that’s to say: under the Antarctic sea, half a mile inside Earth, lie networks of fossilised roots.

Eighty million years ago they were trees, breathing through thick layers of greenest vegetation and sweating beneath a temperate Cretaceous sun. There were copious fauna pattering among the vegetation, scraping up soil and sand with their claws and paws and talons.

If there’s one thing I want to see more than a frozen expanse, it’s an Antarctic rainforest.

Rainforest, then ice continent.

Ice continent, then rainforest.

I long to see the difference for myself.

Where the planet’s plates are concerned, where snowscapes and beachscapes and the formation of mountains and births of elements are concerned, relativism is not either/or. It’s a question of timescale. Even the sun, our constant star, will burn itself out. But the timescale of its burnout is so vast that for us, during our short lives, it’s meaningless. For the whole of our lives, we can count on the truth of the sun. This is how real truth exists inside the relative, and the relative inside the truth.

Despite my reincarnation from a past Antarctic life of stalking tawny southern hares among giant gleaming green southern ferns, I’m ignorant about southside Earth. And yet, its emptiness pursues me like a ghostly aroma, a good-time memory, a reflection of sun on mirror sand.

The fascist tech-bro capital class dreams also of expanse. I would have thought this one thing was true: whatever they are, I am not. I’m broke and I want fewer things (people, tech, cities, buildings, products, developments, ads, offices, ideas, wars, lies). They’re rich and they want more things, more and more. They want to bury me and us in things, and once we’re buried, chain us underground and overland so we can dig. They’ll end by burying dignity and beauty, the only stuff that makes humans worth a damn and which could somehow plausibly redeem our evil history and original sin. They’ll bury it all in endless plastic shit.

And yet, when they and I close our eyes to rest, we all dream of Antarctica.

They dream of how it will melt and they will mine the poles, minerals without end.

I dream of how maybe, one day, I’ll put my foot on its crust.

We’ll both be wearing boots, and we’ll both be hoping for a twin to stand and face us, to hold us like a mother and say welcome, you’re not alone or empty and now, neither am I.

In the South Sandwich Islands, biologists have taken the first ever footage of a glass squid: a squid whose skin is totally clear.

The South Sandwich Islands sit just above the Antarctic Circle. On a map, they look as though the Antarctic Peninsula has continued its outward curve and then looped back west on the way up toward South America, as though rounding the breast of an enormous highway, speeding alone into the blue horizon headed, with an unfathomable depth of disappointment and relief, toward civilisation.

The squid, wholly uncivilised, immodest as it is possible to be, exposes its internality through glass flesh. You can see everything, all the neon insides: organs transparent, or becoming transparent, or translucent white. The squid can control whether it appears transparent or opaque, depending on its goals and needs and, perhaps, its mood.

Glass flesh is not unknown among deep sea creatures, but to see the colossal squid so radically undressed, alive and moving about in its own home, is new for science. All I can think about, as I watch the squid sucking up ocean and pulsing its blue tail and waving its electric orange tentacles underwater, insides fading in and out, is: what trouble might we ourselves avoid if we could see our own insides, if our skin was window upon window rather than field upon field?

When I feel inside myself and feel a squish of red wet organs instead of seemingly endless mind, emotion, and idea, I understand myself quite differently. I understand that it’s absurd to pretend I will live forever, and all the moments I spend trying to live forever are moments of a wasted earthly life.

Recently, during a religious service, I was assailed by an awareness of everyone in the room as animals. It was one of those uncanny fresh moments, as in, everything I thought I knew about who and what I am, who and what everyone and everything else is, seemed to melt away and I was struck as though having just been born or just come awake from a long amnesia with the absurdity of a bunch of animals sitting in a room silently contemplating their being and attempting to feel the energy, undying, which connects everything for all time, and discern its contours. I looked around at the people, my friends and also strangers, imagined and felt my own body, and marvelled at how we had arrived here, human animals seated amid a shared ritual.

And how strange, also, that we all have distinct faces, haircuts, clothing, styles, and personalities. I really did feel insane about it. Personalities. I thought about animals and which animals have distinct faces (elephants, apes) and which ones have distinct personalities (my pet rabbit, RIP, who was unlike anyone else with her bizarre games and codependent sweetness and rude little attitude, hopping in to the fridge every time she heard it open). And I was filled with just this glass squid type consciousness of my own animality, my own meat, inside and out, and my own ability—I could flip a mental switch and see the world anew—to become transparent at will.

In school I took a course on religion and psychoanalysis. My professor was neurotic and kind. A distinct personality. Eventually, a few years after I graduated, or so I’ve heard, the pressure of vying for tenure broke him and he landed in a psychiatric facility. So, I suppose he was teaching his subject with passionate understanding, and that may be why the course has continued to influence me so deeply.

Surveying the subject of religion and psychoanalysis, my doomed professor introduced a class of spiritually-minded millennials (already a death-obsessed breed) to the most 1970s book of all time, second only to Taxi Driver in its perfect crystallisation of the gritty post-hippie era just preceding our own unfortunate corporatist-apocalypse one. The book was The Denial of Death by one Ernest Becker.

The premise of The Denial of Death is simple: everything anyone ever does in life is just about trying to be immortal. We attempt to achieve immortality in the following ways: having families, forming civilisations, practicing religions, falling in love, and also, most especially, constructing a personal identity. So, everything.

I took this thesis to heart and still agree with it, though I would argue that Becker downplays a key piece of the human makeup, which is our deep desire to ruin ourselves.

As a species we are suicidal. Not in the sense of making intricate plans to kill ourselves (we do that too, of course) but in the sense of, perhaps, sitting in the front seat of the front train carriage even though we know those are the seats which guarantee our death in a crash. Not even though—we sit there because we know this.

Three out of seven days a week I don’t care if I live or die.

One day a week I very much want to die.

The other three, the days where I desire to live, and desire it so passionately that it wakes me in the middle of the night, broken out in sweat and tears, praying to a god I half-believe in to please not make the end ever come, it’s those three that cause all my problems, all our problems, social unrest and relationship woes and destruction of nature and egoic behaviour. Or so Ernest Becker claims.

It’s our midnight prayer—the begging for more life, terror of the nothing which breathes in the dark—that enslaves us and causes us to act out. To hurt and to build. To be free, we have to accept death. With acceptance of death comes an end to, or at least a modification of, immortality projects

(that’s what Becker calls them, immortality projects, such as, for example, colonising Mars or mining Greenland or creating an authoritarian superstate or drilling for oil in a national park or withholding contraception from religious followers to build a bigger base of believers to pay the church in future or abusing kids or crow-barring someone’s windshield in a road rage incident or charging predatory interest or murdering everyone in a village in order to steal their homes or hurting a lover on purpose with words)

and the beginning of a search for naked truth.

We wake in the night, afraid of dying, desperate to prolong our existence, praying for it. Then we go beyond this prayer, somehow, and pray instead for dignity. The dignity to face the expanse of nonbeing, even if it doesn’t turn out to be real (of course we hope it’s not real). To accept nothingness as real is to begin to be free.

My point is only that on the way to Antarctica there are colossal squids whose skin is glass, who light themselves from within, and whose faded outlines of organs are visible. If we could see our own organs, we would know ourselves for what we are (vulnerable, temporary animals, meat) and perhaps be satisfied with the fact that we can think and experience and make personalities for ourselves, and not need anything else.

The contrast between what we are materially (meat) and what we are capable of (psychic depth, being moved by beauty so that it changes us, acceptance of change, love) is so shocking, so actually unbelievable, that we should need nothing else other than this fact to satisfy us for our whole lives. To become conscious of it, over and over, is enough for a life. To try and express this consciousness is already a delectable excess.

Nobody needs to order and return five pairs of trousers or look at reels or colonise Mars.

Imagine yourself as a glass squid swimming the near-empty undersea beneath a near-empty continent of pure ice which was, incredibly, for reality changes so constantly and profoundly and isn’t that an insane firework in your heart, once full of green rainforest and teeming with every kind of life, even dinosaurs, maybe even us, maybe even you, and maybe me.

There is something beautiful about civilisation. There’s something beautiful about an ornately decorated doorway, the golden ceiling of a mosque or a cathedral, a martello tower, a lighthouse, a cinema, a cafe, a nighttime city street in 1970s neon rain. But what if we had never made it? What if we had done everything differently, and kindly? What if we had started out by accepting our fate: nonbeing? What would be available to us now, in the way of beauty, in the way of expanse? What sort of civilisation might we have made instead, to what uses might we put our technologies?

Imagine the lands that would still exist. Imagine the animals, the mysteries, the natural fields, the created fields, the extent of the silence, the simplicity of prayer. It’s important to imagine this, now. A different world, where we know good and evil and life and death properly, deeply, where we become adults or, better yet, become as baby children again in wonder and animals in wisdom and wise adults in stillness, stop grasping, become a dignified species worth saving. Become as the glass squid, who knows how to transcend.

Notes

See Robin George Andrews, ‘First ever video shows colossal squid in natural habitat,’ on the National Geographic website (15 April 2025), for a description of the glass squid sighting, with photos and video. Enjoy.

For the full story on Antarctic climate and geological formation since the planet’s inception, and every other thing about Antarctica you might want to know, see David W. H. Walton (ed.), Antarctica: global science from a frozen continent (Cambridge University Press 2013).

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

MARIANNE DAIGH: I’ve been writing since childhood — stories, poems, essays, journals. The first story I remember was about a horse. Who knows why. I had no experience of horses. Everything I wrote was too long, including the horse story. The teacher pulled me up for it in front of the whole class. I was 9. The horse story was 11 pages long and the assignment was 2 pages, maybe. This is good, she said, but unnecessary. You didn’t need to do it. So, nothing changes.

I’m not sure if writing explores questions that can’t be explored any other way. Having access to another person's mind in such vivid detail is not a normal life experience, so that’s quite special. Basically it’s the medium I’m using because it’s what I know how to do.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

MD: Usually a line or image occurs first. For one story, the first line came to me fully formed while chopping vegetables. Often the lines and images are random and pointless, but sometimes there’s a whole piece of work in them. This essay came from a phone conversation with my friend Caitlin and a video my mom sent me of the glass squid. Thanks Mom and Caitlin.

My routine depends on the season. March to October it’s easy to wake up early and write for a couple of hours, then revise or work on side pieces at night. I write best late night and early morning, which is fucked up. Winter is awful for writing. I’m still figuring this out.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

MD: That’s easy. Religion. I can’t stop writing about the religious dimension. I spent a good portion of my adult life studying theology and writing academic theological essays. I have tried to move on, both in life and in art, to no avail. It constantly insinuates itself. I would say I should just accept it, but maybe the reason it remains interesting is because I keep running away.

The other subject almost all of my work touches on is the natural world. These aren't unrelated. Nature and the divine are the ultimate characters because they're all around us but their mystery is impenetrable.

If not a writer, who would you be?

MD: Filmmaker. If I thought I could access the training or talent, I’d do it now.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

MD: There’s an Irish writer and podcaster called Blindboy. If you know him you know him — he wears a bag on his head. I’m a fan. He speaks a lot about the artistic process and the importance of having craic with yourself on the page. Craic is an Irish term for fun, hilarity, play. All the other ego shit about writing is not only bad for you, but it also leads to bad art. When you’re having craic with yourself on the page, in a state of flow, that’s when the writing is good and the process is worth it.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

MD: Not to jinx it, but I’m working on a book. I’ve been writing creatively in a focused, serious way for about two years now, so I feel ready to tackle a book. Jk, I have no idea what I’m doing. So far it’s good craic.

It is simultaneously improving and ruining my life by forcing me to be more disciplined with time. I also tend to lay in bed at night thinking about how bad it is, which is unpleasant.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

MD: James Baldwin teaches me how to make a sentence. Anne Carson teaches me to tell the truth and that I can, at the end of the day, write however the fuck I want to write. Dostoevsky teaches me that a story is allowed to be thrilling and deep at the same time. James Dickey (my substack is named after one of his poems) teaches me to write about the natural world with love and respect. He's also made me think twice about camping.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

MD: Check out the Irish doom folk band Øxn. Their album is called Cyrm. Weirdos who enjoy this essay would probably enjoy the album. They close with a cover of the Scott Walker song Farmer in the City — absolutely gorgeous.

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Note on Artwork

We’ve paired this piece with Kay Sage’s Le Passage (1956).1 A woman sits at the edge of a plain cracked into pale shards, her bare back to us, facing a grey horizon. I remember first seeing this painting and thinking she’s sitting by a frozen ocean witnessing slow ice shelves. I suppose it could be either really. The uncertainty and melancholic calmness of this painting evokes for me the same mood rising from this beautiful essay.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I won’t dilly dally much today because I really want y’all to dive into not one but two new amazing flash pieces from the wonderfully weird and wild imagination of GennaRose Nethercott (one of my most favorite contemporary writers and poets). Go forth!

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The Museum of Doors

It begins at the entrance: a paint-peeled green door with a faulty latch, the twin of your apartment door back home. Within, you will find every other door you have ever passed through. The tall wooden door with the crystal handle from your grandmother’s house. The door to the driver’s side of your first car. The door you closed when you left the termite-ridden farmhouse you shared with your husband and never reopened, and all the doors that came after. Shop doors and doors to the bedrooms of one night stands and hissing electric doors into department stores and the hospital door through which you first exited after being born.

Most of the doors you do not recognize or remember, but the metal placards insist you have, at one point, crossed through them. Some of the doors don’t look like doors. A door can be many things. One door is your first lover, fumbling with your bra clasp in the dark. One door is the phone call from your sister, the tremor in her voice when she found your father on the sofa after his stroke. One of the doors is the horse who bucked you off when you were eleven, marking the moment you realized you were mortal and fragile and would one day pass through the final door of death.

There is a special exhibit in The Museum of Doors containing all the doors you almost opened… but chose not to. They stand sarcophagus-tall and sealed–relegated to their own wing, away from the others. For an additional fee, the curator will pull a delicate silver key from his pocket and let you slide it into the lock of one of these doors. You must not turn the key–though yes, it fits. You must not open the door. You can only stand there, the metal warming in your hand. On the other side, you hear another you breathing–wondering who they would be if only they had left this door closed.

The Museum of Cats

No one knows how long they’ve been there–the cats of Viareggio. Nor is it known how many there are, save among the cats themselves. The curators, too, are cats and do not share their records with a human public. All we can say is: there are certainly hundreds, possibly thousands.

The museum itself is not a building, but a bank of large stones stacked by the shore of the Ligurian Sea. This pile stretches a good kilometer from end to end. Each boulder is roughly the size of a cat.

The cats live among the stones.

Visit in late summer, and you’ll see them sunning themselves, draped like fur coats over the rocks. Tabbies and tortoise shell. Sphinxes gone oily and pink with heat. Fat orange tomcats feasting on sardines thrown to them by visiting spectators. The cats weave in and out of white marble like shadows. When the tide is low, they breed, yowling under moonlight. When the tide is high, we do not know where they go. They turn from us. They make their plans. Strange, untranslatable plans that alter the course of human history: Every great war. Every newborn king. Every monument raised or fallen. It was planned here first, strained through a comb of whiskers.

You too have been shaped by the cats. What–did you think your choices were your own? No. The cats scratched the entirety of your life into their secret ledgers, long before you came to be. Philosophers of our own species have spent centuries debating the balance between the cats’ influence and our believed free will. And it’s easier, no? To accept that all of this, it is the cats’ doing. Your worst mistakes: not your mistakes, at all. They are merely a flea behind the ear, swatted with a careless paw.

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Also by GennaRose Nethercott:

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943)1, the title of which is a reference to Mozart, translating as “a little night music. The painting depicts a hotel corridor of sorts, a place of transience, with the doors shut and numbered like exhibits, a sunflower the size of a body forcing its way down the red carpet, two girls caught in a wind no one else can feel, hair lifting, dresses already torn. Save one, none of the doors open, at least not as we are shown them. In the far corner is just one ajar door, a bar of light flooding in cleanly…beckoning…warding off? I’ve spent so long gazing at this painting and I couldn’t think of a better piece to lend visual harmony to the beguiling museums conjured by GennaRose.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we present you the winner of our second Micro of the Month challenge! The theme was Rabbits and you guys…I had no idea y’all loved rabbits so much, haha. Karan and I moved this month from the US to Canada and mostly what we were reading during that time was your micros on rabbits…it was a delightful experience and I’d have it no other way! I hope you enjoy the piece we’ve picked as much as we did.

Details for June’s Micro of the Month Writing Challenge

Opens: NOW!

Closes: June 3, Midnight

Theme: Love & Sex

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I lift the kit from her cage to cradle her lop-eared comfort. She knows my hands. She knows the dark. Light. Alfalfa, piss, droppings. Her mother’s teats, my human smell. To be so small, to be made airborne, placed on my long thighs. She doesn’t bite. Maybe she should.

We are entangled, this baby and I, two hearts beating. If it’s a race, hers is winning. Mine is in the running. She can’t know promises, the ones I’ve made, the ones I’m breaking—how hard it is to be honest to oneself. She can’t know the voice in my head and how it’s different from what I say to you out loud, how even the truth I tell myself is fiction, how everything I know is a story that I’ve shaped.

What can she know of story? So sits this baby with her translucent ears, her tiny brain of happiness, or anxiety, or indifference. She might know my cardigan is her relative. She might feel me shrink when you appear. She doesn’t know the splintered guitar, or where I’m bruised. I stroke the unearthly soft of her, or earthly, for what is she but of the earth. She doesn’t wear a watch. Or read the news. Better than the poet, she knows the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. She would eatthe flower. I will eat the roots.

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Contributor’s Note

What does a tiny rabbit, a “kit,” newly arrived on the planet, feel when I put it on my thighs and stroke it—it, with 40 million years of deep instinct as prey, knowing it is edible, and what that does to the heart—and me, as predator. I delight in its adorable self. Soft. Vulnerable. Safe in the knowledge it won’t bite. Does it feel safe? Or is its stillness an act of self-preservation? I have voices in my head about which it can’t have a clue. It knows what it knows, which we underestimate if we’re being true to form. I’m interested in how animals perceive their lives, how we perceive ours in that context. We are, as a species, egocentric, but each being, walrus, kit, scarlet mite, is equally as important to itself. I feel reverence for those unique lives. Here, the leap to fiction becomes what happens when you put these worlds and consciousnesses together, when the human is a different kind of vulnerable. Or is she? She is psychological prey. She is thinking that everything she knows is a construct in her mind. Maybe she’s thinking she should bite. She is thinking this rabbit knows something deeply fundamental, something important, something she doesn’t.

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LEAF SHEEP

Poems about animals. Poems about us (with animals). All the creatures, great and small, one poem at a time.

By D M Gordon

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I hope you’re all settled in for the evening because below I’m sharing with you a new kickass brilliant story by the award-winning writer Isabel J. Kim. I first discovered her work in Clarkesworld, when I all but fell outta my chair because her story was unlike anything I’d ever read. I hope that you all too fall out of your chairs after reading “Nomenclature”, then, in the best way possible ofc!

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So God looks down from heaven and says to Cain, “You have to invent murder.”

Cain looks up from the field and says, “OK, you got it, God. What’s murder?”

And God says, “Murder is when you kill someone with intent, so you’re going to kill your brother.”

And Cain says, “What’s a brother?”

And God says, “You’re going to have to invent that first, actually.”

Sanctuary puts his armor on from the bottom up. Greaves, breastplate, gloves, helmet. Identification taught him that, before Identification was blown up in a drone strike.

“You need your hands free for as long as possible,” Ident told him, back when Sanct had just been decanted. “The buckles on the breastplate are a bitch, and after you get it on, it’s hard as fuck to bend over.”

Sanct had nodded, uncertain. He hadn’t known enough about the world to disagree with Ident. And anyway, Ident was his squad leader, so he was in charge of Sanct, and Sanct was six hours old, his brain pre-loaded with the Basic Bio™ package and the Standard Movement™ package and a handful of trade secret combat sims. Sanct didn’t know anything much about anything, other than that he was a soldier and he had been born to fight and die. So, he was imprinting hard on Ident.

“This is where you can make a joke about copulation,” Indent had said, kindly. “It makes the commanders feel more comfortable, if you do things like that.”

“What’s copulation?”

“It’s how people are made. Not us. People. You and I and all the other pieces of meat are made in the vats, but the commanders and the civvies at home are made by a male and a female copulating. The male inserts his penis into the female’s vagina. Or so I’m told. I’ve never seen a female. You won’t either. But the commanders are people, so they like to imagine we’re people too.”

“Okay, so copulation,” Sanct had said. “And my armor on from the bottom up.”

“Quick study, Sanct,” Ident had said.

Two months later, he’d be dead. Drone strike. Death from above, Ident’s limbs flying and his red Blood™ leaking out onto the desert rock. Sanct would have a perfect visual of Ident getting blown to high heaven.

“What do we do,” Sanct would whisper, shocked by the sight. This wasn’t the first time someone had died on the battlefield, but it was the first time his squad leader would have died, and he would feel something sharp and terrible in his chest. Not a physical feeling, but something else.

“Nothing,” Feign would say, before hustling Sanct and Copyright and Passage back into their vehicle and driving them back to base like a maniac while arguing with the commander over the comms, even though Sanct was supposed to be driving. And then Feign would be the new squad leader. And they wouldn’t talk about Ident again. The same way they didn’t talk about Clay and Endure and all the others who had been downed, in the two months since Sanct had been decanted.

Things that exist so far: light, darkness, life, death, mothers, fathers, god, satan, all the animals, shame, the wasteland, the garden, snakes.
Things that don’t yet exist: murder, brothers, your mother weeping, your father moaning, the act of putting the rock against the head and bashing it open.

The pieces of meat are similar to human beings in that they’re derived from a single, legally acquired pool of human DNA, although the meat’s formulation has been substantially improved on through clever technological enhancements. The meat has limbs that are swappable and more durable, their blood is Blood™, and they’re stronger, overall, with improved eyesight. The meat is decanted and is ready to go after a single week of conditioning. The pieces of meat don’t have names. They only have randomly-assigned callsigns.

Sanct doesn’t know how many conflicts the meat is deployed for. He only knows that he has been decanted into a rocky desert, where the sun is hot and it never rains and they have to slather their exposed flesh with a thick white goo before going outside, to protect them from the UV rays.

There were rumors and conspiracy theories among Sanct’s squad, that they haven’t been deployed in the Middle East or Africa or the American Southwest, that they’re on an entire planet entirely. There’s no way to know. None of them knew that much about earth, other than what was included in the Basic Bio™ package. Being on another planet would explain why they rarely saw commanders, but that fact could also have been explained by the fact that most warfare has been automated. In some ways, the meat’s presence is anachronistic.

“They lost their taste for dying,” Right had said. “But they didn’t lose their taste for killing. And you wanna hear my theories?”

Copyright knew more about what was going on than anyone else, because Right had an in with a commander who called on the off-hours. Sanct and the others figured it was probably some sort of strange romance, although romance was maybe the wrong word. Right and the Commander mostly had long, secret conversations over the comms, and occasionally Right was called in for a special mission that he would return from, tight-lipped.

Sanct never asked about what happened with the commander. They all had topics they didn’t want to touch. Right’s commander, Feign’s soap carvings, Sanct’s reaction to Ident’s death.

“Sure,” Sanct said.

“The civvies like to watch. Nah. Like’s not the right word. We look like them, right? They can….what’s the word, empathize, with us dying. And other than us, it’s all machines and code and shit. It doesn’t feel like a fight, a real fight with stakes, if you cripple a landship or a drone. But us, we’re full of Blood-Tee-Em. We’re a good watch. You can feel like your team’s really winning, when we take a base. And when we die, you can feel sorry for us.”

Sanct considered this. It would explain why they were issued rifles, instead of ion cannons and beamers. It would explain why they existed at all.

“If they felt so sorry about us, they shouldn’t have us out here,” Sanct said, and it came out wistful because even Sanct, less than four months old, understood that it was their lot to fight and die. If they weren’t made for this, they wouldn’t have been made for anything at all.

And despite everything, Sanct is glad to have been decanted.

Cain goes home after God’s command. He eats dinner with his mother and his father. Abel is somewhere in the hills and valleys, with his flock, and won’t be home until dark.

And Eve says, “You look tired, Cain. Are you alright?”

And Cain says, “God asked me to do some stuff, and I don’t know about it.”

And Eve says, “Oh that guy.”

And Cain doesn’t ask her to elaborate, because his mother is using that tone she uses when she talks about the cows having escaped the pasture, the rain having ruined the drying laundry, the dog having shit inside. Which is to say, when she talks about a natural phenomenon that she can’t argue with, only able to deal with in the aftermath.

And Cain eats his dinner and thinks about Abel. His father doesn’t say anything. For the entirety of Cain’s life, Adam has seemed a little defeated.

Sanct’s life is split into downtime and uptime. Downtime is for sleep, showers, eating real food, watching propaganda, playing card games with increasingly complex rules. Uptime is for digesting mandates from the commanders and piling into vehicles and driving out to combat zones, for readying their rifles, for shooting. It’s for planning maneuvers with landships and drones and readying traps and strike points. It’s for trying to recover territory. It’s for sitting behind a brick wall, three in the morning, heart in Sanct’s mouth while he hears shelling in the distance.

By month eleven, Sanct’s the second-oldest member of his squad. He no longer drives the vehicle—the honor of the safest seat is reserved for the youngest piece of meat. Instead, Sanct runs comms and tactics, which should be Right’s job, but Right’s their gunner, since he’s shit at reading. Probably there was something wrong with his Basic Bio™ download.

But it works out okay, because Right’s a good shot.

Today they’re being deployed for a longer mission—a week, trying to recapture a supply depot that command thinks has been abandoned. Right’s late, though, which is aggravating. Sanct just grits his teeth and flips through the maps and the mission briefing, because realistically, it doesn’t matter if they’re half an hour late getting out. They’ll drive a little faster and it’ll be fine.

Right finally jogs over.

“Sorry, my commander called,” he says, swinging over the side of the vehicle and getting cozy up next to Sanct and the gun mounted on the open back of their ride. “Start the car, Popular!”

Pop starts the vehicle, arcing them out of the hanger and into the burning desert. Sanct stashes his papers and glances at Right.

“Your commander give you anything useful?”

“Nah. Just wanted some attention before I headed out.”

“Hm,” Sanct says. They’re eating ground fast, but it would still be a long drive. He was sore, still, from the last deployment. He had gotten a real bad full-body bruise from when half a building had fallen on him. Right had risked his life dragging him out of that situation. They’re the two oldest in their squad, now. They’ve known each other for the entirety of Sanct’s life. “Why’s he like you, anyway?”

Right shrugs. Folds his legs, wincing as he changes position.

“It’s not romantic. Sorry if that loses you any bets.”

“Oh yeah?” Sanct says, his interest piqued.

“He just likes to talk. I apparently look exactly like his dead son,” Right says. “Fucked, right?”

“Yeah,” Sanct says, for lack of anything else he can say. The wind whistles around them. They have to lean close together to speak.

“He says he wants to get me out of here,” Right says, quietly, against Sanct’s cheek. “But I’m pretty sure he’s full of shit. I bet he’s said that to dozens of guys that have my face. His son’s face. Whatever.”

“Could all have been you,” Sanct says.

“You know I don’t believe that stuff,” Right says, and then the wind picks up, and it’s too loud to talk anymore, so they don’t.

A lot of the meat believes in reincarnation. They say that the stuff that makes you you is still in the gene pool, and eventually your combination will be reassembled, and then you’ll get printed and decanted again.

They say that unlike everything else in the universe, the meat is destined to come around again. There’s only so many neural patterns and body types that have been preprogrammed into the vats, and eventually, something exactly like you will be printed, and it will be the perfect shape for your soul to re-inhabit.

There’s guys that get really spiritual about it. There’s a smuggled book on Buddhism that gets passed around the barracks. A Bible, too, and a book of Norse mythology.

Sanct read them all, but he doesn’t know if he believes in any of it.

After dinner, Cain sits on a bale of hay and looks at the fields and the orchards and the great velvet sky above the basin of the valley that his brother is herding sheep in, and he sees the speck of his brother among the sheep and he can faintly imagine that he hears his brother singing.

Cain gets up and begins walking toward the valley. God has called him. He’s supposed to answer.

The next day, their vehicle pulls a tripwire as they’re rolling past an aquifer. Automatic turrets spring from the ground and start shooting at the squad.

“Duck,” Sanct shouts, and everyone crashes to the floor, except for Pop, who frantically puts the vehicle in reverse and slams his foot on the acceleration. Right begins inching shakily his way over to the gun mounted on the back.

“Don’t—” Sanct says. Over the edge of the vehicle he can see that there are reinforcements, coming to back up the turrets.

“They’re going to radio in that they saw us unless we get them now,” Right shouts, and hauls himself up to brace against the gun. “Get down!”

Sanct dives back down. He hears the whine of the staccato scream of the big gun above him as it charges up and then Right fires, one, two, three times. Sanct peeks over the edge of the vehicle. One turret down. Couple of assholes coming right at them. Sanct spins his rifle from his back into his arms and takes a couple of shots, gritting his teeth as Blood™ blooms on the adversaries’ uniforms. Hope springs in Sanct’s heart. Maybe this will be easy.

And then he hears two more shots, one after another, and then he’s not paying attention to anything at all because their vehicle is swinging wildly and next to him, Right’s bloody body is falling and ragdolling out of the vehicle and it’s happening too fast for Sanct to say or do anything, and Sanct is gripping the side of the vehicle as it spins out of control and he hears shots, and for a long moment the world is just a smear of color and noise until the vehicle

“Pop’s dead,” Waste shouts from the front. Sanct looks over the edge, and Waste is leaned over with his hands on the steering wheel, half-sitting on Pop’s dead body as he pushes down on the acceleration with his foot.

Pop’s head dangles. Blood™ oozes out of the side of his neck. Sanct feels a sick numb feeling in his stomach. There’s Blood™ in the back of the vehicle, too, where Right was shot, where he fell. It’s all over where it smeared against the low walls before Right was tossed out.

It happened so fast. It always happens so fast. Sanct is never going to see Right again.

“We going back, Sanct?” Waste asks. He’s still got his foot on the acceleration. Nobody’s chasing them, at least.

Right. Sanct’s in charge now. Sanct’s in charge and Right and Pop are dead, and its all the fucking bastards fault and it’s a day’s drive back to base, and he has to decide what they’re going to do next. He’s the oldest, now. Right is never going to get back to his commander.

If they go back, they’re just going to have to report what happened, and they’re going to have to come back out and the situation is just going to get worse.

“No,” Sanct says. “We didn’t need the whole team for this one. We keep going.”

They drive through the rest of the day and the rest of the night. They decide to dump Pop’s body at sunset. Until then, it lies in the back of the vehicle, and Sanct drives, because Waste’s hands are shaking too much after the first few miles. They don’t clean the Blood™ off of the upholstery and dashboard—they only have so much water to spare. Sanct’s hands are tacky by mile number ten. They drive in silence. The sun begins to go down, slowly, at first, and then all at once.

Sanct pulls over near a rock formation. They drag Pop’s body across the sand. They set it facing the setting sun. They close it’s eyes. They head back to the vehicle. Sanct sits heavily down in the drivers’ seat. He doesn’t know if it’s better or worse, that they don’t have Right’s body. The way it ragdolled was terrible.

“Is it always like this?” Waste asks.

“No. Only sometimes.”

“I wish I were dead,” Waste says. “Instead of. Them.”

“It’ll be better in the morning,” Sanct says, and wishes that he had anything better to say, that he believed like some of the others did, that everyone would be reincarnated, that they would live and die again. But all he has are platitudes. The same ones that Ident used to tell him, though, when Sanct got scared. When Clay and Endure were killed. It would be better in the morning.

“Okay,” Waste says. “Do you want me to drive?”

Sanct shakes his head. He starts the engine. They continue.

The rest of the trip is bizarrely peaceful, as if they’re receiving some cosmic recompense for the death of half their squad. Sanct tries not to think about it. He’ll think about it later. He should be used to this by now—they’ve rotated so many pieces of meat out of his squad—but he never is. It always feels different. It’s always a surprise.

Their luck runs out as they approach the supply depot. It’s not abandoned. There are turrets at the corners, vehicles visible behind a barricade, and when Sanct pulls up his heat vision goggles, it’s clear that there are multiple lifesigns inside. Sanct swears. The depot was supposed to be empty. The survivors from the earlier aquifer shootout must have called ahead.

“We heading back?” Waste says.

Sanct hesitates. If they return, they’ll just be sent out again, with two new freshly decanted pieces of meat. The supply depot might be better guarded by then, and there might be more ambushes along the road now that the other side knows that they’re trying to take the depot. And then what? Freshly decanted meat, dead.

He shakes his head. “We’re calling in a drone strike.”

“We can do that?”

“Not usually,” Sanct says. Sanct is eleven months old, though. Sanct understands relationships, and how they change what people are going to do. “I’m going to call Copyright’s commander.”

At the edge of the valley, where the grass turns to rock and sand, Cain sees Abel. He’s a small figure down in the valley. Cain recognizes Abel by the crook of his staff among the sheep, and then by the cloak that their mother has woven for him. It isn’t very good. All their clothes are poorly made. Nobody has made clothes before their mother.

And Abel waves his staff and calls, “Cain!”

And Cain waves back, rock in his hand, and says, “Abel!”

The commander listens to Sanct’s explanation without interrupting. When Sanct is done, the commander speaks in a calm, measured tone.

“In half an hour, there will be a drone flying overhead with a precision payload. Make sure that you’re at least two hundred meters away.”

“Copy that. Thank you.”

Sanct leans back against his seat, the tension leaching out of his muscles. Reinforcements are coming. He’s not going to have to lead Waste to his death.

“Was it bad, when he died?” the commander asks.

“It wasn’t bad,” Sanct lies.

Cain’s killed a lot of things. Bugs. Snakes. Lizards. Sheep. A dog, once, when it attacked him first. He’s reaped sheaf after sheaf of grain, if that counts as killing anything. His parents have told him that every single thing on earth is alive, and that all of them were created by God. God has not provided any guidance on the subject.

Nobody else on the earth has a brother, other than Cain, other than Abel. Cain thinks that killing Abel is going to be different than killing the dog. But he doesn’t know. He’s never had a brother before. Nobody has.

And Abel calls out, “Why do you have a rock?”

The drone streaks overhead. From its belly a black speck drops and hits the supply depot and there’s a bright, beautiful plume of flame. Dense clouds of black smoke billow from the windows and broken ceilings.

Sanct and Waste watch the supply depot smolder. The fire begins to flicker out. The smoke trails into the bright blue of the sky. Sanct gets the heat vision goggles out and squints through them. There’s too much ambient warmth to tell if there’s anyone still alive. Sanct unlocks the vehicle, strapping his weapons to his back and to his belt.

“If I’m not back in an hour, drive back without me,” he says, and hoists himself out.

And Cain looks down at his brother and thinks about light, darkness, life, death, his mother, his father, God, all the animals, and the story that his mother once told him about paradise and the snake and his father, when he asked why she was so sad. And he thinks about his sickle. And he thinks about his flail. And he thinks about his hoe, and the rocks he digs out of the ground, and he thinks about how strong he is, from the days in the field. How the human arm is engineered for throwing.

And Cain thinks about Abel. How soft Abel’s head is. What is a brother? What does a brother matter to him?

The rock is warm in his hands.

Sanct walks through the bombed-out ruins of the supply depot. The exterior walls are still intact. Inside, the structure is a ruin. Sanct wonders about the waste of it all. The original plan had been to take the depot clean, but he supposes that destroying it and preventing the enemy from having it is better. He glances through the heat vision goggles every few meters. So far, there isn’t anything that looks like a live body. He steps over a corpse, and then a second one. There’s Blood™ and ash on the floors.

He gets nearly to the other side of the building before he raises the heat vision goggles and sees the figure on the other side of the wall, hot and alive. Sanct angles himself against the wall and peers through the open door. Yes. There he is. One survivor, then. It could have been worse.

Sanct lines up his shot. He doesn’t think. He shoots. There is a high whine, and then the sound of someone collapsing, swearing. Sanct waits for the ensuing silence. It doesn’t occur.

Sanct sighs. Rolls his shoulders. Walks outside with his rifle in hand, ready to deal the finishing blow. After this is over, he’ll go out to his vehicle, and then him and Waste will head back to base.

And God, standing next to Cain like he always does, says: “Look, it is crucial that you invent the act of putting the rock against the head and bashing it open.”
And Cain says: “Can I do that to a sheep, instead?”
And God says: “No. It’s got to be a person.”

And Sanct looks at the stranger, and the stranger looks at him, and the stranger is bleeding from his thigh and there is a growing pool of Blood™ around him, and Sanct understands at that moment.

The zealots are right. They’re all made of the same meat. The same gene pool and presets. The same faces and the same bodies and the same DNA being printed out on Sanct’s side, on this stranger’s side, on all the sides of every conflict. Every piece of meat.

This stranger has Ident’s face.

And Cain says, “You know, I think my mom was right about you when she said that she loves you but doesn’t like you.”
And God says, “I don’t care if you like me. Do you love me?”
And Cain says, “I don’t know what love is. That hasn’t been invented yet.”
And God says, “Shit. Fuck. Whoops. Hold on one second.”
And Cain feels a pain in his heart so great that he feels like he is dying.

“Can you make this quick?” the stranger that looks like Ident wheezes. He’s unarmed. He’s wearing downtime clothing. He looks exactly like Ident did, before Ident died.

There is sweat and white sludge dripping into Sanct’s eyes. He wipes them. He looks up at the sky. The drones. The birds. The beating sun. Where are the commanders and the civvies and all the people who are people might be watching them right now? Sanct’s thoughts are all bleary, smeared with exhaustion There are drones high in the sky and there is a camera on his helmet and maybe the same thing on not-Ident’s helmet. Is anyone looking? Is anyone ever looking?

“Hey, man,” Not-Ident says. “We don’t have all day here. C’mon. I don’t need any foreplay. Don’t fucking draw this out, kid.”

And Sanct, looks back down. He wonders, despairingly, rifle held ready in his arms like a warm lover, if a crass vocabulary is genetic. He puts his finger on the trigger. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to watch this. And besides. He’s one meter away. His aim doesn’t need to be perfect.

“Now, Cain,” God says.

Cain has never disobeyed God before. He feels love like a deep stupid painful throb in his heart. He closes his eyes.

Sanct opens his eyes. He throws down his rifle. He unbuckles his gloves and his body armor. His breastplate falls to the ground. He strips his sweaty, stained uniform, and then his sweaty undershirt that had once been bleach-white. He ties the undershirt to the barrel of his gun. He jams the gun into the sand. He leans down and heaves not-Ident’s body over his shoulder.

“Hold on to me,” he says. “Don’t fucking bite.”

“The hell are you doing?” Not-Ident wheezes.

“Doesn’t matter, you’re probably going to die either way. I probably nicked an artery”

Sanct hefts Not-Ident’s weight. His shoulders are killing him. Not-Ident is heavy as hell.

“You’re insane,” Not-Ident says.

“Nah,” Sanct says. “You look exactly like someone I used to care about. All my friends are dead. And I’m done with this shit. I’m tired. Aren’t you tired?”

Silence for a moment, before Not-Ident coughs wetly.

“Yeah. I’m tired.”

Sanct looks to the sky.

“I’m done with this shit,” he says again, to the sun, to the drones, to anyone else who is watching. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

And then Sanct turns and starts walking. He grips the white flag like it is a life buoy. He is taking one step after another, away from his vehicle, away from Waste, away from the bombed-out supply depot. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He doesn’t know if there’s anyone else out there. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. He doesn’t know if Not-Ident is going to die.

Sanct takes step after step. He is waiting for Right’s commander to kill him with a remote drone strike. He is waiting for anyone to stop him.

“What do they call you?” Sanct asks.

“History. Tory, to my friends.”

“I’m Sanct.”

“Hi,” Tory says, and then coughs again. “Again. I just want to make it clear. You’re crazy, and we’re both going to be dead.”

“Yeah. But right now, we’re alive. So shut the fuck up, and let me carry you.”

And Tory laughs, wheezing, and it’s strong enough that Sanct thinks that his Blood™ might have clotted and Tory’s not going to bleed out immediately. And right now they’re both alive, and they still have a couple liters of water and the desert is vast and deep and there is no one immediately coming to kill them, and Sanct is choosing not to kill anyone ever again.

And Cain bashes God in the head with a rock, and wanders into the desert.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

ISABEL J. KIM: I started writing with a pretty conventional story: I was a kid, and a teacher gave me praise for my fiction. Shout out Dr. Horn from Warren Middle School, you set me on a path that led me to such strange places as “writing short science fiction stories.” I started writing stories with more than superficial meaning mostly because I have a hard time writing stories that don’t have any meaning, in fact, I am probably too didactic in my fiction and have actively been working to pull that aspect back, to middling effect. I think part of the reason why I do this, though, is that I have a hard time explaining my thoughts through a traditional essay format, and sometimes I feel that I’m the recipient of a particularly strange curse: I can only say how I feel through the lens of a 4000 word science fiction story, a format that nobody asked me to write (well, now people ask me to write them, but for a long time they didn’t!).

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

IJK: I went full time as an author a little over a year ago, and since then any semblance of a consistent routine has regrettably dissipated, despite my best efforts. Things happen when they happen, I work pretty much every day at any time between 7am and midnight, but I do less work per day than I used to, when I had a more traditional job. I do try to write during “normal” work hours, just to match my partner’s schedule. I also have different drafting cadences for novels and short fiction—since you've got a piece of my short fiction here, I’ll talk about that process. I usually start with one vivid, clear scene or concept that I want to scaffold a story around, which usually isn’t enough to carry the entire narrative, and then I start trying to think about what other concepts might go well in that story. I collect these ideas like a crow collects shiny stones, and these ideas will kind of just be in my brain for weeks or months or years until I have enough pieces that fit together into something cohesive and more interesting than just the sum of their parts. Then I start writing, and it usually goes pretty quickly after that.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

IJK: Doubling, bodysharing, death of the self, being overtaken by an alien entity or having to commune with that entity, tremendously strange ethical dilemmas, leaps of faith. I have no idea why all my themes are so strange. In real life I’m fairly cheerful! For a while I was also including the word “fluorescent” in everything I published, but I’ve stopped doing that for now.

If not a writer, who would you be?

IJK: Easy but boring answer: Biglaw corporate transactional attorney, specifically in a leveraged finance or M&A group. That was my profession before I took my own leap of faith.

I became a lawyer because I felt like I should get a "real job," when I was younger, and I liked it enough that I would go back to that. Before I was a lawyer, though, I was thinking about getting an MFA, though, and in that case I would have been doing conceptual installation art and making no money. There were a lot of lives I considered inhabiting when I was twenty-two, okay.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

IJK: I’ve both received and would like to pass along this piece of advice: Quantity over quality. Write more stories, get your reps in, learn where you always stutter. This is more effective at quickly improving your craft than endlessly polishing a single narrative ever is. Ideas are cheap, work on your execution. Also, you can recycle those ideas into different executions over time.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

IJK: I’m working on my second novel draft! My first novel, SUBLIMATION, is out on June 2nd, and I am truly in the trenches working on the next book I owe my publisher. Everyone says that second books are harder and I didn’t believe them, but this draft? This draft wants to kill me. With hammers. If it doesn’t kill me, though, this book will be fun for people to read. I’ve been pitching it as Piranesi meets the Backrooms, and it is about a mall in an alternate reality that goes on forever, and it is about how empire and cultures replicate themselves. It’s also about losing your girlfriend at the mall.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

IJK: In no particular order: Kazuo Ishiguro, Masaaki Yuasa, Wes Anderson, the Wachowski sisters, Kelly Link, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Ted Chiang, Porpentine Charity Heartscape. And some specific works–Catch-22, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Homestuck, Futurama, OFF, 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss. I am, for better or for worse, a product of my time and also of the internet. And I’m probably forgetting people and media, too.

Many of the names and pieces of media on this list have shown me how to create a perfect traditional narrative, and then, how to break a traditional narrative in an effective way. The other thing that many of these creatives have shown me is how you can use humor effectively, and how humor and horror are two sides of the same coin.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

IJK: DAK0TA by Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries—this was one of the first pieces of video art that made me think of text as an artform. It plays with time and text and music, and it’s a little dated now (it’s quite old, I first saw it a decade ago), but I think it still holds up as an experience.

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Notes on Art

I remember first seeing this painting and thinking, wait wait Willliam Blake writes such good poems and he’s a great artist. But of course, talent is in a way a divine gift, and indeed in The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve1, Blake draws away the layers of divinity in the figures depicted here. We witness Cain fleeing into the wilderness with his hair seemingly on fire, mouth open in a howl, while Adam and Eve cradle the body of their dead son. There is a crack in the veil of light, of God, and evil has sprouted yes, but also there is family, and heartbreak, and as you ponder Cain’s interiority, just…humanity. This is exactly what Isabel J. Kim is so darn good at. She gives us strange, ancient, biblical even (as you saw in Nomenclature) characters and tales, and yet it is always their humanity, however marred, that shines through.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, below we share a flash nonfiction piece that could well be a prose poem or a series of handwritten letters torn at seemingly random places and yet it binds together into a delicate, cohesive whole full of longing and love. Enjoy!

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Adele had a small waist, a blue Chevy pickup and a laugh that would fry an egg. She was studying Chinese and landscape architecture and finished with a law degree. Which was about the last I heard of her except for a single Internet post: “I am a dedicated commitment-phobic,” it read. “I dare call it freedom.”

She bought the truck with the last of the insurance money, which also paid her tuition at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her father was a “hot-shit driver” passing on a double yellow line, top down on the Sunliner after a night out in Rolla, Missouri. “If you want to imagine that. I sure don’t. Killed them both.”

She was living in a tent when I met her. At twenty-eight she had four years on me. I had a black-cat tattoo and was a sucker for a bleach blonde with a soft southern drawl. I bought her a gun rack for the truck and we drank Genny Cream Ale and laughed until she peed herself and laughed some more, parked out by Rick’s Sunoco on a hot summer night.

“Dear Addie, Thank you for the newspaper article. Rider and I are so proud of you in New York. The days are longer now, and the pecans are green as lemons. We say that every spring now since you left. Rider’s got his postal pension. He spends his time at home now and is good company. We miss your Momma, and I know you do too. Here’s a little money. The bus still stops at the depot. Your loving Aunt Inez”

Adele and her cousin would shake the trees at her grandmother’s pecan ranch, where she went to live after Aunt Lu got too nervous to mind her. She took the bus from Little Rock to Okemah on her own and stayed in the house in back with Inez and Rider until she finished high school and got on a Greyhound to New York, where she lived with a jewelry maker whose name you’d know on the Lower East Side and saw Lee Morgan at Slug’s the night before his wife shot him between sets. He was thirty-three. It was the same year, ’72, that the Times mentioned her in a review of Moonchildren, and she moved to Vermont and bought the truck.

“Dear Pie,” she wrote me in Jamaica Plain, “I’m rather worried right now. How am I going to survive? You know what I mean? Nervous, nervous, nervousnervousnervous. Strung out. Crazy. Scared. Slippery. Cranial winds. Etc. etc. etc. Oh, I want to be light-hearted about it all, but I’m overwhelmed. I’m POOR. I’m TOO BUSY. I’ve got BUGS. I want to cry. I want my Momma. I long to see you. I would come down to Boston but I can’t afford it. I guess I’ll have to wait for you to come back up here. All my love, Pie.” I was still in love with her, so I did.

She planted a garden in the beds in front of the house, basil, thyme, garlic, and green onions that sprouted every spring after she left me. She could really cook. She made drop biscuits, brown gravy and fried chicken that was perfect, with ease, and talked about her brother who was in prison in Kansas for something he didn’t do or almost didn’t do and threw the plates at me after I washed them and the cups too when I called her a sad cliché.

I paid off all her debts before she left. She gave me a Leica camera to hold. Dinah and Bix, her cats, stayed on to love me on those long dark nights. Or when the stars were out, I would whistle and hear a rustle in the brush on Sunset Hill and whistle again and sit on the front steps until they came back to me.

I found a letter from her Aunt Inez in a file marked “Okemah,” tucked in with a faded studio photograph of her father in his army uniform, thin as a rail with a full-body smirk, lit cigarette and those same sharp cheekbones, “1944” penciled on the back; two snapshots of her mother, left hand on her elbow, ring on her finger, younger than Adele was when we met, prettier; and a two-dollar bill, still crisp, sealed in brown envelope marked “Good Luck” on the front.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

FLEMING MEEKS: I began in fits and starts, in high school, in college. I wanted to find out what was in my head. I wrote like a photographer. I took snap shots. I discovered I could do that by writing and rewriting and rewriting. My first work was very short. I went from there to longer narratives. Word by word. Figuring it out, writing it. Trial and error and patience.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

FM: Voice, image, unease. That's all of a piece for me. I don't have a routine. I sit down when I can and where I can and write and think. And boil it down. Compress, And I go where it takes me. I look for ideas and things I could note resolve. Time, time and time helps me figure it out. Many things I couldn't figure out a year or five years or ten years ago start to make sense. I figure it out by stripping the work down and building it back.

I don't have a routine. I don't have a writers room. I can write anywhere. I find stories in what I see all around me. Sometimes things I see and hear touch things I want to know more about, things I want to understand. Snippets of conversation, body language, frustration. When I was a journalist, an editor said he could put me in an empty room for an hour and I would find a story.

The magic is to do it. To fail and fail again. To never give up. much more about failure than success. She published a book of photos of her family. There are something like 60 photos in the book. Or 62 or 64. She and assistant went back and looked at all of the photographs she took for this book, all of glass plates that are her negatives. She uses large format cameras. There were 6,000 plates. Only one in a hundred was acceptable to her. One good photograph out of a hundred, It's very gratifying. I saw her show at the National Gallery of Art in 2018. Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings. I have not gotten over it.

It's not about that 10,000 hours crap. It's about working every fucking day and believing in yourself no matter how difficult it is. Sally Mann inspires me more than any other artist. Off the top of my head I can't name a writer who inspires me at that level. Who inspires me day in and day out. No, I can. Philip Roth, Bob Dylan. Yes, they inspire me day in and day out and have for decades.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

FM: I think about it like this. Put two people in a room and create a stituation. A problem. A conflict. Emotional, yes. Intellectual, yes. Spiritual, not so much. Conflicts between people, misunderstandings, arguments, longing and desire. I try to land in the middle of it. In media res. To create problems and try to solve them. Resolve them. Often there is not satisfaction, no real resolution. But understanding. These conflicts are also with the self. All of these "people" are parts of the self. Life is tough.

If not a writer, who would you be?

FM: A photographer. Photography for me is always learning. I would love to have done that full time.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

FM: Keep working back into a piece. Build it stitch by stitch. Don't be in a hurry.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

FM: I am combing photography and text. I have something like 35,000 photographs, and I've probably lost another 30,000. I think about my pictures and what I am writing. There is a commonality to it. There is often a connection between what I have written and what I have photographed. I put them together in my head and then on paper.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

FM: Bob Dylan. Sally Mann. They are people of my generation or almost of my generation. I marvel about how they figure it out again and again. I constanly learn from them. And learn about persistence.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

FM: Any photograph by Saul Leiter. The late interiors of Pierre Bonnard. In the Mood for Love directed by Wong Kar-wai. Every second of it is brilliant.

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World1 (1948) — a woman in a pink dress turned away from us, seemingly dragging herself across a field of dry grass toward a gray house on a distant hill. We never see her face. This piece has a similar aesthetic and heart I feel. Adele is rendered down to the cheekbones, the laugh, the bleach blonde, and yet she keeps slipping out of frame so to speak — to New York, to Vermont, to law school, to a single internet post years later while the narrator stays in the field and the pecans go green as lemons every spring.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we present you a beautifully argued essay. I especially love the way Liza weaves reportage, personal reflection, and poetic engagement with grace and humility throughout the piece. I encourage you to experience it as a kind of meditation!

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I am an unlikely science writer. My appreciation for science has always run deeper than my talent or skill level. I spent my high school years at a public magnet school for science and technology, and while I was interested in the broader questions of how and why we perceive the world the way we do, I couldn’t seem to get any of the details to stick. Diagrams and problem sets left my brain in tangles, and I dozed off during demonstrations of chemical reactions and lengthy descriptions of cell structure. Hands-on experiments only underscored my lack of ability—one misstep and my solution would turn pink when everyone else’s was blue. 10th grade chemistry, 11th grade physics, 12th grade probability and statistics: I hated it all.

In much of the public imagination, and to me for most of my life, the word science conjures images of people in white coats using inscrutable jargon, rather than the many tangible impacts of science on everyday life. I say “conjures,” as if it were magic. Science can feel like magic at times, at least from an outsider’s perspective, but in reality it is the opposite of that. It’s a process, one that’s often discouraging, frustrating, and difficult to explain. It involves plenty of failure, and even after years of labor it may not provide the results one would hope for. And yet, without it, human societies wouldn’t exist. Science is in our drugs, our food, our weather, our infrastructure. It’s in the air we breathe. And with ecosystems changing more rapidly each year, the planet’s food supply dwindling while the population grows, and more people getting sick, we can’t afford to ignore it.

It’s summer 2025, and I’ve been selected to spend a week at a writers’ residency at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). Government funding cuts loom over the campus like the smoke currently drifting down from Canadian wildfires, and the entire community is reeling. We are still in the early days of an administration hostile to scientists and to science itself—an administration that, not content to defund necessary research by as much as one-third, compounds the problem by presenting stories that spread fear, panic, and disinformation. The purpose of my residency here is to build bridges between the scientific community and the general public, using art (in my case, poetry) as a medium. According to CSHL’s website, “Artists who can interpret scientific research elements into accessible works of art—paintings, novels, poetry, and more—will connect with CSHL scientists who can explain the significance of their research, lessening the prevailing distance between the public and science.” I wonder if I can live up to this, or if anyone is up to the task these days.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was founded in 1890 and since then has become world-renowned among scientists, though it’s less known to the general public. It has been home to eight Nobel Prize winners and currently has 1,000 employees, in addition to the 12,000 scientists it hosts from all over the world through its Meetings & Courses Program, graduate school, and other educational outreach. It’s been the site of groundbreaking discoveries in cancer research, neuroscience, and plant biology, to name just a few areas. Uncomfortably, CSHL also provided a setting for a more sinister chapter in the history of “science,” namely the Eugenics Records Office, which was housed on campus between 1910 and 1939. CSHL makes its records of the eugenics movement, and its own role therein, available via an extensive website and archives collection, to anyone seeking to understand the catastrophic impact this had worldwide. This difficult history is hard to reconcile with the diverse and innovative scientific hub that exists at CSHL today, as is the case with so many prominent and powerful institutions in and outside of the United States.

The role of science is to investigate, to seek and find, to question and answer, but not necessarily to inform the public, let alone to persuade those who have already made up their minds. At the same time, people need—and deserve—to know about the work that is being done, not only to stay informed about their own health and that of their environment, but to appreciate the wonder and even the beauty inherent in science. Positive developments can provide reasons to maintain hope and resilience in dark times. In order for this to become a reality for more people, however, true stories about science need to be a greater part of the conversation, and they need to be presented in an approachable and less problematized way. This is where good storytelling comes in.

Think, for instance, of the Covid vaccine. Ian Oldenburg, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University, points out how utterly astounding it was that within the span of a few months, the world went from encountering a new disease we knew nothing at all about to having a completely new technology that saved thousands if not millions of lives and got us back to our jobs, our schools, our communities. It was nothing short of miraculous. Such a discovery should have prompted a renewed appreciation for the necessity of science and what it can accomplish in a relatively short amount of time. Instead, the vaccine was met with suspicion, refusal, and a distrust that lingers even today—and, tragically, countless more Covid cases and deaths that could have been prevented. Even as I type this essay, the news is breaking that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current secretary of health, is slashing funding for mRNA immunizations, including the Covid vaccine and a new one for avian flu.

Clearly, we need better stories. “Science doesn’t have a great PR department,” Oldenburg says. Right now, the public is in desperate need of stories that celebrate what science can do to change our lives for the better, that can give us reasons to persist in the face of such challenges as disease, hunger, and climate disaster, while acknowledging the untold damage false “science” has wrought historically. Stories as compelling as the ones being circulated on certain corners of social media, but without misleading or bending the truth. Stories that present information in a way that’s approachable without being condescending. It’s easy to slip into blame and frustration, to chalk people’s distrust of science up to ignorance. It’s tempting to rail against misinformation and those who spread it. But the truth is much more complicated than that, and complaining won’t resolve anything. Maybe scientists also need to do a better job of communicating.

It’s not hard to see where distrust of science stems from. In addition to the long and actual history of racists and ableists presenting themselves as “scientists,” fictionalized stories of scientists as villains are deeply embedded in our cultural mythology. Some of the most iconic villains in modern media are doctors or scientists—Dr. Octopus, Dr. Horrible, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Then there’s science itself, which by its very nature uncovers new truths that challenge previously held perceptions. Human beings are notoriously resistant to change. Even before the advent of modern science as we know it, Galileo was famously excommunicated from the Catholic Church (and wasn’t pardoned until more than 300 years after his death) for proving the earth revolved around the sun. Some people still believe the earth is flat, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary. It’s impossible to expect a new scientific discovery to change entire worldviews, embedded as they are in culture, media, religion, and individual psyches.

Then there are the very real stories of science’s dark undertones: the histories of eugenics and forced sterilization, and the theft of biological data from marginalized groups, whose impacts still reverberate in countless families and communities. For far too long, studies compromised by personal and cultural prejudices were passed off as “science,” costing millions of lives and the endangerment of entire languages and societies. Add to this the more recent stories of racism, sexism, and queerphobia within the scientific community, harms that persist not only in science but in every field, and it’s understandable why science cannot have unchecked power, why so many people fear and distrust it so deeply.

One scientist I talk to at CSHL says the blame rests not with science as a whole, but with the bad actions of individual scientists. I think the truth is more complicated than that. The concept of science, the desire to make sense of the world we live in and determination to uncover the truth, is what makes us uniquely human. Without it, we wouldn’t have much of what makes the world liveable today. But science as practiced by humans is inherently flawed, and contains all the shortcomings of human beings themselves. Take, for instance, the British doctor who published a now-discredited study erroneously linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism. The paper was eventually retracted, and the doctor was de-licensed. Yet the myth that vaccines cause autism continues to be publicized—and believed—and children have become ill and even died as a result.

Individual stories that circulate about bad actors within science, within medicine, seem like isolated incidents, and they are. But it’s a flawed system that allows these things to happen in the first place, and lackluster communication methods that allow false rumors to spread while positive developments go relatively unnoticed. How, I wonder, can we imagine what an alternative model would look like?

On my first morning at CSHL, I speak with a bioinformatics expert, Hannah Meyer, who runs a lab on campus. “Scientists should become better at advertising what they do,” she says. She specializes in the immune system, and how the thymus gland teaches our T-cells which cells are healthy and which are infected. She says to think of the thymus as a school and T-cells as students. T-cells learn the skills they need from the thymus, even learning to specialize in treating different types of infections, the way an undergraduate student chooses a major. They leave the thymus, or “graduate,” when they have learned everything they need to fulfill their function.

T-cells specialize and serve different functions from one another, Meyer explains. She likens the T-cells to slices of Swiss cheese, layered on top of one another. Each individual slice has holes, but if you have an entire stack of Swiss cheese, the holes disappear. One slice picks up where another leaves off. It’s the same in the immune system: each T-cell has its own specialization; one’s weakness is another’s strength. I reflect on what this comparison says about community collaboration, how, in a thriving, well-functioning community, each member has different skills that are seen as valuable, and no one is labeled useless or left out. When someone isn’t able to perform, someone else is there to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, as in a society rife with divisions and inequalities, this is not always the case. Just as there are holes in the fabric of society, there are holes in the Swiss cheese stack of the immune system. This is why people get sick.

Meyer often speaks in metaphors like a poet. She is from a rural area of Germany, near the French border, and was the first in her family to attend college. She shares her personal background with students, and encourages other potential scientists who doubt their own abilities to “go for it.” Science, and scientists, have a good advocate and storyteller in Meyer. And we need better metaphors, better stories, when it comes to talking about science. Speaking with Meyer’s team, I reconsider the more commonly-used metaphor of the immune system as the body’s military force: in this framework, T-cells are “soldiers” who fight off “foreign invaders.” The language of military and policing is so overused in talking about health that it’s become cliché—and because I deal with autoimmunity myself, I’ve heard it ad nauseum. What if, instead of these stories, we told new ones?

I compare the violent portrayal of the immune system in the popular imagination to the way Meyer presents it: T-cells are not soldiers but students. They spend their time in the thymus learning, then work together for the body’s greater good. There is such humility in that metaphor, a recognition of the power of community, of individuals working together to improve the whole. If the stories we told about science were presented with warmth and understanding rather than violence and fear, would public perceptions of science change?

I am shy to share my personal history of autoimmune disease with Meyer. Instead, I ask if she’s ever encountered someone in her career who has personal experience with autoimmunity or cancer—two opposing examples of the immune system’s inability to function properly. She is very cautious, and doesn’t want to overstep her bounds. Meyer is not a clinician, and though her work is impactful in developing T-cell therapies, which are in turn impactful in clinical and pharmaceutical settings, she is “so far back on the chain,” she says, and doesn’t interface with the public the way a clinician would. But that’s just it. If we are to improve public health outcomes, we need doctors, pharmacists, scientists—we need everyone. There’s that Swiss cheese metaphor again. No one can be an expert in all of these fields, but together we can accomplish so much.

Maintaining a sense of metaphor and play, expanding the possibilities of what stories about science could be, making the abstract real in order to serve others and the community—these may seem trivial on the surface but are in fact necessary and undervalued. Such themes permeate the workplace culture in Meyer’s lab. On the way to lunch that day, Amitava Banerjee, a postdoctoral fellow, pulls a thymus plushy out of his bag. “I like to call it my emotional support thymus,” he says. I can’t help but burst out laughing. The actual thymus, an organ I didn’t even know I had until earlier this week, has a dull pink color, and is kind of bumpy and gross-looking to a squeamish non-scientist like me. Banerjee’s emotional support thymus, however, is bright yellow and smiling, with big googly eyes, rosy cheeks and a mischievous grin. It is wearing a BATMAN hat—a reference not to the superhero but to the database the team created containing over 22,000 interactions between peptides and T-cell receptors (BATCAVE, or Benchmark for Activation of T cells with Cross-reactive AVidity for Epitopes), and the AI model they developed to comb through it (BATMAN, or Bayesian inference of Activation of TCR by Mutant ANtigens). In this lab, even databases and AI models can be associated with a quirky name and a familiar face.

The emotional support thymus is more than four times the size of the real thymus, but that’s not the point. Almost all of the scientists I spend time with at CSHL are so good at making the conceptual tangible, presenting their work in a way that’s approachable, even exciting. Who wouldn’t want to hold a smiling, cuddly thymus, to cradle it in their arms like the adorable puppy they can’t wait to come home to? Going into this residency, I had expected to be intimidated or condescended to, thinking that maybe the selection committee had chosen the wrong Writer-in-Residence, that I was in over my head. But then it hit me that there is no “wrong” person. Science is for everyone. Or it should be. In a more just world, we would all have access to accurate information, thoughtfully told stories, and the positive changes good science can effect.

So where is the disconnect? Where is the breakdown in communication? Why are stories of fear and violence so much more powerful, more memorable, than ones of gratitude and community, humility and learning? Meyer tells me I will need a social scientist to answer that one.

As a poet, I wonder if poetry can be a medium with which to tell better stories. It is an unlikely tool, in the same way I am an unlikely science writer. But I feel some personal responsibility, too. The scientists I’ve talked to at CSHL have instilled that sense of responsibility in me. They’ve given me their time, treated me with interest and respect, and are spoken of highly by their grad students and those who work in their labs. In terms of communicating better stories about science, other forms of writing—campaign rhetoric, advertising, social media posts, and the like—haven’t worked out well. So why not poetry?

I have models in poets such as Andrea Werblin Reid and Joseph Osmundson, whose books tell stories of breakdowns in communication between the immune system and the body, and between the body and the stories the body tells itself—not unlike the breakdowns in communication between the scientific community and the rest of the public. Both poets, like the speakers in their books, like all of us, are living alongside the results of medical science, its breakthroughs, its promises, and its limitations.

Reid’s posthumous collection, To See Yourself As You Vanish, deals with the poet’s experience of ovarian cancer and acknowledgement of her own mortality. Like Meyer, Banerjee, and the other scientists I’ve spoken with at CSHL, Reid resists the use of militarized language to describe science and the human body. In one of the book’s earliest poems, “Language is a Virus,” the speaker criticizes others’ thoughtless use of war metaphors to discuss cancer:

[...] they say she lost her battle with—

Like it was a duel she entered at dawn, like she was ever

in possession of a pistol. there is no fight against.

there is live with, for as long as humanly possible.

How many times have we heard phrases such as “She lost her battle with,” or “He’s fighting cancer,” forgetting that no one ever agrees to this fight in the first place? The more I think about such metaphors, the more ludicrous they seem. No one gets to referee someone else’s illness, or to declare a winner. As Reid’s speaker points out, she never willingly donned armor and went into battle. By suggesting she did, we are not only making an unfair judgment; we are taking away her agency. Reid so brilliantly reclaims the voice and agency of those who are sick and dying, and are too often assumed not to have either.

Reid’s speaker allows herself a full range of emotion—envy, superiority, distaste, ill will—and grants herself the agency to resist and refuse. She is resistant to the judgment and isolation she receives even from those close to her, the “magic of the disappearing friends.” “[W]hen you say you’ll retire in Boca Raton/your backyard fat with the children of your children,” she admonishes, “know your audience.” So many of the speaker’s friends and loved ones are unable to hear stories like hers, or the privilege of health keeps them from listening. And that’s what health is: not a virtue, but a privilege. The same goes for access to affordable, high-quality health care and accurate scientific information. These privileges are not earned but granted randomly, unfairly, at the whims of the universe and not necessarily to the most deserving among us. Yet, Reid asserts, most people want to point to a specific and available cause of illness. That way, they can rationalize, it won’t happen to them. “[W]hen someone asks what it was, what caused it,” the speaker observes, what they’re really asking is, “what could they personally avoid not to get it themselves.” She responds, simply, “bad luck. avoid bad luck if you can, because that’s what it was/and that’s what it is and mostly nobody wants to hear that out loud.”

The way we talk about science, the way we talk about health, matters. These stories do not just stay within the lab; they flow through the membranes of the scientific community and spill out into our public and private conversations about health, illness, and those living with illness. This is exemplified in Reid’s work and in Capsid: A Love Song by Joseph Osmundson, who is both a scientist and a poet. Capsid: A Love Song deals with autoimmunity, specifically HIV, and explores viral transmission and replication as a metaphor for romantic and sexual relationships. As with virus and host, one partner can overwhelm and overtake the other, until it’s not clear where one begins and another ends. Balance, intimacy, and risk-taking, Osmundson’s speaker suggests, are inherent both in personal relationships and in having a human body that can get sick at any point. “All human bodies know disease,” his speaker points out. “All bodies take risks. It is just that some of us pay more dearly for ours.” Similar to Reid’s discussion of “bad luck,” Osmundson addresses the additional bad luck of being stigmatized, of having one’s needs ignored, and how this further complicates the effects of the disease itself.

Like Reid, Osmundson is critical of the language of war and capitalism as used to describe illness. In “IIa. Drugs/Small molecule inhibitors,” the speaker says, “this is where the war begins… I will gather my troops against you. 3TC. We will build a barrier, a wall, and you will lay siege.” Osmundson implicates both partners in the relationship, both host and virus, for the violence that results:

We made these soldiers. We built them together. They are made of our dead. They speak for the gone. We built them together, bodies and industry; capital and ash; activists and artists and scientists and doctors pushing and dying and pushing and dying and pushing and dying.

In war there is a clear “we,” those complicit in the violence, and a clear other—the nameless, countless dead whom “we” were willing to sacrifice in order to build our own soldiers. Like Reid, Osmundson ultimately rejects the language of war in favor of living with. In “IV. Latency,” he says: “We see people living with. Living in spite of. Living.”

Again, the stories we tell about illness, about bodies, about the human condition, reach well beyond science. Science comes with real human stories attached—stories of real people’s relationships and lived experience. “We are alive thanks to the stories we tell,” Osmundson asserts in “I. Fusion.” “We are alive because of the words we speak into silence.” Poetry recognizes this. Science needs to do the same.

Can storytelling be a way to build a better relationship between science and the communities it is inseparable from? It’s not easy to make stories about real science as alluring as the ones promoted by conspiracy theorists. Instant gratification is endemic to our culture, and science doesn’t work that way. Despite the popular myth of the “Eureka” moment, scientific breakthroughs take years or even decades to achieve, and most people don’t have the attention span for stories so long in the making. At the same time, the stakes are too high to give up. The mechanics of science can seem cold and abstract, but in fact they are part of our everyday lives: the food and medicine we rely on for survival, the weather forecasts we use to determine our safety, the technological tools we take for granted.

Science can be intimidating. Certainty, even false certainty, feels a lot safer. But it’s an illusion. It’s precisely because of uncertainty, because of the desire to know more about the world, that science exists. Science can be beautiful, life-changing, even joyful. Almost everyone I talked to at CSHL, scientists and non-scientists alike, said some version of the same thing: we need to tell better stories. So how do we get there? How can we tell stories about science that are compelling without being hyperbolic, that challenge misguided perceptions without threatening people into submission, that become widely discussed without causing widespread panic? It won’t be an easy task. But stories like these must be possible, because we cannot afford to live without them.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

LIZA KATZ DUNCAN: I think I was always writing in some capacity. I started writing poetry in earnest when I was about 13 and just never really stopped.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

LKD: Fits and starts. I wish I had a regular writing practice and could stick to it, but my own practice is pretty chaotic, mostly dependent on my work schedule (I’m a teacher). I tend to write over long stretches of time, rather than short bursts here or there.

I’m often driven by a question—what can the environment in which we find ourselves, whether natural or social, teach us about what’s going on in our internal environment, or vice versa? The self being a microcosm of the world, and the worlds we contain, and so forth. Sometimes I start with a specific image or event and let the language itself lead me.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

LKD: Bodies of water. The Jersey Shore, where I’ve spent a lot of my life. The intersection between science and storytelling. The body and its depths. The more-than-human world.

If not a writer, who would you be?

LKD: Maybe a psychotherapist—I’m fascinated by the human experience in all its forms and constantly amazed by how the mind works. Or a science journalist, since I was terrible at science in school but would love to have the opportunity to see the natural world up close.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

LKD: To be fearless. To write what scares you or makes you uncomfortable, those topics you most want to avoid. To lean into your obsessions. To find your people—writing ancestors and writing community.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

LKD: I’m simultaneously working on a climate novel, a memoir-in-essays called Bodies of Water, and a collection of poems about grief, fields (physical and metaphysical), and the lunar maria. All three are ruining my life in that they’re consuming my mental space faster than I can write them.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

LKD: Too many to name. But in terms of weaving together elements of place, science, and the body to create narratives that disrupt and surprise: Sy Montgomery, Susanne Antonetta, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert MacFarlane, Melissa Febos, Sabrina Imbler. Too many more to name.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

LKD: I’ve been relistening to Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown and reflecting on its lessons about past and present, life and death, human and more-than-human, and how these supposed “opposites” are more interconnected than those in power would have us believe.

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Notes on Art

We paired this essay with Hilma af Klint’s Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 3, Youth (1907)1 — orange ground, snail-shell spirals, a cluster of eggs in the middle that could be cells under a microscope or candies in a bowl. Af Klint trained as a botanical illustrator and spent her life trying to diagram the things science hadn’t yet found language for: how spirit moves, how matter coheres, how a body comes into being. There’s something of the same energy in this essay which often has to cadence of a fable, a story…and indeed, the best essays do!

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I remember first encountering Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s work when I read his award-winning short story “Taylor Swift” as a class assignment. I’ve probably never had as much fun analyzing fiction as I did with this one. So, getting to publish him now is a dream come true!

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Frank invents a shrink ray. So the first thing Frank does is go visit the bank, handing the teller a note. “Give me all your money I got a shrink ray.”

The teller says, “Really?”

“Yes,” Frank says. To prove his point he shoots the Xmas tree in the lobby down to the size of a bonsai.

It’s a slow day at the bank; nobody gets too upset.

“Hmm,” the teller says, making sure Frank sees she’s not making any sudden movements. “That’s ok, but the last person who came in here with a shrink ray, instead of trying to rob us, he waited for someone else who was trying to rob us, and he did you know what to several you know who’s. Big reward money by the way, clean rap sheet as well, making it easier to get into the college of your choice if you know what I mean. Think about it.”

Frank thinks about it, trying hard not to stare at the teller like a weirdo. “Any idea on how long a guy has to stand there waiting for someone to come by and try to rob you?”

“Not long,” the teller shrugs. “You’d be surprised how often people try to rob us. There might be someone right behind you planning to do just that.”

Frank looks at the people behind him to see if any of them look sketchy. They all look sketchy.

“Ok,” Frank finally says. “Where should I wait?”

“Go stand over there by Carl.” The teller points to a guy who looks like he could be a plain clothes police officer if he wasn’t so obvious.

So Frank walks over and stands next to Carl. Carl says, “I like what you did to the Christmas tree. That’s an impressive shrink ray you got.”

Carl carefully pulls out a mayo jar with holes drilled through the lid, with a couple tiny bank robbers inside. “I’m starting a collection,” he says. “But since Lucy sent you over here you’re probably not really a robber, you just haven’t figured out what you ought to do with your life. So I won’t shoot you.”

“Just you wait, Carl,” one of the men in the jar peeps. “Once we figure out how to make a grow ray, you’re going to get what’s coming to you!”

“Or I could shake this jar a bunch if you two won’t settle down,” Carl tells them. “I think there’s one of those agitators at the paint store next door. I can use that while Frank here guards the bank.”

Frank nods, a little embarrassed. The other guy in the jar is about to shoot himself with his brother’s shrink ray, maybe out of despair, maybe just to get himself down to the size of something so small no jar could hold him, even if it means almost certain death from all the viruses and bacteria and who knows what tiny monsters that exist in the microscopic world. His brother tries to wrestle the gun away; when they fight Carl rattles the jar to break it up.

Carl grins, like he’s twelve, it’s finally Christmas, and he’s definitely going to get that bike he’s always wanted. “This is exciting! Just think of the odds of all these people with shrink rays trying to rob the same bank! Maybe it’s a side effect, that once you build your first shrink ray, you get pulled irresistibly towards the nearest financial institution, thinking wealth is finally going to be yours. The next thing you know, you have a job as a security guard, normally a safe, secure and boring career if it weren’t for all the people with shrink ray guns showing up.”

The door to the bank slides open and another sketchy looking dude walks in, hands in bulging pockets.

“Maybe I should just try to rob the bank after all,” Frank says.

“But you won’t,” Carl says. “Because you also want to be seen as a good person by Lucy over there behind the window, because you have feelings for her.”

Frank blushes, realizing once again Carl knows more about him than he does himself. “Wait,” he says. “Are you attracted to Lucy too?”

“We all are! Lucy’s the best,” Carl says, grinning because he finally has a best friend to tell everything to. “Where do you think all those ideas about shrink ray guns have been coming from?”

Our Frank turns around and waits in line again to see Lucy. It takes awhile, as even more men with shrink ray guns have to be convinced to go stand next to Carl, or get shrunk cricket sized for the jar. Frank isn’t angry, mostly just puzzled, and he’s not sure how he wants to phrase the questions branching across his mind.

“Back so soon?” Lucy says, snapping her gum, looking like this too has been happening over and over.

“What did you shoot with your shrink ray gun?” Frank says.

“The odds,” Lucy shrugs, then she leans over. “Somewhere nearby there’s a really tiny house with really tiny people living inside it, laughing and laughing, because someone was dumb enough to ask them how to make a shrink ray. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to get better at crochet or taxidermy?’ they told me. ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘I’ve dreamed of shrink rays ever since I was a little girl, but instead of becoming an engineer I sought true knowledge and that’s how I found all you little people in your hidden tiny little house, and I have three letters of recommendation attesting to my goodness so could you please just give it to me or let me intern with you or whatever.’”

“And they just gave you the gun?” Frank asks.

“They gave me ideas,” Lucy says. “Much more useful, and fun, don’t you think?”

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

HUGH BEHM-STEINBERG: As a kid I was terrible at music (I hated practicing) and I never had that sketching/drawing itch, but I read all the freaking time, and it wasn’t that much of a jump from there to trying to be a writer. The funny thing is that writing led me into art and music making too: it’s sort of like if you choose a creative life, any door can lead you to any other door, so long as you’re willing to just go through.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

HBS: I’m part of a writing group that every November tries to generate a new short story every day of that month. That’s where most of my raw material comes from. Coming from poetry, both wildness and structure matter to me. A good working process tries to honor both of these things.

I tend to start my stories with problems or situations/opportunities, and then try to explore how things might unravel as the characters try to make the best of things.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

HBS: Nothing so heavy. But I love talking animals, doubles and multiples, imaginary stores and acts of buying things, made up magazine titles, fantasy/science fictional tropes like time travel and aliens, witches, potions, magic, etc. I also like to leave things out: I seldom describe what my characters look like, or go too deeply into what anyone is thinking. I think I’m an anti-weird writer, in that I often put my characters into weird situations that they then go on to treat as being completely normal. I try to be kind to my characters.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

HBS: I think I’d make a good tour guide.

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

HBS: My teacher Jane Miller told me that most writers are better at their work than at their own lives, because when you’re starting out you can get away with it. But if you’re serious, then you have to start paying attention to your life, and working on all the things that will make you a better human being. You’ll write better when you have your act together, and you’ll be happier in the process.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

HBS: The big thing I’m working on is learning Spanish; my reception is still way ahead of my production, but lately it’s started to seep into my dreams. I’m also working on putting a manuscript of stories together and sending it out to publishers.

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

HBS: I tend to imagine prose as an open space, given shape by culture, but where pretty much anything can happen. So I’ve never been much interested in realism/naturalism. Along with the tons and tons of SF and Fantasy I read as a teenager, and all the poetry I read and wrote, I’d say Italo Calvino has been really helpful at crystalizing my values as a fiction writer, especially Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Quickness and lightness are very important to me. I’d also include Grace Paley for how she uses dialogue. I love how her characters just say things. There’s a Bay Area writer, Peter Thomas Bullen, who operates in a similar way and sometimes I hear his voice in my ear when my characters argue with one another.

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

HBS: Lately I’ve been totally smitten with Juana Molina’s music. It’s gorgeous, head music; like when you’re listening you’re in a forest you’ve never been in before, and there’s children and witches and birds and insects and spirits and small animals and so much else you’ll never understand, but that’s fine. It’s enchanting. All you have to do is listen. Segundo is a good place to start.

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Notes on Art

We paired this story with Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games1 depicting a town square crammed with over two hundred figures, every one of them absorbed in some game the others, it appears, couldn’t care less about. None of them relalize knows how all this scene looks from above. I love Bruegel for this — how seriously he takes play, how the composition just keeps accumulating bodies and you keep finding new ones doing new inexplicable things in the corners. Behm-Steinberg’s story has that same energy, the cascade of people with shrink rays all ending up at the same bank for reasons none of them fully understand, a mayo jar filling up with tiny failed robbers, and Frank — poor Frank — who built something extraordinary and could only think to rob a bank with it.

Welcome back to our crash course on the lit theory we wish we had actually learned in our MFA.

Okay, first off, here’s part 1:

So, below is part 2.1. Yes, you read that right. 2.1. Because things are about to get ultra-nerdy, friends, and I want to give this out in chunks. My rough draft for this second unit was over 15,000 words (!!).

This unit on VOICE, CONSCIOUSNESS & DISTANCE will have four lessons:

1. Narrator & Focalizer ← today

2. Distance: Showing vs. Telling

3. Modes of Consciousness

4. The Unreliable Narrator

Alright, let’s get started.

Today we’re tackling the topic of VOICE, otherwise known as perhaps the single most abused word in the entire craft vocabulary (am I dramatic? No not me). People say voice to mean tone, style, sensibility, character interiority, the way the prose sounds, that special je ne sais pas quoi a certain author might possess. The idea of voice is used to praise work and also to dismiss it and seldom does it seem to mean the same thing twice.

And the reason this matters — the reason we’re dedicating pretty much the entire second unit of this series to voice — is that almost every failure in writing is a failure of voice.

Unit II: Voice, Consciousness, & Distance

Lesson I: Narrator & Focalizer

For most of the twentieth century, critics talked about point of view as if it were one thing. Was the story told in first person or third? Limited or omniscient? Fixed or roving? But French literary critic Gérard Genette noticed that point of view was actually two questions glued together.

Alan Palmer1, in Fictional Minds sums it up as follows:

When you read a discourse and ask “Who speaks?” or “Who narrates?,” you are concerned with narration. When you ask “Who sees?” or “Who thinks?” then you are concerned with focalization. Sometimes an agent sees and speaks at the same time, and sometimes the agent who sees is different from the agent who speaks.

A first-person narrator recounting her childhood is speaking as her adult self, but the narrative might be focalized through the child she was — seeing a parent’s argument with the limited understanding of a six-year-old, even as the adult voice arranges those impressions into sentences.

Gérard Genette gave us three positions of focalization, let’s dive into them.

1.

Zero/ Free Focalization

With zero or free focalization, the narrative isn’t tethered to any single consciousness. Rather, the narrator perceives and knows more than any character. This is what we used to call omniscience — think the 19th-century novel’s expansiveness, Tolstoy moving freely between Anna’s interior and Vronsky’s to narrators who can comment on history, weather, the secret thoughts of strangers passing on the street and so on.

Gérard Genette coined this term because he wanted to move past terms that were “too specifically visual.” He felt this for a lot of the terms we use in lit theory (point of view, angle, perspective, field of experience, etc.). But characters aren’t exclusively seeing, are they? They also hear, smell, feel, think, remember, intuit… So, this term was his attempt to account for everything a consciousness does.

Genette borrows Tzvetan Todorov’s formula to describe this position2:

Narrator > Character (where the narrator knows more than the character, or more exactly says more than any of the characters knows).

Wayne Booth’s term for this is privilege.3 Here he is on what it means, how rare its complete form is, and why even the novel that seems to disappear into its characters can't actually escape it:

Observers and narrator-agents, whether self-conscious or not, reliable or not, commenting or silent, isolated or supported, can be either privileged to know what could not be learned by strictly natural means or limited to realistic vision and inference. Complete privilege is what we usually call omniscience. But there are many kinds of privilege, and very few “omniscient” narrators are allowed to know or show as much as their authors know. […] Our roving visitation into the minds of sixteen characters in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, seeing nothing but what those minds contain, may seem in one sense not to depend on an omniscient author. But this method is omniscience with teeth in it: the implied author demands our absolute faith in his powers of divination. We must never for a moment doubt that he knows everything about each of these sixteen minds or that he has chosen correctly how much to show of each. In short, impersonal narration is really no escape from omniscience — the true author is as “unnaturally” all-knowing as he ever was.

Watch it happen in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, page 56:

A small crowd meanwhile had gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of them, they waited; looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at Victoria, billowing on her mound, admired her shelves of running water, her geraniums; singled out from the motor cars in the Mall first this one, then that; bestowed emotion, vainly, upon commoners out for a drive; recalled their tribute to keep it unspent while this car passed and that…

So Sarah Bletchley said with her baby in her arms, tipping her foot up and down as though she were by her own fender in Pimlico, while Emily Coates ranged over the Palace windows and thought of the housemaids, the innumerable housemaids, the bedrooms, the innumerable bedrooms. Joined by an elderly gentleman with an Aberdeen terrier, by men without occupation, the crowd increased. Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing — poor women waiting to see the Queen go past — poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War — tut-tut — actually had tears in his eyes.

A different example, from a piece we published recently:

Most of the post-1900 examples I can name use zero focalization to move between living minds. uses it to move between living minds and dead ones — between mortal characters, the spirits of unborn children, and a collective we-narrator speaking from beyond death. Take the bathroom scene where the unborn spirits watch their mother sew a stillborn baby back to life:

They were born in a tub, in a bathroom with high clay walls and a flimsy zinc door. They slid out of their mother, a soul with a tightly curled body. She didn’t scream, this mother. She rinsed the body, that silent breathless baby, then washed herself. They watched, curious.

Her lips tight, their mother dug out a spool of thread and a needle attached. Their curiosity morphed into horror and they tried to scream. But spirits cannot scream to the living, so, they could do nothing but watch, dread curling, as the mother pricked her finger, then stabbed the dead baby’s stomach. and blood began to flow along the thread, white to red as it flowed into the body.

Then the body’s eyes opened, and it began to cry. The mother cried too, and hugged the body. The body looked at where They floated, close to the yellow bulb, hatred clear in their eyes. And it smiled. Through its tears, it smiled, and curled further into the mother.

The narrator here is moving freely between several consciousnesses at once: the spirits’ interior (curiosity, horror, dread curling), the mother’s actions and her tight lips, the dead baby that becomes alive and looks back at the spirits with hatred.

2.

Internal focalization

The narrative is filtered through a particular character’s consciousness. We see what they see, know what they know, and no more.

In Genette's terms, this is the position where:

Narrator = Character: the narrator says only what a given character know.

Where zero focalization gives you the long view from above, internal focalization locks the camera to one mind. Genette divides internal focalization into two subtypes:

Fixed — the lens stays with one character for the whole novel. His canonical examples are Henry James’s The Ambassadors “where everything passes through Strether,” and What Maisie Knew:

where we almost never leave the point of view of the little girl, whose ‘restriction of field’ is particularly dramatic in this story of adults, a story whose significance escapes her.

Variable — the lens moves between characters but stays inside one consciousness at a time. Genette's example is Madame Bovary, “where the focal character is first Charles, then Emma, then again Charles.”

The variable version is doing more contemporary work than people give it credit for. Genette himself notes:

the commitment as to focalization is not necessarily steady over the whole length of a narrative […] Any single formula of focalization does not, therefore, always bear on an entire work, but rather on a definite narrative section, which can be very short.

The lens can move sentence to sentence, scene to scene, even mid-paragraph. Most novels we’d casually call “third-person limited” are actually variable internal focalization.

James Phelan4 describes it thus:

Internal focalization [is the] center of consciousness narration such as we find in the fiction of Henry James, where the narrator perceives and knows only what the central consciousness perceives and knows.

In other words, the narrator’s knowledge is intrinsically bound to the character’s and that binding so to speak is the engine propelling the story forward.

Having said that, Mieke Bal — and Phelan after her — argued Genette’s strict divide doesn’t quite hold. For Genette, narrators speak and characters see and never the twain shall meet. But Phelan shows that narrators can perceive too. “Determining focalization is just a matter of answering the question who perceives?“ — and the answer can be the narrator, the character, or both at once, sometimes inside the same sentence. Phelan calls the simultaneous version dual focalization. His central example is Lolita: Humbert the narrator perceiving Humbert the character’s past perception of Dolores, two focalizations stacked in the same syntax. The slow change in what Humbert the narrator can bear to perceive across the novel is the moral arc. It’s a way to write retrospective first-person where the present-day narrator and the past self are both focalizing at once — useful any time you want a narrator reckoning with who they were.

Palmer (2004) pushes back on the whole concept from a different angle. He argues:

Focalization was envisaged primarily for, and works very well for, one aspect of mental functioning — perception.

Focalization works well when you’re tracking what a character sees and hears. It gets shaky when you’re tracking what they think, feel, remember, or half-know without realizing. Internal focalization gives you the edge of what a character can perceive. It doesn’t give you the rest of their interior — what’s happening underneath, around, and past the senses. That stuff lives in distance, psycho-narration, and free indirect style. We’ll come back to all of those.

For now, here’s internal focalization at work, from chapter one of Gatsby. Nick has just had dinner with the Buchanans and stepped outside for air when he sees a figure on the lawn:

Example from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (pg 32)

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

And another contemporary example is from this piece we’ve published by recently, the entirety of it fixed internal focalization:

3.

External focalization

The externally focalized narrative reports only what’s observable from outside. There’s not really much interiority, or if there is, it comes through dialogue which isn’t quite the same thing. Think Hammett’s hard-boiled detectives, Hemingway when he’s at his most withholding (“Hills Like White Elephants” — we never enter either character’s mind).

The narrator perceives and knows less than the characters. The reader is locked outside their minds and has to read them entirely from the surface — what they say, what they do, how they move, what they pointedly don’t say. Think of a camera on a shelf. The recording is honest, but the interpretation is entirely yours.

In Genette’s terms, this is Narrator < Character — what Pouillon called “vision from without” and what Genette also calls “the ‘objective’ or ‘behaviorist’ narrative”.

Mieke Bal5 argues that what Genette calls “external focalization” isn’t really focalization at all but its absence — a refusal of access rather than a technique of access. The category is contested. But it’s still the best name we have for prose that holds the reader outside so to speak.

Gerald Prince6 defines external focalization as prose

…limited to the conveyance of the characters’ behavior (words and actions but not thoughts and feelings), their appearance, and the setting against which they come to the fore… the narrator tells less than one or several characters know and abstains from direct commentary and interpretation.

The trouble is that virtually nobody pulls it off purely (inasmuch as such a thing can even happen…more on that later). Alan Palmer points out that “’pure’ behaviorist narrative is difficult if not impossible to find” — and theorists don’t even agree that Hills Like White Elephants qualifies as fully behaviorist. Norman Friedman7 divided the territory into two: the dramatic mode (selective external — what Hemingway actually does) and the camera (pure recording, no selection). The camera mode was always a theoretical limit case because, well, even a camera has to be pointed…someone, a human with independent thought and will, always chooses the angle.

Genette gives a beautiful example of why writers reach for this position in the first place — what he calls “the reason of propriety, or the roguish play with impropriety.” The carriage scene in Madame Bovary: Emma and Léon inside a moving cab, the cab going nowhere in particular for hours, the windows pulled down and Flaubert refusing to let us in.

Seymour Chatman8 got so impatient with the whole focalization framework that he wanted to throw the term out and replace it with two new ones: filter (a character’s perceptions) and slant (a narrator’s angle of reporting). Monika Fludernik9 even argued the whole concept should be “scrap[ped]… in its traditional configurations.”

If I wanted to pick one primary takeaway from this, it’d be this: please remember focalization can shift! Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway slides between Clarissa and Septimus and Peter Walsh within a single paragraph… the third-person narrator remaining stable while the focalizer flickers. These moments of transition are where the prose does its strangest, most beautiful work. Two consciousnesses brushing against each other through the same syntax.

Focalization is one of the few narrative tools that can carry a metaphysical claim. Liviu Lutas10, for examples, writes about disembodied focalization — that is, narratives focalized through a brain in a jar, a forest, a mountain, a house — what he’s exploring is the idea of whether vision can detach from a human body.

I partially bring this up because I’m very interested in non-human interiority. I know that can seem like we’re into the whimsical over here but I actually am not whimsy-oriented as much I am interested in this kind of interiority as a real ontological proposition — the dog who is a perceiver, the river that sees and so on and so forth. Focalization is the technical instrument that makes that work (or doesn’t). If you write a story focalized through a horse and the horse just feels like a person in a horse costume, it is a failure of the craft as well as imagination. The focalizer’s vocabulary, sensorium, attention, sense of time and ontological stakes have to actually be, well, the horse’s.

Here, I’m reminded of how, during a recent conversation, Kelly Link recalled a mentor mentioning that every story ought be blessed by an animal. I think fiction and truly literature at large affords limitless opportunities for us to explore the consciousnesses of beings other than those embodied as humans and focalization is a good place to start when trying to learn these techniques in practice. Speaking of which, here are some writing exercises devoting to helping you with exactly that:

Until then, read closely, write slowly, & daydream aplenty.

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With gratitude,

Shannan & Karan