My short story, “What Lingers in the Trench Depths” is now available to read in the first issue of Astral, Alien Fiction.

An entity travels through space, searching for the source of a great grief which has afflicted their companion, and the cosmos entire.

I wanted this piece to feel a bit like a work in translation, but a work in translation done soon after encountering and engaging with a new language, as one might with an extra-stellar entity, so the translation doesn’t carry with it the practiced fluidity of a native speaker, or someone who has spent years of study. Instead, it carries with it a sort of laborious awkwardness, which may be the entities habitual mode of speaking, or may signal something lost in translation.

The inception for this piece came in 2018 after I read about microplastics being found in the Mariana Trench. 2017 was the year when I reached a personal crisis point about climate catastrophe and the environment, and this story was part of me trying to work through my incapacitating grief in a way that allowed me to move on to necessary hope and subsequent action. I hope that the story can do something for you.