My story “Extinctions” is out today in Shimmer! You can read it for free here, but if you purchase the issue ($2.99) you get all the other stories–including one about mermaid astronauts, which you know you want–along with interviews.

“I don’t honor old bargains,” you tell her, though you’ve never turned anyone away. There’s a stack of your mother’s cards tucked away under lacy bras you never wear, and another in the urn that your girlfriend thinks holds your grandmother’s ashes.

All of my stories have a little piece of my heart in them, but this one has a whole bloody chunk.

I originally wrote this for a workshop in college after returning from a summer where I realized my hometown had moved on without me, the landscape had rearranged itself, and I was a stranger in a place where I’d spent my entire life. Like the protagonist of “Extinctions,” I never had a great deal of love for my hometown. It was a place without a single out queer kid and nowhere to go without a car, a library that never bought brand-new books and a decaying Main Street. But that summer I realized that I’d forgotten how to drive to my old school, and that shook me. I never thought it would move on without me.

This is also a story about growing up.

That fall I was watching a lot of third-rate urban fantasy tv,  including far more Supernatural than was healthy. I love the repressed monster hunter archetype, but those characters are rarely allowed to learn from their mistakes or mature. I wanted to see a story where the monster hunter grows up enough to reckon with her past and her responsibility. Where she is old enough and wise enough to view the place where she came from complexly, without anger or sadness or nostalgia washing out everything else, and to weigh the life she wants against the life that is expected of her.

Soundtrack :

The soundtrack to this piece actually came after the first draft was written. “Extinctions” was originally titled “The Ghosts in Your Bones” and when I was googling it to see if there was some famous piece I would be competing with, I found this song by Gerran Howell. It’s so perfect for this story, and I listened to it on repeat while I edited.