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The idea for this story began in my final week at the Clarion Writers Workshop. I wanted to write a haunted house horror story using stripped language, but unsurprisingly, it became strange and detailed and maximalist. It’s the perfect piece to summarize my time at Clarion, as it was collectively inspired by all the great stories I read over the summer of 2023.
Some days I felt close to that line where awareness ends. Beyond that border I would become someone else’s memory. I knew eventually even that erratic existence would fade. I knew you went through this, and I wondered what you saw and what you felt, lying there with your eyes closed.
This piece was one of my Clarion West Workshop stories, for one of the days we issued a challenge in the group to write something erotic for a particular week (shout out to Samit for being amazing during “Chaos week”) and this was the result of it.
Early Wednesday morning, after a long weekend devoted to the search for her, twelve-year-old Amelia is spotted wandering home on the main highway out of town. She has at that point been missing since the previous Friday.
It’s a little difficult for me to think about the initial process of this piece because I’ve continued to think about it quite a lot since initially writing it, to the point where it’s now the kernel of a someday novel project about occupation by a victorious fairyland.
When my daughter was a newborn, I found I only had the attention span to write micro and flash; I wrote a lot of it. I was also sleeping very little at night and crashed most afternoons, which for me is when the weirdest dreams happen. “NotRob” was one of them.
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