This month, I have a new short story out in Plott Hound Magazine Issue 2 – a very new and very exiting magazine all about animal POVs, which is one of my favorite genres, so I’m happy to contribute a marine story to it. It’s a tiny tale, but it touches on topics that are very close to me: animals and death. The things that brought it forward were a loss, of course, and the wonderful Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó, a non-fiction book about comparative thanatology which investigates what animals could possibly know of death (spoiler: a lot!) Oh, and playing Spiritfarer, a premium piece of death fiction if there ever was one.
If you are comforted by the thought of the Rainbow Bridge (originally written in the late 1950s), by all means, take every bit of solace you can from it – it’s sweet and important and hey, who doesn’t want happiness forever for lost puppers?
Alas, for me it always fell short. It’s as if we can’t imagine animals having a lot of agenda or deep inner lives, and therefore also no complexity for their possible afterlife. And since my heart beats for ocean biomes and marine life, I wrote of an ocean beyond, beyond the mouth of the River Lethe, and what it would mean to explore it.
I wanted “In the Sea of Binary Stars” to be somewhat open, too – anyone can imagine going to an ocean beyond, dream of swimming free in an endless sea, that’s not limited to certain species. But if you can’t guess and want to know who exactly I wrote this story for, whose little lives often slip away in no time, there’s a hint in my bio accompanying the story.
Thank you to Allison Thai of Plott Hound Magazine for giving “In the Sea of Binary Stars” a home, and to Jennifer Hudak and Aimee Ogden for being my first readers! And thank you, (potential) reader, for considering supporting the magazine. This might not be the last animal story I write, because at this point, why not accept that human POV is not for me?
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