"After the End of the End of the World"


My story "After the End of the End of the World" from the Fall 2019 issue of Outlook Springs is now available online.

To call this a "story" as in "short story" as in "work of fiction" is not entirely accurate. It's much more of an essay about a novel I spent more than a decade, off and on, trying to write. I ended up enjoying writing this story far more than I ever enjoyed working on the novel.

Here's how it begins:

She was born to a father who wanted to take his anger out on the world, and in every story there is to tell about her, she escaped him, and the consequences were terrible, and she ends somewhere cold, somewhere north, on a glacier perhaps, a frozen place in an ever-warming world.

It is not too much to say that her father destroyed her life. Who is to blame, though, for destruction? Who is to blame for life?

I return always to the moment where she finds out what happened. Or, more accurately, I return to the moments before, then the moment where she is notified, and then the moment after. This is what compels me in the story: the moment a life changes forever. The cleaving.

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