“I cannot witness this myth much longer. I watch the kelebek, the first one I touched, that hasn’t left my side since. Its wings now so faded and translucent that the world seems to be painted on them, one version of this image no truer than another. I feel much the same; hollowed out, made diaphanous. Through me one can see the unhandselled Earth.”

Excerpt from my forthcoming short story, “What Planets Are These, Conjured From the Depths of Our Imagination,” written as a first draft at CW in 2017 and coming out this November in An Invite to Eternity: Tales of Nature Disrupted ed. Marian Womack & Gary Budden.