This story forced me to get comfortable with long silences. Not just on the page, but in my own process. There were versions where the Listener narrated everything, where it gave long internal monologues explaining its logic. Those versions were technically impressive—and emotionally sterile. Once I stripped them away, what…

When I sat down to write this story, I didn’t think of it as speculative fiction at all. I thought of it as silence. Not metaphorical silence, but real—the kind that follows you out of a temple or settles in the car ride home after visiting a gravesite. That’s the…