Author Dom Merenda

This story began with a single line: “Do you remember what you asked it to forget?” It came to me without context, without a character or a world. Just that sentence, waiting. Haunting. Like someone else had already written the story and […]

Origin of the RecipeThis story began, quite simply, with the idea: What if a demon fell in love with food criticism?It’s ridiculous. It’s theatrical. But it’s also a lens through which I could explore something I care about deeply: the intersection of […]

This story began, as so many of mine do, with a single image: a statue washing ashore. I didn’t know what kind of statue it was at first. I just imagined something old and barnacle-crusted, something that shouldn’t be moving but did, […]

I wanted this story to start with sweat. With exhaustion, frustration, humidity, and the quiet desperation of app-based labor. I wanted you to feel the weight of the insulated bag on Min-jae’s back before you ever saw a dragon. Dragon Express is […]

This was the hardest story in the collection to write—and maybe the one that changed me the most. The structure came first: I wanted to write a story that unfolded in reverse, not just in time but in causality itself. I didn’t […]

In most fiction, time is a line. Even in stories that travel backward, like Memento or Time’s Arrow, causality is preserved. The audience may encounter events out of sequence, but cause still precedes effect. The logic remains intact. In Because You Were, […]