Short Fiction

“The Unintended Changeling,” Excerpt, Write On!, January 2023
“Beaver River,” Island Writer, June 2020

The Moon and the Night

In progress manuscript

Emma gave up a successful career in neuroscience to manage her family’s hotel. What was initially a difficult personal sacrifice, became unbearable in the intervening years as she struggled to manage her chronic pain while working full-time at the hotel, taking care of her two school-aged children, and fulfilling the expectations of her husband and parents. Her ability to cope with her pain is further challenged when global technological disruptions start to interfere with all forms of audio and visual technology. Dubbed GrAVe, the disruptions occur daily, sometimes for several hours at a time. She suspects that she knows the true cause of GrAVe, but keeps her suspicions to herself, afraid of the chaos that could ensue if the general public knew the GrAVe disruptions were neurological rather than technological. Unlike her husband, Christopher, she isn’t surprised when the government decides to suspend school along with most mass transportation and manufacturing.

Things reach a breaking point in their relationship, when Christopher defends his mother’s racist theories around the source of GrAVe, then accuses Emma of cheating on him. To escape all of these pressures, Emma takes her two daughters to an abandoned family cabin on Newhorne Island.

A few months later, Christopher is tasked with bringing a government recruiter to Newhorne Island to convince Emma that she has to join the national research campaign into GrAVe. Christopher remains hurt and angry at Emma for leaving him. Though he brings the recruiter to Newhorne Island, he won’t commit to moving across the country with her to the GrAVe research campus.

Emma has always struggled to assert boundaries and figure out what she wants, outside the context of others’ expectations. Faced with the conflicting pressures of returning home with Christopher to manage the hotel, or moving across the country to work on GrAVe, Emma is forced to assert herself and decide what truly matters the most to her.