I was elated to have my story, The Night Side, published last week in the inaugural issue of Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine (Vol 1: Dystopia). You can find the story here, and I encourage anyone reading to check out the full issue of this exciting new magazine.
I hunted around quite a bit for a publisher for this piece. It’s a long one, for starters, with a word count above the upper limit most lit mags and journals stipulate in their submission guidelines. When I came across Fatal Flaw’s request for submissions that “consider the world through a cracked lens” for their Dystopia-themed issue, I leapt at the chance to submit; to me, The Night Side most certainly inhabited a place within that description (and much to my delight, the editors agreed!).
I’m very fond of this piece, so I decided to write a bit here about how it came about. The seeds of the idea for it were planted back in April 2016, when two friends and I were making a trek in Nepal from the village of Salleri to Everest Base Camp. For several days after the outset the trek, especially prior to our rugged trail meeting the main track out of Lukla, we found ourselves completely without internet access. At one point, my friend commented (a bit ominously), “There could have been another 9/11 and we wouldn’t even know.” Of course, he wasn’t explicitly talking about terrorist attacks, but rather that any event of potentially world-changing magnitude could have been happening elsewhere, which we would have remained in ignorance of until we either got back online or a local villager who had acquired such news managed to inform us about it.
I knew I wanted to make a story out of this idea, but I would take it further. There would a world-changing event, but one extreme enough that the characters themselves would bear witness to it–and furthermore, rather than be left in ignorance due to a temporary lack of internet access, the event would annihilate the internet and all other communications systems that they and those around them depended on, leaving them deep in the Himalayas and unable to acquire information from the outside world. Thus, as I started writing it (following another trek in Nepal in October 2017), it grew to become more about our tenuous ability to know things with certainty–and beyond.
The story, indeed, is set in the Khumbu region, on the trail to Everest Base Camp. The EBC trek is a stunning journey that takes one through awe-inspiring terrain of such rugged beauty that it at times leaves one as breathless as the thin air itself. The trails wend through peaceful villages inhabited by the eminently kind and accommodating Sherpa people, whose lodges/tea houses make a physically demanding adventure a more comfortable and full-bellied one.
I’ve included some of my photos, featuring a few locations and landmarks from the story, for anyone who might be interested to see these places for real.
Happy reading and happy trails!
