Wild Thing: reprint of my story "Sky Suck"
In 2019, I started to write this piece in the suburbs of Philadelphia with one question in mind: what does it mean to have a dream in the
For those attuned with the astrological seasons, you might’ve felt the very watery, mystical, potentially disillusioned energy of Pisces season. It is though, in my mind, the season of dreams, the final lessons of the past astrological year before the burst of spring and Aries season.
I’ve finally started Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead after a writing friend suggested the book to me, and I love the precious narrator asking even the police chief for his astrological details so she can interpret the roots of his cruel behavior. That poetry, the story of a chart, is something I’ve been drawn to my whole life.
There is also a delightful passage of her welcoming her neighbor’s dog into her home as a guest, just as concerned with not having food for them as she would for any other passerby.
I was trying to explain Pisces season to a colleague recently and felt myself just gesturing to the torrential rain covering the city around us. Later, I noticed Hozier’s new music video, him reading underwater, sets the tone perfectly. The colors, the mood, the normalcy of life in an atypical setting…yes.
As I considered what from the archive to share this month, I tried to feel into this sense of fantasy and sense of being washed over. I remembered a publishing call a friend sent to me years ago for an environmental justice magazine, and deciding for the first time to write for a specific submission call. I’d always worked the other way—dream first, then send. But I welcomed flipping my process upside down.
What was on my mind at that moment was a dream I had then of being a professional screenwriter, but felt conflicted by the extreme consumption that goes into the film industry, and my competing call to connect to ecology through my writing. What came to me was a character enlisted as a pilot to clean the air with a dubious climate technology, playfully called Sky Suck.
Months later, the piece was accepted, and Reckoning sent me my first check for a short story.
You can read the re-print of the story below:
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