My flash fiction piece “Within dead branches” was published by Nature: Futures on April 16th 2025.
You can read the full story on Nature.com website under their Futures section at this link https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01178-w. Just be aware you may need to make a free account to read the full thing. If your university or organization already has access to Nature then you may not need to set up an account.
I am so glad to see this in print and share this story with people. It was a very emotional experience writing this from the narrator’s perspective of being grief stricken to the point they’ve lost themselves looking for their lost love in parallel worlds.
[Content warning – It contains themes of death, grief and suicidal ideation.]
It was a pleasure working with Nature and the editor there. One of the neat things is that they asked me if I wanted to include a Behind the Story write up to accompany it. Of course!
Here’s what I wrote:
I love writing speculative fiction because it allows me to examine emotions such as love and grief through the lens of ‘What if?’.
Within dead branches was inspired by my love of parallel worlds as a concept, and in part by the 2002 movie The Time Machine. In that Hollywood version of H. G. Wells’s classic story, the time traveller is driven to invent the time machine to reverse time and save the love of his life. At the time, I thought the idea of being so grief stricken that you would invent time travel was far-fetched. Surely you’d move on and come to terms with your loss before you could discover the secrets to time travel? Fast-forward 23 years and I might have changed my opinion on that.
I gave my narrator a device that allows them to jump between parallel worlds as a way to explore that grief you feel when you lose a piece of you and would do anything to reconnect with that person and those memories that define you and your relationship.
I purposefully left both the narrator and the love of their life ungendered throughout the story to allow for as many people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, to connect with the narrator and their situation. After all, both love and grief are near-universal human experiences.
I also wrote Within dead branches because I desperately wanted to imagine at least one world where River Phoenix was still alive and making movies into his fifties.
Hope you enjoy this bittersweet story.
