If there’s no one to read them, do my words truly exist?

This angst-laden question is posed by the narrator of my latest short story Markets of the Otherworld now live at Uncanny Magazine. But it could be mine – in the spirit of the famous question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

The answer, of course, is no. Sound requires ears. If there are no ears to hear, there is no sound. Stories, similarly, require listeners or readers. Existence in the absence of an observer is at best a conjecture. A story that is unread, unheard, thus has no proven existence.

Well, apart from the writer’s own heart, I suppose. As long as that heart still beats.

I hope you all give this one a read. It’s quite special to me. It’s the only short story I wrote last year and it arose from personal feelings and doubt on self, identity, and consciousness. It’s a secondary world fantasy, written in the form of a monologue – a form I rarely use – that follows the adventures and musings of an elderly Otherworld researcher. Her life is not mine, but her questions are. If, in an alternate universe, I had been granted such a magical book as a child, this might be the trajectory my life would have followed, until I found a Death Market of my own.