Last year, while I was in Dublin, the editor at fwriction:review accepted an excerpt from House of Cards that had already been accepted (this excerpt, more than any other, proved popular; seven editors accepted it, and were sad to learn that it had already appeared, and I’ve never understood why this excerpt, mostly because my life was falling apart and I think that is clearest at this point in the narrative, which means my falling-apart life was clearest in this excerpt).

Hard, telling this editor that I couldn’t give him the excerpt, since I respect and enjoy the work he regularly features. But I promised him the next thing I wrote.

I took a break from House of Cards for a couple of months, and lived in fictional worlds governed by self-imposed organizing rules. Several of these stories will appear over the next few months, but this, Reminders and Remains, imagines our world if inhabited by men and women from mythology.

The story is the first I fully finished after meeting Shaun, so I’ve always kind of thought of this story as his story, which started with a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, or the idea of this package and what might be inside. From there, the story spilled.