I have long admired Undertow Publications. They’re a small Canadian press that publishes beautiful books in that narrow category of literary-weird-horror. It’s the same country as Daphne du Maurier, Robert Aickman, and Alberto Manguel’s Black Water anthologies: precise, elegant, and uncomfortable. I particularly recommend Aickman’s Heirs which contains “The Underground Economy” a story that will scare you in a deep and absurd way. They also have a regular anthology series called Shadows & Tall Trees, and I’m pleased that it includes one of my stories, “Child of Shower and Gleam.” It’s about pregnancy, motherhood, and childbirth, so part of the same family as “Uterus Abscondita” in Shimmer, and “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest” in F&SF. It’s darker than those, I think, not about the terror & hope of transformation, but a changeling story, a story about vulnerability in the everyday world.

When we moved to this neighbourhood– shortly before our son was born– I liked how busy it was, mostly with students, but also with kids. They traveled in packs on bikes and scooters, shouting up and down the street to the park at the end with the swimming pool, draped in beach towels, with the occasional supervising adult or older sister. There were a few children, though, who seemed out of step with the others, a little behind the group, more often alone, and never accompanied by adults. Sometimes they knocked on our door, asking for treats and glasses of water and just for the attention of a friendly adult who would listen to their strange stories and watch their somersaults. Sometimes I had the time. More often I did not, with a baby and a wholly transformed life to figure out.

Then– as is often the case in a neighbourhood full of rental houses– they were gone. I still think about them.