Deep Time

A Novel

Coming October 2026

In these woods walks a thing like a man. A thing that once was but is now something else. It cries out a long high painful cry of anger, grief, and loneliness. It moves through a landscape ever-more parched and hot. Even when the rains come and the floods, or the snow and freeze, there are fewer days that are not orange with dust and flame. The sunsets blaze, pink and gold, but also green and blue and purple, an undersea array made skyborne as light refracts through a cloud of chemical particulates. The ground beneath its feet is a scab, but, if you pick at it, there is no blood below. A sore, but a dry one, some abandoned wasp’s nest laid upon its side. But where the thing goes, it leaves tracks and traces. Shocks of brilliant green in its footsteps that freshen for just a moment and then turn to ash. The thing cannot touch without leaving its clue, a handprint or footfall, a smear or streak, all of it green. And then all of it ash. And this is why it cries out. It is no longer a man, and it can touch nothing, save to leave a trace of life and then to watch life die. And so it walks in green, knowing what will come after, in gray, and knowing likewise what came before.

“There was a bit of unpleasantness afterward.”