1.
The first time, you are born forward.
Headfirst, gasping, pink and raw.
The second time, you wake backward—
feet first, toes curling into the past, unpeeling from the present.
2.
Your mother screams when she sees you again.
Not because you are dead. Not because you are alive.
Because you are unhappening.
Milk retreats from your lips. The alphabet unstitches from your tongue. A borrowed relief. Knowledge lifts from you like a heavy coat removed.
Your father’s voice unbreaks into silence. The house inhales its dust. Each loss returns as a gift, bewildering in its backwards arrival.
The love letter you wrote at seventeen folds itself closed, the ink curling back into the pen. With it goes the ache of first heartbreak, the sweet agony of wanting dissolving into innocence.
Your name is unsaid from every mouth that ever called it.
Your footprints unpress from the snow.
3.
It is quiet.
Not the hush of sleep or reverence, but the kind of quiet that exists before anything happens.
Your mother stops screaming. The kitchen rewinds into hunger. The light outside dims back into yesterday.
It feels familiar, this undoing, like stepping backward into a shadow you used to fit inside. There’s a tenderness to it now, this unbecoming. A mercy.
You uncough your first cigarette, tasting clean air again. You uncry your worst nights, grief rolling back up into your eyes, leaving them clear and dry. You unlearn every betrayal, unmake every scar, each pain transforming from memory to possibility to nothing at all.
Your spine unbends from the world’s weight. Your ribs unlock. You are lighter with each subtraction, each undoing a small liberation.
4.
Then, you start to remember in reverse.
At twenty-four, you stand in the street, watching the world siphon itself away. The weight of adulthood drains from your shoulders, leaving bewildered lightness.
At twenty-one, you taste regret unwriting itself from your bones. Shame dissolves. Mistakes unmake themselves. Wild, impossible forgiveness.
At eighteen, you are lighter. Rough. Hope returns, not as expectation but as forgotten birthright.
At fourteen, your mother stops looking at you like she knows what’s coming. In her eyes, only present tense love, unmarked by future disappointments.
At ten, you still believe in ghosts. Fear is smaller, contained to darkness and stories, not yet grown into the vast dread of living.
At seven, you curl inside your father’s coat, and it still smells like him. This is happiness at its most complete—simple, physical, certain.
At four, you forget the words for gone, for leaving, for never again. Language simplifies. The world narrows to what you can touch, taste, love without naming.
5.
Somewhere, deep in the unmaking, you reach a door that was never opened.
The handle fits your palm like it was carved for you, cool and waiting. The weight of what lies beyond—the unformed, the void, the before.
Somewhere, deep in the unmaking, a voice says your name before you had one. It calls to you with the blur of oldest memory, pulls at something essential beneath your unraveling self.
You thin out. Edges blur into possibility. The world no longer ends at your skin. Memory loosens, drifts, becomes something smaller than silence. You are becoming less while becoming more.
Somewhere, deep in the unmaking, you wonder why you are here. The answer shimmers just beyond reach, like light reflected on water. But understanding, too, must be unlearned.
A flickering calm presses against your skin, then recedes—the surrender of questions, the release of needing to know. This is the final undoing: the dissolution of the questing mind. And then—
6.
Stretched. Neither here nor there, neither now nor then. Your hands unclench a childhood toy as your fingers tighten around it, release and possession. A bruise flares and vanishes. Pain and relief fold into each other. Your mother’s voice calls you inside—no, she hasn’t spoken yet—no, she already has, and the words that are unsaid retract into silence.
Time stutters. Not moving. Not unmaking.
7.
Before before before
A pulse in the dark
A thought unthinking itself
Something that never was, never will be
Not a person Not a past
Just a change of heart waiting to happen
And in this waiting, neither joy nor sorrow, only the vast promise of being nothing yet. It is neither emptiness nor fullness, but the pause before starting something new,
again.
About the authors:
Gio Clairval is an Italian-born writer and translator who has worked as a mechanical operator, schoolteacher, and international management consultant based in Paris. She is currently pursuing a PhD in psychology at La Sorbonne. Her fiction has appeared in The Dark Magazine, Nature: Futures, Fantasy Magazine, and anthologies published by HarperCollins, Corvus/Atlantic, and elsewhere. She translates speculative fiction from German, French, Italian, and Spanish into English, including for the landmark anthology The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, among others.
Mandy Munro is a speculative fiction writer from Sydney, Australia. She has written two fantasy novels, is a graduate of the Wayward Wormhole Novel Workshop 2024 in New Mexico, and Associate Editor for Novel Slices in 2024. Her short stories have appeared in AndiopdeanSF, Bullet Points, Tales of Netherünby Quill and Read, and Villain or Hero? short story anthology edited by Zena Schapter. She grew up in a convict-built house, once lived in a haunted house, and happily lives with her husband and her border collie.
Part of our Summer 2025 Issue. New stories, poems, and essays now through August 31, 2025.
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