My short story “Mijara’s Freedom” came out last Friday in The Future Fire, an online magazine of social-political and progressive speculative fiction. You can read my story here. Like “Yet A Youth,” “Mijara’s Freedom” actually originally appeared in print in slightly different form in a school literary magazine. In this case, it was the 2008 issue of Images, the literary and art magazine of Edina High School. So this story is pretty old! Also, it was titled “Parvana’s Freedom” then.

Pieces in The Future Fire are illustrated, and I feel so lucky to have beautiful artwork by Cécile Matthey accompanying my story. I haven’t seen my characters brought visually to life since the cover reveals for Sparkers and Wildings, so it was pretty magical. In fact, the way the artist imagined the protagonists was quite different from how I pictured them, but I love her rendering.

I wrote this story more than twelve years ago, so its origins are rather hazy now. But the action takes place against a backdrop of wildfires, and I seem to recall taking visual inspiration from a photo I saw in the newspaper. This fall, of course, devastating wildfires in the West are in the news again, and so “Mijara’s Freedom” might hit a certain way, although it is not a story about climate change.