Alicia Dreams the Sound of Footsteps in Her Wake

SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an award-winning, Vancouver-based writer originally from Mexico. She is the author of the novels Signal to Noise, Certain Dark Things, The Beautiful Ones, and a fiction collection, This Strange Way of Dying. She also has a knack for shining a light on the work of talented speculative fiction writers as an editor, such as in the anthology She Walks in Shadows, which received a World Fantasy Award. Her newest work, Gods of Jade and Shadow (Del Ray, 2019) is a dark fairy tale about a young woman who is sent on a harrowing journey by the Mayan God of Death.

In “Alicia Dreams the Sound of Footsteps in Her Wake,” Moreno-Garcia takes us to the darkened attic above a record store where two estranged friends gather over a Ouija board, and asks, “Do ghosts go away when we stop believing in them?” Rich with sensory detail and nostalgia for a life that never was, this story will leave you listening for ghostly footsteps coming down the hall.