The story: Maya
Spoilerish comments below -- please read the story first! (And the previous post if you haven't already...)
First off, if you did take a moment to read the story, thank you. If you didn't, it only takes about two minutes, to why not go do so now?
I like this story for reasons I'll get into, but I'm plagued by the idea it is too short. I would love to have the facility of Robert Silverberg to spin a luxurious novella-length tale around a plot of this sort, allowing the reader to sink into a world and the characters in the manner of his haunting "Sailing to Byzantium". Perhaps the biggest benefit of such an approach would be a greater chance of achieving the desired emotional impact at the end. As the author, I read in the emotional resonance I want, but I have no idea if the same occurs for someone coming to it cold.
Whatever I might wish, though, I find myself constantly striving for the shortest and quickest resolution to whatever I am writing. I like to think it's a sort of modern style and not sheer laziness.
It's not much of a stretch to admit I'm the immature dolt of the story...except in real life I'm the one who happens to know how to program.
Speaking of Silverberg, he is both a very favorite author of mine and a big inspiration for this story. I'm on a probably-lifelong mission to read all the Silverberg I can (his oeuvre is quite massive), and a common theme of his work is a couple working out their problems against he backdrop of time or space. I had thoughts at the time of dedicating the story to him, since it couldn't have existed without him.
I was congratulated for the clever use of the title and name of the wife, as "Maya" is a goddess of illusion, which was very appropriate to the story. However, I was not in fact so smart...I was making a reference to Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam War Memorial and all-around artist. Fortunately for me, both sources work well and resonate, so it's a happy accident (unless Maya Lin was also named after the goddess, in which case it's indirectly intentional...)
An additional inspiration for the story (where "inspiration" means "I ripped off the concept wholesale") is a short Alan Moore comic story about a world in which superheroes have been placed in a ghetto, surrounded by an encroaching darkness that will annihilate them. I can't find the title of the story at the moment, but will update this post when I get home from vacation. In any case, the last frame of the story has always stayed with me, a picture of a top-hatted Victorian superhero looking beyond a fence at the coming darkness, with the thought:
Perhaps it is an illusion, borne of the distance...
I decided to build on that, and combined it with an idea from a story I wrote in High School, about a guy living in a fantasy world in his basement and starving himself to death while the world wandered on by. In thinking about a universe disappearing in shrinking concentric circles around this couple, it seemed fitting that the universe would eventually be composed of their bedroom, the place where they could continue to try to shut out the events of the world and interact with each other at the most intimate level.
For me, the story is all about the point where she loses language, yet they continue on. That part gets me every time.
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