Almond Blue Nana has come a long way. Irrepressibly curious, a lover of all things human, and under no illusions that her chosen name is nicely inconspicuous, she crossed the universe to meet Leo Snow, an obscure poet dying of cancer in near-future Boston. On the sidewalk outside Leo’s apartment, an ex–grad student nicknamed Bone Marie struggles to protect a ragged cohort of her fellow addicts. And down the street Chloë, a misanthropic hacker, holes up in a concrete oddity called Dido House, doing her best to burn the whole system to the ground. When the deluge comes, Leo runs out of pain meds, Bone Marie and her friends nearly drown, and the city’s friendliest alien decides to connect them to each other and to Dido House, overturning Chloë’s carefully ordered life in the process.

Chloë Snow Hatch, disgruntled member of the resistance, dedicated nihilist, black-hatter.

Leo Snow (no relation), a poet. Raised as the only Black child on an island off the coast of Maine, he is now stoically dying in a Boston apartment.

Bone Marie, ascetic, addict, and reluctant leader of the klatsch of unhoused people hanging around outside Leo’s building.

Almond Blue Nana, an alien from outer space.

His kitchen was capacious, with a pantry and larder and one crumbling brick wall. On mornings like this it was filled with sunshine. Long ago he had sat here with Zety and Mona, listening to them talk about things he didn’t understand, but for many, many years now he had been alone. He wasn’t unhappy, or else unhappiness was so much a part of his personality that he didn’t notice it anymore. He had his tea, his single filet of salmon that lasted all day, his pint of chocolate-chip ice cream in the afternoon, and at night an oxycodone for the pain. For company he had pigeons on the windowsill and the odd seagull cutting through town on its way to the harbor and, of course, the drug people. The drug people occupied the sidewalks down below, an unquiet congregation of the lost and hopeless, their grievances and disputations rising to his ears at all hours, their backpacks and shopping bags and likely stolen bicycles blocking his steps when he ventured outside. In his mind he called them la foule, meaning the crowd. They had been there for years, flowing in and out according to patterns only they understood, and making the other residents of the building furious.

“I hope it was worth it, you fucking junkie cunt!”

He finished his tea.

After repeating the performance with the salmon, in reverse—out of the oven, out of the pan, onto a plate, into the fridge—he took up the bushwhacker and struck out for the study. There he rested again, slumped in a dingy blue armchair he knew he would have trouble getting out of. He wondered if it was time to accede to the inevitable and drag his desk over to the armchair. Or the armchair to the desk? But he liked the armchair where it was, in the corner where two bookshelves met. And dragging the desk would be impossible. Write on his lap? Abominable idea. Was he an e-card rhymester? A poet needed a proper desk, and his was proper indeed: made of solid oak, large enough to sleep on, with six brass-handled drawers and a trough for his pencil. It had been left in place by Mona’s aunt when she sold him the apartment. Even if he could move the huge old thing, putting it in front of the armchair would cut the spaciousness of the room in half. You’re dying, he thought, don’t fuss. You’re dying, you haven’t had sex since 2024, you’ve stopped doing laundry, you’re running out of paper. You have bigger problems than a quibble of interior design.

An hour later he was at his desk. Lined up on the windowsill were his companions: an OED he could no longer lift, let alone open, let alone read even with the magnifying glass, several smaller dictionaries, several editions of Roget’s International Thesaurus dating back to the sixties and forward to the turn of the century, a Bartlett’s, a collected Shakespeare, a collected Yeats, a collected Stevens, a collected Eliot, a collected Chaucer, some Auden, Leaves of Grass, a King James Bible, The Fire Next Time, and a very old copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. His own books were not in the window. There were only two of them: the first issued by a tiny press that had folded shortly afterwards, leaving him with half the print run (twelve boxes); the second, Child of Paragon, by a larger house that had been around for a century before likewise expiring within days of the title’s release. He was a publisher-killer. Plus a chapbook produced by one of his students, who was thankfully, as far as Leo knew, still alive. The boxes of his first book were stacked up on the far side of the second bedroom, inaccessible to man, and what could very well be the last two copies of Child of Paragon in the world were at the back of a file cabinet in his closet. In the almost thirty years since, he had published this or that poem in this obscure but well-regarded or obscure and unregarded print journal or that online “platform” so obscure as to be undetectable. For a total of seven. That was less than one poem every four and a half years, although in truth three of them had come close together in the mid-two-thousands, when he had just started teaching and Paragon was still as fresh in the minds of editors as it was ever going to be. About ten years ago someone had mentioned him in an essay for Poetry, saying he was “ripe for reassessment.” But he never was plucked and since then had evidently withered away altogether.

How Child of Paragon ended up as the shortest novel I have ever written still confounds me. I started it a few months before the pandemic, and due to its near-future setting I had to keep revising it to keep up with history.