Negative Space (sfwp Literary Awards)

Set in Kinsfield, New Hampshire, a decaying small town gripped by an inexplicable suicide epidemic, the story unfolds through four rotating first-person narrators: Ahmir, Jill, Lu, and anonymous posts from an online forum where residents track the deaths. All four orbit Tyler, a charismatic and self-destructive teenager who never narrates his own story.

Ahmir, Tyler's closest friend, introduced Tyler as someone who carved himself with a box cutter, replaced meals with pills, and went days without sleep. Jill met Tyler on the psychiatric ward at Sisters of Hope hospital. They bonded quickly, and when Jill was discharged, she wrote her number on his bandages. Lu, a socially isolated teenager whom Jill refers to with she/her pronouns while other characters use he/him, harbored an intense fixation on Jill, secretly imagining inhabiting her body. Lu frequented the Forum, an anonymous online community documenting Kinsfield's suicides.

In a flashback, Ahmir recalls Tyler introducing him to WHORL, a legal synthetic drug made of dried purple-grey leaves sold at gas stations. Smoking it, Ahmir saw hundreds of thin black strings crawling from Tyler's face and descending from the sky. Tyler told him this is what the world really looks like. On the last day of junior year, Tyler and Ahmir attended a party, then rushed to the Regal Lanes bowling alley, where roughly 70 teenagers had gathered around the body of Hector Ferrera, Kinsfield's 31st suicide that year, hanging from an orange extension cord. Hector's suicide note read "I SEE YOU."

Tyler's occult obsessions deepened over the summer. He took Jill and Ahmir to the Abandonments, a condemned neighborhood on the outskirts of town where they found the house of Werner Baumhauer, a figure who allegedly tried to weigh the human soul by hanging himself on a scale and may have started Kinsfield's suicide cycle. In the attic, a round room containing a dead tree planted in an iron pot, Tyler performed a ritual: humming, slitting his forearm, squeezing blood onto the tree, and calling Baumhauer's name. A voice answered from the dark, though it belonged to a homeless man.

With help from their friend Marlon, who works at a local pizza shop, Ahmir uncovered Tyler's hidden project: hundreds of cryptic notes, drawings of spirals, maps webbed with vine-like lines, and a list of suicide victims that included a future entry, Trevor Wright, dated three weeks ahead. When Trevor's body was found on that exact date, the prediction proved accurate. Tyler read obsessively from Prince of Wasps by Sean F. Paulson, which argued that unseen forces may manipulate human behavior just as plants release chemicals to conscript wasps into killing caterpillars.

Tyler's rituals escalated. He passed WHORL from his mouth to Jill's during kisses, and she began seeing the black strings. At the Baumhauer house, he wrote names in blood on cardboard and burned them, then deliberately dislocated his own shoulder. Shortly after, four bodies were found hanging from a football goal post, including three members of the Dirty Boys, a local gang who had recently attacked Tyler. Tyler then vanished. Jill searched the Abandonments, finding a noose and fresh embers but no body. Convinced Tyler was dead, Ahmir went to Blood Swamp, a marshy area outside town, to overdose on Xanax. There he found Tyler: naked, grey-skinned, covered in cuts and rope burns, barely able to speak. Ahmir dragged him home, and Tyler was hospitalized with pneumonia.

Tyler recovers but returns profoundly changed, speaking in fragments about unseen entities and his dead father. Animal attacks surge across Kinsfield, and 14 people die by suicide on Halloween. At Thanksgiving dinner at Jill's house, Tyler slits his wrist with a carving knife and drips blood over the food. Jill's father throws him out. All three narrators share parallel dreams: In Lu's, Jill's father descends into a black pool while Tyler anoints him with blood; in Jill's, her father walks through snow toward the Baumhauer house. Jill's father then goes missing and is found dead in the Abandonments. Tyler attends the funeral, where wasps swarm the casket, and moves into Jill's household at her mother's invitation. He carves occult symbols into every doorframe, builds an altar on Jill's dresser, and kills Jill's golden retriever Harvey. The basement sprouts mushrooms and fills with a massive wasp nest.

Meanwhile, Lu meets Arnold "Arnie" Sepulveda, a teenager who had apparently died by suicide but reappeared alive and stopped a school shooting at Kinsfield High. Arnie teaches Lu protective rituals involving salt circles, candles, and invoking a patron saint. Lu chooses Saint Gobnait, a Celtic beekeeper saint. Arnie warns that Tyler possesses the same occult knowledge.

When Jill texts Lu in desperation, Lu performs a dangerous ritual, projecting into Jill's body and discovering a glassy tumor in her lungs. Lu cracks it, but the destruction releases millions of oily strings. Jill collapses with pneumonia and enters an induced coma. Tyler, also violently ill, confronts Lu at the hospital, saying his connection to the other world is fading. He tells Lu, "You're going to die becoming what you need to be," then leaves. Jill wakes, removes Tyler's markings from the house, and burns his clothes.

The characters scatter from Kinsfield. Jill leaves for college, where she meets Maddie, a student who practices folk magic, and they fall in love. Lu, after leaving the increasingly paranoid Arnie, takes a bus to Boston, where Uncle Max, Lu's mother's brother, takes Lu in. Tyler deteriorates alongside Ahmir in a shared apartment, dealing drugs for a violent supplier named Chucky. His teeth fall out, he paces all night, and he carries an extension cord fashioned into a noose. Ahmir comes home to find Tyler hanging from the banister. His suicide note reads "I SEE YOU," the same words in Hector Ferrera's suicide note. In the notebooks of Tyler's dead father, Ronald Theodore Seifert, Ahmir discovers that Seifert conducted identical rituals decades earlier, drawing the same symbols and experiencing the same dislocations in time. The cycle is inherited.

Years later, the surviving narrators converge on Kinsfield. Supernatural horrors pursue them: Hundreds of turtles fall from the sky, and a rippling, skin-like shape flickers at the edges of vision. Jill and Maddie's car crashes when a flesh-colored sheet slams onto the windshield, killing Maddie. Marlon is destroyed by a monstrous figure of fused geese; Ahmir mercy-kills him the next morning. Deep in an old mica mine, Ahmir finds a pile of rags with Tyler's face, tells the remnant that Tyler's life was short, cruel, and insignificant, and blows out a candle beside it. Outside, the landscape normalizes into ordinary sunlight and birdsong. Ahmir carries a dying turtle to the river and releases it into the current.

Jill reaches the Baumhauer attic, the round room from every narrator's dreams. Tyler hangs in the dead tree like an empty skin, smiling with a flat cloth face. She picks up his box cutter, hums until her throat tears, and slices him apart until he falls to nothing. Jill becomes a ghost in local legend, the "Candle Girl," who appears when someone lights a candle at a roadside spot. Lu, now very old in a care facility tended by automated machines, hums one last time, sees faint strings fill the room, and glimpses familiar faces in the window glass before dying peacefully, surrounded by an ocean of gold.