“Still” by Tia Travis will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Erin Stocks interviews her on the story.

There’s a sort of quiet foreboding to this story, almost a freezing of time, which is also reflected in the title. What inspired this tale?

I grew up on the prairies, in the provinces of Manitoba and Alberta. I lived on a farm where my dad tried (and failed) to make a living growing grain; in trailers in the middle of nowhere (including my uncle’s pasture); in a series of small towns; in a mining community in Northern Manitoba where family friends lost their lives before we moved on. We were always moving, but one of the constants of that semi-nomadic lifestyle was the beautiful, melancholy, often harsh reality of the rural Canadian landscape. Some of these memories—running through endless fields, catching wind in empty jars—infuse this story. One memory stands out as inspiration for “Still”: that of racing home in a panic to inform my mother that my brother (I was four, he was three) had hooked his snowsuit on a barbed-wire fence that ran through part of frozen Snow Lake. I was too small to unhook him, though I struggled as much as a four-year-old could. (This was the 70s, pre-helicopter parenting, probably the last decade when kids ran wild and unsupervised until the streetlights came on.) I recall the guilt: the dread knowledge that I failed in my responsibility as protective Big Sister. I was sure when I returned with my mum that it would be too late: my brother would have fallen through the ice and drowned or bled to death from puncture wounds. And it would be all my fault. Lafe was cold, wet, scared, but no worse for wear except a rip in his snowsuit. We had preternatural luck in those days. And I shudder when I say that. But yes, there’s a little personal experience blended with this story’s imaginings.

MORE: Read the rest of the interview here!