“Fields of Gold” by Rachel Swirsky will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Gina Guadagnino interviews her on the story.

One of the biggest hurdles in this narrative is to convey the passage of time in a timeless place, yet you manage it so well through the use of Dennis’s lists and flashbacks. What do those two devices allow you to do with the story?

The story is functionally timeless, I suppose, because time has ended for Dennis, but I don’t see it as narratively timeless. He’s still experiencing a sequence of events that has an emotional impact for him. What he hears and when he hears it creates his revelation. I think it’s actually a pretty traditional story shape if you strip off the setting and just look at the story as a skeleton. That said, I think Dennis feels trapped; there’s a tension in the story between the fact that he’s having his midlife crisis and feeling like the time he has to live is dwindling… while at the same time, the time he has to live has both technically become nothing (since he’s dead) and everything (since there doesn’t seem to be any end to existence). I think he’s very preoccupied with time and I think the flashbacks and the lists help illuminate that part of his mental state.

MORE: Read the rest of the interview here!