The seed for it was a small, sharp moment in the Caymans at Stingray City. We were diving with the rays, feeding them squid the usual way: close your hand around the piece, hold it out, wait for the ray to follow, then open your fingers so it could take the food. I had just surfaced for the third time, taken a fresh piece of squid, and started to sink again.
A parrotfish came out of nowhere. It bit my thumb hard enough that my hand flew open. In the same motion it snatched the squid and vanished. I sank the rest of the way to the bottom and watched the blood leave the wound in little dark globs. They rose slowly, turning over in the water, until the light current took them sideways and they were gone.
The wound itself was stranger than it had any right to be. An odd scab would form, fall away cleanly, and then form again. It did this for months. The whole thing took about six months to finish healing.
That image stayed with me: the clean bite, the unhurried blood, and the scab that kept returning as if it had not quite decided the job was done.
The Healing grew out of that. It follows a marine biologist studying a rare coral colony that is recovering from damage faster than it should. During a dive he receives a long, shallow wound along his side. What follows is quiet, clinical, and progressively stranger. The wound closes. Then it closes again. The story stays close to the body and the ordinary routines around it—dive logs, sample labels, bathroom mirrors—and to the slow realization that a surface is only a surface.
There’s coral, a laboratory, a handful of people who care about him, and one persistent question about what, exactly, is being repaired.
The cover is already up. The story itself should appear shortly.
I hope it sits with you the way those rising globs of blood, and that stubborn scab, sat with me.
—Alexander Winston