Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixty

Late 2021, the ministry I used to serve in as an administrative assistant sent a memo saying that they were removing COVID-distancing restrictions. All those who weren’t immunity-compromised should come back to the office to work in person. Before COVID shut down our office, our building was filled to capacity as we were going through a strong growth period. Our facilities personnel were constantly re-arranging cubicles to maximize space, department heads fought for prime offices, and new employees were encouraged work remotely or share desks. Then, like many other businesses, our office shut down in 2020. A scant few essential workers, including myself, prowled the premises, worked in abandoned offices, wandered the halls in our masks like ghosts.

When the higher-ups told employees to come back in 2021, a couple of departments came back, but that was it. Most of my coworkers—some good friends of mine—either decided they liked working from home, or they moved and now worked remote in another state, or they were laid off, or Ieft for other jobs. A couple passed away.

In early 2023, I found myself wandering the empty floors, surveying the empty cubicles, eating in an empty lunchroom. The office started renting to other ministries to bring in income, but all I could see were empty husks that were once occupied by life. There’s a loneliness to being someone who remembers how an office used to be, being able to go up to a friend’s desk and chat, or the goofy games that were supposed to bring departments together, the potlucks and the chili cookoffs. Of course, I also remembered the office drama, the gossip, the debates, the painful discussions.

All that was gone now. The only things that were left were the memories of a community that no longer existed. Memories, empty chairs, cubicles stripped of belongings, smiles and voices vanished. And a silence that felt too deep.

A few months after I realized the office I worked at no longer existed, I too was laid off.

Liminal spaces became very popular during COVID times. My social media became flooded with pictures of back rooms, decrepit pools enigmatically filled with fresh green water, corridors stretching to nowhere. There’s a YouTube video of a house for sale where the deeper the camera went into the house, the weirder the rooms got—less domestic, more warehouse-like, with twisting corridors, endless shelves of DVDs, and at one point, a bizarre bathroom with three toilets set in odd angles. With all of us stuck in our homes, places that used to be filled with people became empty and took on a new, surreal and fascinating beauty.

What makes a space liminal? The dictionary defines liminality as “intermediate between two states, conditions or regions transitional or indeterminate.” Another definition is “relating to the point (or threshold) beyond which a sensation becomes too faint to be experienced.”

Last year, I attended an entertainment conference in Florida, and they celebrated their last night at the SeaWorld theme park. The organizers reserved the entire park just for our event. It was raining, so they gave us attendees blue poncho raincoats. This being November, after the daylight saving time change, it was dark in the early evening, and though there wasn’t a speck of snow to be found, the entire park was decorated for Christmas.

So there we were, a scattering of attendees in bright blue ponchos, walking through a mostly empty amusement park (with roller coasters running) through warm rain coming down on us while hidden speakers piped in cheery Christmas music. That alone would be considered liminal enough. But then I came upon the kiddie section of the park: an entire replica of the neighborhood of Sesame Street.

No lie, it was all there: Big Bird’s nest, the 123-apartment building, Mr. Hooper’s grocery store. There were a couple of oddities that didn’t quite fit in: the buildings held bright posters advertising Muppet versions of popular musicals in their punerific glory (Scramilton, Les Monstérables). The piped-in Christmas music was pushed aside for more well-known Sesame Street tunes such as “Rubber Duckie” and “I Love Trash.”

Yet, not a child was in sight. No puppets. Barely any adults—the few that did wander in didn’t look human—more like amorphous blue plastic trashbags with legs and feet. I was alone, standing on an empty whimsical street that shouted its charm to nobody. Suddenly, a place that was a symbol of my childhood delight felt alien, abandoned.

Suddenly, I recognized the exact same feeling I had when I was walking through the empty building at my day job. And though I had never been to this particular theme park, I grew up with Sesame Street. It is as familiar as the back of my hand. The dissonance between the nostalgic memories of the show and the emptiness in front of me was jarring.

Those memories held one thing in common with my day job’s empty building: the lack of a laughing, vibrant community.

I asked friends on social media to give me titles of stories that contain liminal spaces. Many suggested Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Narnia’s “Wood Between the Worlds,” and the Neitherlands in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. The entirety of Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake inhabits this space, from its craggy crenellations to its oppressive corridors reeking with hidden history. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is another, where Noemí Taboada rushes to her cousin’s side, her cousin having been taken away from her family and all she knows, and now living in a house that is hostile to her. In fact, many gothic stories inhabit this liminal space of loneliness.

Stories about liminal spaces that develop from the loss of community is harder to find, but they are there if you know where to look. Obvious ones are ghost stories done by the point of view of the ghost, trapped in memory. Daniel José Older’s The Book of Lost Saints is a good example of this. His Marisol can’t remember anything, but she does know her nephew Ramón, and through little hints and tricks, gets him to uncover her past. But she’s also stuck in a place where she can’t talk to her nephew, can barely interact with the physical world and can only depend on Ramón as her memories are uncovered. Ghost stories also don’t necessarily need to be dead people. The characters in Alex Jenning’s The Ballad of Perilous Graves are not only able to see ghosts of people they used to know (there’s a whole neighborhood called the Dead Side, where the dead live), but they also are haunted by the major storm that flooded New Orleans a few years ago and has the potential to occur again.

Refugee stories can be this, such as On Fragile Waves by E. Lily Yu, where young Firuzeh is forced to flee with her family from Afghanistan to Australia, and is haunted by the ghost of a friend. The City & the City by China Miéville is brilliant in that there are two cities, but you’re not supposed to acknowledge one in the other. This is more about the loss of community through separation—and the keenness of being so close to a community, yet so far.

Short stories can also inhabit the liminal spaces of people being left behind, stuck in their memories of how things used to be contrasted with the lonely reality of the now. Uncanny Magazine just published “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou—a story about a young woman trapped in a world empty of people, yet can still communicate with her family and friends through text and emails. It is haunting and, yes, liminal in its loneliness.

I have to crow about one of my GigaNotoSaurus stories, “Old Seeds” by Owen Leddy, about an astronaut sent to terraform a planet by herself. The only things that accompany her are memories of her children, and as the astronaut goes through great swathes of time, the distance from her daughters in the past gets longer and longer. Another GigaNotoSaurus story “The Grandmother Hypothesis” by J.S. Richardson has a scientist traveling multiple dimensions to see what her dead daughter’s other lives are like—the scientist is stuck in the liminal space of “what could have been,” unable to move on from the trauma of her daughter’s death. Ellen Klages’s “Amicae Aeternum” is an interesting look at a loss of community that’s about to happen: a girl rising up early to experience her hometown for the very last time before she goes on a trip. She takes in every single detail of everything she does—greeting people, eating food—committing it all to her memory as it will be the very last time she will do any of these things. She is creating her own liminal space that will hopefully sustain her when she is gone.

Which brings us to stories about immortality. The weight of previous times can be felt in stories about ruins and the past, in characters who had lived to see such places in their prime. It’s like a reverse haunting, characters alive but existing in a state of limbo, stuck in and being haunted by the past even as time moves forward. This is very much present in one of the characters in my favorite video game, Genshin Impact. Zhongli, a funeral parlor assistant, is the local expert on everything in the country of Liyue. He has lived for a very long time—he has seen many of his friends die and his beloved city grow and change. Many gamers like to mock one of his ubiquitous voicelines because he says it so often, yet it perfectly sums up the melancholy liminal space he exists in: “Osmanthus wine tastes the same as I remember, but where are those who share in the memory?”

Liminal spaces are supposed to be transitory, a temporary stop on the way to a destination. We’re not supposed to remain stuck in liminal spaces. We’re supposed to look, say, “huh, that’s weird,” and move on.

The beginning of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn starts off with our dear unicorn living in liminal space. She is not haunted by the past at all; she does exist in a limbo where generations of animals grow and die, but she and her pool stay the same. She doesn’t even know she’s the last of her kind until hunters disrupt her peaceful environment. Only then does the realization slowly unsettle her until she finally leaves her world to search for the others.

But what if you can’t? The loss of a community isn’t something you can get back instantaneously.

When I wrote the story for Meow Wolf’s Grapevine Texas location, “The Real Unreal,” I didn’t realize that what I was doing was writing about the liminality of community loss. Meow Wolf’s exhibits are known for their wild art galleries, but in order to get to those galleries, one must first go through a “mundane” space. This could be a grocery store, or a station, or in my case, a house.

When one enters the Real Unreal, they are presented with a house that shows it used to be occupied, but its inhabitants are now gone. You are encouraged to riffle through the remaining journals, laptops, and phones to get an idea of what happened. It is very much a liminal experience—seeing, touching, and reading the thoughts of people whose lives appear to have been upended. Not to give away the entire story, but one of the main characters had just experienced her own loss of community space—her husband had died, her oldest child had moved away to attend university, and she had lost her house. The woman’s best friend, a social influencer, invites her and her remaining child to move in with her. The two friends navigate what it means to become a family.

Queer folx cast out of their homes banding together, creating found families. Africans ripped from their homes, brought as slaves to a foreign land redefining their own community and thus forming a new identity. A social influencer inviting her best friend who had fallen on hard times to live with her. Liminal spaces such as these may start out as lonely, but when new communities are formed, they bear the weight of possibilities and potential. For those who can’t move on to new communities, they have the option of bringing others into their lonely spaces, and thus creating something new by themselves. After I was laid off from the day job, I was forced me to come to grips with the fact if I wanted community, I would have to be the one to build it. A hard thing, considering I relish my newfound hermit status. So now, I have to be intentional in reaching out.

It is a learning curve. There are days when I’m happy to not connect with anyone except my immediate family. But then I’d get lonely, so I will enjoy lunches with former coworkers, or do online hangouts with writers, or connect with friends from cons. And then I get overwhelmed again and not speak to anyone for a month. Something that has changed for me is that I’m learning to be less of a lurker in places such as Discord.

I am learning how to settle down in this new normal, buffing the sharp edges, planting more greenery, shaping this space into something that’s still weird and liminal, but it’s mine.

LaShawn M. Wanak writes speculative stories, essays, and poetry. Her work is published in venues such as Uncanny Magazine and FIYAH. She served as the lead writer for the art collective Meow Wolf on their permanent immersive exhibit, “The Real Unreal,” in Grapevine, TX. She is also the owner and editor of the Hugo-nominated magazine GigaNotoSaurus.

LaShawn enjoys knitting, anime, and wrestling with theological truths from a Womanist’s perspective. You can find her on Facebook, Bluesky, and her newsletter. She also has a Patreon. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also, pie.

The Liminality of Community Loss