About “Flores”
Julie says, “Last summer I dreamed I was standing in the glass-walled hallway of my house, which looked out onto a thick forest, and I saw this baby sitting on the floor — not a human child, but a child belonging to the species of tiny hominids that lived thousands of years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. When I went to pick up the child, I saw its parents standing at the edge of the woods — they’d left the child with me because they were being hunted by humans. I woke up and told my husband about the dream, and he suggested I turn it into a short story. I’ve never written a story from a dream before, but I gave it a shot. The story changed in the telling — the protagonist isn’t me, but a woman whose last child is going off to college, and the Flores people make their presence known more subtly at first — but, like the dream, the story addresses the blurring of the boundaries between town and wilderness, between human will and biological impulse, between hunter and hunted.”
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