A story I translated from Spanish by Ramiro Sanchiz, “Trees at Night” (Árboles en la noche) is in the November 2025 issue of Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. A podcast of the story is read by Kate Baker.

Sanchiz is a Uruguayan writer, and this story is part of his literary project that explores permutations of a universe that revolves around a character named Federico Stahl. You can read “Arboles en la noche” in the original Spanish at the magazine Contaminación futura 8.

In the story, a librarian at a hospital-like sanatorium befriends a young patient named Federico for reasons that eventually become clear.

I recommend this story, among other reasons, as a masterful example of in medias res: beginning a story in the middle of the action or plot. Science fiction often does this, and SF readers are used to it, but I’ve seen readers of mainstream and literary fiction sometimes get so flummoxed that they give up because they don’t immediately understand what’s happening. SF readers have learned that a good story in this style will explain all the things in the end, and the fascination of the story is the discovery.

This haunting work offers a distant echo of the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (which I recommend): aliens come to Earth, and what they leave behind seems incomprehensible to humans.