A young man tries to cling too tightly to the past and the ghosts that will suffocate him.
The “Y” short story appeared in 2021 in Rhonda Parrish’s G is for Ghosts alphabet anthology. Each story is structured as “[letter] is for [word],” with the word only revealed at the end of the story.
These anthologies always provide interesting creative structures upon which to scaffold a story, and I was glad to finally flesh out a world that had been percolating for a while.