Publications – Jennifer Hudak

2025

Holding Patterns

Escape Pod 989

I dream about the trees sometimes. I think we all do, even though none of my generation were alive when the forest was actually growing. We don’t dream about them the way they are now—stunted and dormant—but the way they were when the first colonists arrived here on Ariadne: pale smooth trunks growing straight and true, latticed with ropy, red-leafed vines that cradled the heavy fruit dangling off the branches. The canopy towering dozens of meters overhead, everything quiet and lush and smelling of damp. People say that back then, you could watch the trees growing in real time, budding branches and unfurling leaves. Even in the vids and holos they show us in school, the trees look so sturdy, so real—so permanent—that you could forgive someone for believing that they’d grow forever.

But the trees here want something we can’t give them—some murmur of information, an arboreal greeting, the plant equivalent of a rough hug and a shouted Hello! Good to see you! They’re waiting for something that will never happen.

Just like us.

The Last Time Gladys Howled At the Moon

Strange Horizons, March 31, 2025 (Special Issue on Aging and SFF)

Gladys was approaching her first heat when she shed her fur and lost her tail. The transformation was unintentional, and unwanted. When she awoke in her new form, smelling of skin and sweat, she wailed for her pack in a voice that scraped her throat raw. None of them answered. They’d abandoned her in the night, leaving her to find her way out of the forest and into the world of humans. In that moment, as rocks and branches bit into her tender feet, she wished that they’d eaten her instead.

How to Cook with the Negative Space in Your Grandmother's Recipes

Worlds of Possibility, February 2025

1. Find your recipes.

You have a stack of them, though you haven’t looked at them in years. Some of them are scrawled on index cards, front and back, in your grandmother’s sharp, slanted script. Others are typed, using your grandfather’s old typewriter with the slightly dropped e. All of them are incomplete. “The recipe has all the information you need,” she used to tell you, or “The exact amounts don’t matter,” or “You have to just feel it.” But it doesn’t, and they do, and you can’t.

Echo Syndrome

Small Wonders, Issue 20

When my daughter climbs in the car, there’s three of her. They shouldn’t all fit in the passenger seat, but they overlap each other to save space. Together they reach for the seatbelt, their movements almost in unison but not quite; their asynchrony makes me slightly nauseous, and I swallow hard before putting the car into gear and inching out of the school parking lot.

One of them tells me about the B+ she got on her Calculus test. Another puts in her earbuds and hunches down, nursing some hurt that she’ll never reveal to me. The third opens the mirror on the back of the sun flap, adjusts her lip gloss, and practices her pout before extending her arm to take a selfie. None of them seems more real than the other; all are hazy around the edges, and slightly see-through. At a stop light I take a breath, a question on my lips, but when I turn to look at them, a fourth has emerged. She doesn’t move or talk. She just sits there, staring at me, with disconcertingly unblinking eyes, daring me to speak.

Written on the Subway Walls

The Sunday Morning Transport

When machinery cleaved rock and stone, I was born. When steel scraped against soil, creating open space where there had been only darkness, the earth whispered, Look!

I came into being then: a furrow in the ground. A trench. A pathway opened to the chill blue sky. The earth shifted and sighed around me, and named all that I was seeing, which had not existed in the darkness before my birth. Air, it whispered. And birds, and clouds. And then, soon after, water.

It rushed in: a flooding tumble that filled me like oxygen, like lifeblood. I remember its caress. The boats buoyed on top, weighty and wide. Lake Erie reaching out with distant, icy fingertips; the mighty Genesee shouting greetings as my canal improbably soared through the aqueduct above it, a flying waterway carved from stone. I remember touching both lake and ocean, sweet and salt.