You can read or listen to a story I translated from Spanish into English by Ramiro Sanchiz, “Trees at Night” (Árboles en la noche) at the November 2025 issue of Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. The podcast of the story is read by Kate Baker.
Sanchiz is a Uruguayan writer whose work has been described as “new weird.” “Arboles en la noche” is available in the original Spanish at the magazine Contaminación futura 8.
In the story, a librarian at a hospital-like sanatorium befriends a young patient for reasons that eventually become clear. It 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 is incomprehensible to humans.
Rather than the self-destruction in the Strugatsky novel, in “Trees at Night” the response is estrangement. I don’t know how to summarize the story without spoilers. This sentence, taken from close to the end, might say enough:
“The Sanatorium rose far away, its sight mostly blocked by trees; the sun had already set, and a globular cluster of stars sparkled in the sky to remind all us humans that we were not on Earth and, in fact, we did not know where we were.”
Semiosis 