Escape Pod, February 2026
Across two parallel narratives separated by dimensions and centuries, “The Anatomy of Miracles” weaves together the story of a lonely alien miracle worker and a teenage girl in near-future Seattle, both longing for home.
The miracle worker is an ancient, multi-limbed being in the service of unseen masters who deploy him across inhospitable planets to perform acts that defy physics — translocations, rearrangements of matter across vast distances. His power derives not from science alone but from his ability to communicate across dimensional boundaries, finding minds in other universes whose desires mirror his masters’ needs, then trading impossibilities like currency. He is, at his core, a translator and mediator. Yet for all his power, he is a captive: his homeworld was destroyed by his masters shortly after he left it nearly a thousand years ago, and a message — Come home. Please, come home — has spent those same centuries chasing him from planet to planet, only now finally catching up.
Lucy Hasegawa-Smith is sixteen, the daughter of two physicists at the Pacific Institute for Transdimensional Physics, shuttling between Seattle and Tokyo as her parents chase a breakthrough in “trans-d” research. She is sharp, funny, and emotionally perceptive — the one who first asks, in the middle of her parents’ frustrated silence, whether anyone has thought to simply ask whoever might be on the other side of the dimensional bridge for permission. She is also deeply rooted in the small textures of home: calligraphy, the kanji for “home,” two partners on opposite sides of the Pacific, the smell of roast yams by a river.
The two storylines converge on New Year’s Eve, 2083. Lucy is stranded in her mother’s lab during a snowstorm, missing a party where her boyfriend and girlfriend are meeting for the first time. Frustrated and homesick, she kicks her parents’ prototype dimensional device and cries out that she just wants to go home. Across the dimensional boundary, the miracle worker — himself stopped dead in his grief over the ancient message — detects her yearning and recognizes it as a perfect mirror of his own. Their shared longing creates a resonance: movement for stillness, homesickness for homesickness.
In the same instant, Lucy teleports five miles to her family home, becoming the first human to achieve a transdimensional event. The miracle worker, meanwhile, finds himself transported to his own homeworld — empty but intact and beautiful — where he left a prototype machine that might, at last, allow him to work miracles for himself.
The story’s emotional core is its final image: years later, Lucy’s lab is decorated with a framed piece of calligraphy — the kanji for “home” in bold, childish strokes — and the words Some art. Some feelings. Her childhood intuition that communication across dimensions required something universal, something felt rather than spoken, turns out to have been exactly right.
Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko is a Slovenian-born writer and translator. He grew up in Slovenia, Ireland, Australia, and the UK, and currently resides just outside Portland, Maine. He understands that his name is a bit confusing and would like you to know that “Drnovšek Zorko” is the surname. He attended Clarion West in 2019, and his work has previously appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed, among others. In his spare time he is a keen quizzer—British readers may recognise him from that one time he was on University Challenge. Follow him on Twitter and Bluesky @filiphdz.