Check it out here. It’s about art history, colonialism, and—that old standby—alien invasions.

I owe a lot of the inspiration for this story to time spent in Spain, either as a student or as a language-learning program assistant. I spent a LOT of time in museums, which introduced me for the first time to a discourse that preoccupies art historians the world over: how do you teach the public about a piece of art out of its historical context? Or, more tricky, a piece out of its cultural context? How do you avoid perpetuating a narrative about art and its value that’s been so thoroughly written by the “victors”?

The architecture of Spain was also a big consideration for me, especially in Andalusia. The physical manifestation of conquest as “building your church on top of the other guy’s” clearly stuck with me.