I am well familiar with the phenomenon of death penalty proponents who hate it when a convict is proven innocent because they see the penalty itself as an absolute good that needs to be nurtured, like a beloved pet, regardless of the facts of any individual case. The way the system works now, even when somebody is freed because of exonerating evidence, the state still has every incentive to deny the facts and call the conviction justified, regardless.

I grew up where the temperature hardly ever dropped below seventy degrees Fahrenheit. My first experience of real cold was extremely unpleasant. Nikki, the protagonist of the story, comes from the same background, and I imagined this setting as especially horrifying within her context. Nikki has never been so far north and she doesn’t have the luxury of indoor heating (as I did, when I needed to flee from the cold). For her, this environment is stark beyond imagining, yet she endures through this hardship.

Shortly before I started writing this story, there was a viral message being forwarded via WhatsApp. I believe the message originated here in Nigeria, but I’ve heard that it has made rounds in other countries, too. It was a set of rules advising women on how to be good and “godly” wives. This list was really long, and several points in it were backed by Bible verses. These rules perfectly highlighted some of the pressure women face in Nigeria, so I decided to borrow some of them to tell this story. That said, the number in the title is arbitrary.

I’m from rural Arkansas, and small, dying towns are a feature of the landscape. I think I’ve been troubled by places like Swine Hill ever since I was a kid. In some towns, there’s a palpable mood that things are bad and getting worse all the time. Obviously that’s not true across the state, and some places are doing fine. But many communities are in deep decline. The past feels heavy there. It’s hard not to see my home state as a little haunted.

I think it’s actually commonplace among writers to borrow bits and bobs from life, sometimes even including their own, to build the telling details that give a fiction some depth of field. Words pretending to be worlds—which is not every story, granted, but at least those attempting this to any degree—need to suggest that a story is like life, that there’s more to what’s on the page than what’s actually on the page, like how in life there’s no bottom to the depths you can uncover from a person or object or situation: if you pull any thread long enough, the entire universe unravels from it.

My studies certainly play a major part in how I come up with ideas and in the way I approach character and plot. For example, I often touch on the theme of the world as theatre or draw directly from Greek tragedy, while religion and intertextuality are at the core of many of my stories. But it’s not just the ideas; my studies have shaped the way I view the world, and so the lens through which I approach story. My media & cultural studies background has taught me that culture is the result of practices of representation and articulation, which always invites one to question and study power—where it resides, how it articulates the world.

Shorts are great if I have one discrete idea with just a few characters. I can focus on a scene, a single encounter, a single incident. For “The Island of Beasts,” I really wanted to focus on this meeting between werewolves on a remote island. I didn’t want to explain the entire world, all the characters’ histories, what happens next. Short stories mean I can really bring that microscopic focus in and not have to stretch and expand past that. Ultimately, I find I can really pack a lot of conflict and character into those brief, intense moments. That can be very satisfying.

I’ve done cosmic horror before (see my very short story “Windshield,” or “During the Pause” over at Apex), whenever it suited my purposes to reduce my protagonists to the level of ants. I’ve enjoyed other practitioners following in Lovecraft’s footsteps, though not the man’s own work (I find him dire). Generally, I think horror is scarier when the menace is comprehensible, but think there’s room, once in a while, for a glimpse of something too big to be understood.

When I was ten or eleven I read this series of children’s books in Urdu featuring a boy who travels with snake charmers and has a pet snake. He and his snake have many adventures. Subsequently I dreamed about becoming besties with a snake or two for years. I’ve been fascinated by them ever since. The Indian subcontinent, of course, has many myths about snakes who assume human shape after a hundred years. I wanted to write a story about that. The research and details naturally followed.

I wanted Miriam to outgrow her mother, to come to the realization that her mother’s dictates are entirely arbitrary and based on some drama that has no basis in reality except in her mother’s mind. The problem is that when you finally shed someone else’s storyline, something you have been living within your entire life, what do you replace it with?