There is a clear cycle of trauma and release in Carey’s story, the repeated “she’s a warrior” comments that folks with chronic conditions never stop getting. The humanity offered by Alma at the end feels like such a breath of fresh air. Where did the seed of this story come from for you?

It came from the collision of some different ideas I’d been carrying around. I’d been thinking about haunted houses after reading stories by A.T. Greenblatt (“And Yet”) and John Wiswell (“Open House on Haunted Hill”), in which they did fascinating things with the genre. I love the idea of a haunted house as a metaphor for the home we inhabit within our own body. Our experience can be shaped by the evidence of the body’s previous traumas, or the feeling of occupying a form that is different from what we know ourselves to be. It should be a refuge, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like it.

I’m a paramedic, so I interact with a lot of people who are experiencing traumatic events. The theme of enduring trauma shows up in a lot of my stories (maybe all of them, if I look closely enough). I wanted to explore how horrifying events send waves through a community, and the awful irony that the people affected often feel isolated and lonely as they try to make sense of the experience.

When I started this story, I saw Alma and Kevin emphasizing that loneliness. Their intentions are good, but they lack the ability to relate to Carey’s experience. I imagined Carey’s recovery as being a solitary process. But over time, Alma’s kindness and empathy became essential to the story. She pays attention and recognizes that she can offer something to help Carey recover. She isn’t stuck on notions of who Carey was before the accident and accepts the new person emerging from trauma. The humanity Alma shows reflects my own gratitude for the people who helped me heal during difficult times, and my growing understanding that community plays an important role in recovery.

This story was very visual, I could see the scenes clearly in my head (especially the bathroom and the man in the mirror)! Do you often write with a clear visual in mind?

I do tend to focus in on certain sensory details. I feel like I’m about to confess one of my own stylistic weaknesses here, but I can also be pretty slipshod when it comes to certain visual descriptions. I’m not always great at providing physical details of characters, for example. I have various theories as to why this is the case. Which theory I believe depends mostly on how self-critical I’m feeling at the time.

I purposefully didn’t describe exactly what Carey sees in the mirror. It’s a person, but I avoided any more detail than that. I wanted it to be unclear if she’s seeing evidence of the haunting or just her own haunted reflection. I like how ambiguity can create the opportunity for a reader to bring their own impressions into a scene, although it can totally fall apart when you don’t give them enough information.

Haunted House realty: such an interesting concept! What would it take for you to buy a haunted house?

I spend about a third of my life in a fire station, which is about as close as I can imagine to a haunted house. It’s a lot like a home, with a kitchen and living space, except at unpredictable moments the peace is interrupted by noises and lights followed by experiences which can be genuinely ghastly. So, my real home is as different from that as I can manage. We grow veggies, we raise chickens, we cuddle with dogs. Nurturing other living things is the only bulwark I’ve found against real horror.

Speaking of, we never find out why the house is haunted. Why is that?

The nature of the haunting isn’t really Carey’s story. She connects with the house because of her own painful experiences, and in a sense, it teaches her how to give a voice to her own suffering. Repairing and living in the house doesn’t erase what happened there, but it will hopefully make it habitable—a place that feels like home.

What do have coming down the line for us to look forward to?

At the risk of tipping off malevolent spirits, I’ll just say that I’m working on what I like to think of as “a very long short story,” in which a small Appalachian town falls into the grips of a deep, uncontrollable magic.