This is a vampiric revenge story, a story about decolonization and BIPOC feminine oppression, and those are vital, life-blood elements of the narrative, but at its heart, it feels like a tale about the power of stories. One of the few things keeping many of us creatives going in the face of looming global technocracy, AI, ICE raids, and everything else these days are the acts of rebellion we can enact upon these oppressions, soulless systems—storytelling being chief among them. That is why I connected with this story so powerfully. From page one, it deconstructs the colonization of story structure, presenting instead an unapologetic departure from such “traditional” three-act requirements and pulling us into a labyrinthine exploration of the character’s journey through her home, her mouth, her neighbor’s behaviors, her ancestral history, her doctor’s abuse, and the cultural oppression on which her current life is built. How important was it that this story not only talks about taking back autonomy and power through story, but actually demonstrate how to do it and why it’s so important through its very structure? Was that something you thought about in those terms? If not, how did you approach the structural challenge to established narrative “authority” on demonstration in this piece?
When I read this question, I had to take a minute to breathe. You saw it. You understood exactly what I was aiming for, and that made my entire day.
I wrote “What Grows Back” as one of my weekly assignments during Clarion West 2025. This program lasts six weeks and involves intense writing. You create a new story each week while also workshopping everyone else’s work in your cohort, attending lectures, and basically immersing yourself in the craft 24/7. It’s exhilarating, nerve-wracking, and transformative.
Going into Clarion, I set myself a clear goal: I wanted to experiment boldly with form. I wasn’t going to play it safe. One of the most eye-opening aspects of the entire workshop was learning about various non-Western storytelling traditions. My entire cohort became obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with Kishotenketsu, this four-act Japanese narrative structure. It roughly translates to introduction, development, twist, and reconciliation. Consider that for a moment. The traditional three-act structure relies on conflict to drive the story. In contrast, Kishotenketsu builds narrative momentum through contrast, juxtaposition, shifts in perspective, and revelation.
So I made a promise to myself: for my weekly assignments at Clarion, I would not use Western storytelling formats. My story includes multiple perspectives, employs the nested narrative structures found in oral storytelling traditions like One Thousand and One Nights, and attempts something I had never done before: speculative metafictional horror.
And yes, it was absolutely intentional to not just critique the “traditional” three-act structure but to expose its inherent violence through the story’s very bones. For women like Mirlande, who is undocumented, Black, and Haitian, that very structure gaslights on a narrative level. It follows a formula that suggests you must be broken before you can be fixed. You must suffer before you deserve relief. You must perform your pain in ways that make sense to audiences who will never face your realities. It demands I present a clear “inciting incident,” “rising action” (more suffering!), a “climax” where Mirlande faces her trauma in ways that feel cathartic for readers, and “resolution” where she would, for example, either be integrated back into society or meet a tragic end.
For my story to resist that, its form had to be different. The multiple “versions” of events refuse to settle into one authoritative truth because that’s how we, People from the Global Majority, actually experience reality. Our truths often get dismissed or rewritten. But in my story, the house gets a perspective, body parts get to have a POV, the official record gets a perspective, and none of which is more “real” than the others. The metafictional elements, such as the narrator addressing “you,” explaining the kind of story this is, and challenging the reader’s expectations, were meant to prevent anyone from consuming it comfortably.
So when you ask if it was important that the story demonstrate rebellion through its structure—absolutely. Form is politics. Structure is ideology. If I’m writing about decolonization, the story itself must challenge dominant narrative structures. The nested versions, the rejection of linear time, the many truths, and the direct address that shifts from conversational to threatening all enact what the story argues.
The form embodies the resistance. Thank you for noticing that. Thank you for articulating it so clearly in your question. It means everything to me that the decolonizing work came through.
Teeth are such a fascinating part of the human anatomy. They are, at once, utterly vital and accepted as replaceable. We all grow accustomed to losing them from a young age, it’s even a rite of passage in cultures throughout the world, and yet, without them, we cannot eat or sustain ourselves . . . we cannot survive. Thus, we have daily rituals associated with their cleaning. The dental field is held in high regard on a societal and economic scale that dwarfs our attention to mental health because we all understand that the only exposed portion of our skeletal structure must be protected or our bodies can rot from the mouth down. What is so powerful about teeth, as metaphor, to you and to your narrative? Are there examples of how this relates, specifically, to the cultural backdrop of this narrative, aside from the myriad ways expressed in the story?
Okay, I’m terrified of the dentist. The smell of the office alone does something to my nervous system. The dental chair is one of the few places where we consent to lie down and open our mouths. There’s a very particular vulnerability in having someone’s hands inside your mouth while you cannot speak. That dynamic of forced stillness, that negotiation of bodily control under someone else’s authority, has stuck with me.
Teeth also make me think about what Black women are expected to do with their mouths. Smile. Be accommodating. Show your teeth in ways that make other people comfortable. Serena Williams was told her expressions are too aggressive. Michelle Obama was viewed as angry for simply standing still. There is this demand for Black women to perform pleasantness with their faces. Teeth become the instruments of that performance. In my story, I turn that idea upside down.
I found the Kreyòl proverb “Dèyè mòn, gen mòn,” meaning “beyond mountains, there are mountains,” while researching Haitian oral traditions for this piece. What it evoked in me was this image of resistance that never reaches a horizon. You survive one mountain and discover the mountain was hiding another. That’s a philosophy of endurance that has been tested by centuries of colonial violence, from Saint-Domingue to the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the 2021 Haitian coup to the mass deportations happening worldwide right now.
The political reality shapes the narrative, especially the disproportionate targeting of Haitian immigrants in the US, the specific violence of anti-Blackness that often gets flattened in broader immigration discourse. Teeth became a way to materialize that pressure inside the body as evidence of something you cannot ignore once it starts growing.
What do you count when the world keeps taking? You count what remains in your body. What’s still yours. Teeth are the only part of your skeleton that lives outside your skin. They are, as you said so beautifully, the exposed portion of the skeleton. They’re also one of the primary ways forensic scientists identify the dead. When everything else is gone, teeth remain as proof of existence.
This story casts a very wide net, thematically speaking, while addressing many different issues of oppression at once. It feels interconnected and intertwined, but none of the elements feel underserved, and that’s a testament to the well-executed, structural complexity on display here. What advice would you give to writers attempting to intertwine multiple thematic tension points through their narrative without any key issues and through-lines getting “lost in the sauce” like an over-cooked étouffée? Are there any concrete techniques you utilize? Maybe other authors to study or observe who do this particularly well or inspired your work? Non-fiction works to study?
I think of writing less as “balancing” multiple themes and more as building on an ecosystem where those elements are already in relationship. The goal in all of my stories is to make complexity legible without oversimplifying it. My academic background in political science taught me to sit inside complexity, specifically, to track how systems overlap and how power moves across different layers simultaneously. So when I write, my intention is to show where these oppressive forces already intersect in lived reality. For Mirlande, immigration status, race, gender, labor are all impacting her at once. The story refuses to separate them artificially for the sake of clarity.
One technique I rely on is anchoring everything to a single, obsessive image or motif. In this case, it’s teeth. No matter how wide the thematic net gets, the reader always has something tangible to focus on. If there’s one core principle I go by, it’s this: Trust the reader, but give them anchors. Let the story be as complex as reality is, but make sure there’s an image, a voice, a rhythm they can follow through the maze.
I read widely across genres. From the German literary tradition that shaped me, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is foundational. Everyone knows Faust. I often return to his works of fiction and poetry because he allows his work to hold contradictions. Similarly, Franz Kafka showed me that systems do not need to be explained to be felt. In The Trial, bureaucracy becomes atmospheric, inescapable, illogical, intimate. Reading Kafka is an exercise in endurance. Octavia E. Butler and N. K. Jemisin remain important resources I turn to again and again for how they build worlds where power is never abstract. They are masters at embedding systemic critique in their stories. I also explore other forms like films, manga, and video games that use nonlinear storytelling. I’m curious about how different mediums hold complexity without over-explaining it. Especially dense, “difficult” texts have become part of my writing journey. I see them as invitations to co-create meaning. These are books that require rereading, that resist easy interpretation, and trust you to do the work.
If an image only serves one purpose, cut it or give it more to do. That’s the standard I try to hold myself to, and this probably comes from me being a poet and learning the art of compression. The étouffée burning in my story is about a woman so focused on monitoring her neighbor that she lets her food burn and lets the care she performs as cover for her betrayal turn sour. If you want to write with layered, interconnected themes, study systems, read widely across disciplines, and most importantly, trust that readers can follow you while resisting the urge to resolve everything. A story does not need to answer every question it raises. Sometimes its job is to sharpen the questions and to leave them echoing in the reader long after the text ends.
That, to me, is where a story becomes something readers want to revisit, seeing it in new ways each time.
A writing mentor once advised me on endings: “A great horror ending,” he said, “should feel inevitable and should echo out beyond the page, showing that this isn’t over for the character or for the world.” I always loved that concept and I feel you execute it very well in this story. Mirlande gets her due, she gets justice for Helen, Nakibuuka, and all the oppressed women before her who’ve suffered in that house, in this country, in the South, but her horrors are not done. She might have overthrown the active agents in her immediate vicinity, but we cannot help but feel she’s still very much under threat. She’s a survivor. She’s powerful. But like the unconventional narrative, the marginalized community, the women, she will always be threatened by the oppressive systems who fear her power will dismantle and expose them. What power to do you see in the ambiguous ending? Do you prefer to end stories this way, generally, or was it just the perfect way to end this story?
I’m so glad you asked this because I have strong feelings about ambiguous endings, especially in speculative metafictional work like this.
First, yes, I love endings that refuse to let readers off the hook and that insist the story continues beyond the page. Your mentor’s advice is perfect: “should feel inevitable and should echo out beyond the page.” That’s exactly what I was going for.
A tidy ending would betray everything the narrative argues. This story tackles systemic oppression. Mirlande finds justice for herself, for Helen, and for the women who came before her, but the systems that created Dr. Henley and Mrs. Patterson are still in place. ICE is still deporting people. If I wrapped this story up neatly and suggested that Mirlande is safe now, saying the threat is over and she can finally rest, I would be using the “traditional” narrative structure (problem-conflict-resolution) to tell a story about how that structure itself is harmful. The form would contradict the content.
There’s a deeper aspect here regarding non-Western storytelling traditions that I learned at Clarion West. Many of these traditions, like African oral stories or Kishotenketsu, don’t prioritize closure the way “traditional” narratives do. They often end ambiguously, cyclically, or with the idea that stories continue beyond the page. In Kishotenketsu, the fourth act, Ketsu, shows how the elements connect in a new way without tying everything up. The story leaves you with a new perspective. In African oral storytelling traditions, the griot stories I heard from my mother often end with the notion that they’ll be retold differently, and each telling will add new layers. It grows teeth. Throughout the story, Mirlande becomes something dangerous, yes, but that doesn’t make her safe. It makes her a different kind of target.
What happens when one woman becomes dangerous in a system designed to consume women like her? The answer must remain open because the oppressive system is still operating. The threat is ongoing. This serves the metafictional framework, too. The ambiguous ending leaves the reader with discomfort. The final lines literally tell you: “somewhere—in a council flat in London, or a favela in São Paulo, or a refugee camp in Dadaab—another woman is learning to count past thirty-two. And when she reaches forty-seven, she’ll be thinking of you.” That’s a threat that extends beyond the page, into the reader’s world, and into the future. It’s the story refusing to stay confined.
And a follow-up, just out of curiosity: Do you, in your own mind and off the page, have some notion of where Mirlande goes next? What she does? How she gets out of this situation now that she’s not only a descendant of immigrants but a murderer who’s clearly connected to this double homicide?
As I mentioned in my previous answer, the danger for Mirlande doesn’t end. It cannot end. She’s an undocumented, Black woman who has committed two murders that will eventually be discovered. The systems that produced Dr. Henley and Mrs. Patterson will not stop functioning because two of their “agents” are gone. I love ambiguous endings full of possibilities. Any single, final answer risks repeating what the story resists.
There’s a version where she runs. In this scenario, she becomes undocumented in a different country, learning new systems and facing new dangers. There’s another version where she stays and becomes somewhat of an urban myth, a modern folklore, a warning that moves through communities that oppressive systems try to break apart. Then there’s the version that interests me the most: One in which Mirlande is not a singular phenomenon. She inspires a domino effect, representing a rupture in a system that assumes certain bodies will always remain consumable, containable, and silent.
Finally, a more basic question. I’m confident that, after reading this, everyone will want to know what’s coming next from Aishatu Ado and where they can get their hands on it. Are you working on any long form stuff? Do you have more short stories out there that we can all read? What’s around the corner for those of us who want to keep gnawing on these toothy stories of yours?
I’m working on some very exciting projects that are a natural extensions of what “What Grows Back” is doing with form and resistance. I’m writing a multi-POV speculative eco-horror fiction novel that is in conversation with works like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the Broken Earth Trilogy, The Overstory, and Crime and Punishment. It examines moral pressure under planetary-scale crises. Earth herself is one of the narrators. She speaks in geological time while witnessing human-made disasters.
On the poetry front, I’ve completed a speculative SF horror chapbook titled Black Box Flight Recorder. It consists of experimental poems that reimagine Black girlhood as a kind of flight data recorder for the “crash” of empire. The title plays with the idea of what gets preserved when everything else burns. What records do Black bodies hold? What data do we send out during a catastrophe? The collection explores how extractive systems, such as data mining, are extensions of colonial violence. Ultimately, it’s about Black girls refusing to be passengers in systems that aim to direct them toward set destinations. Instead, they become pilots charting coordinates to places that exist outside (post)colonial maps.
I use storytelling to imagine futures of collective survival. This idea runs through everything I write. I’m always asking: how do we survive systems that intend to consume us? What do we become when we refuse to be prey?
As for where to find my work, I have new speculative fiction and poems that will be published this year. You can subscribe to my newsletter at aishatu.carrd.co, where I share updates about new releases and my writing journey.
