This started with a prompt in a weekend flash writing contest: “True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.” That weekend, my teenage daughter and a couple of her friends were talking about sidekicks in books that are more interesting than the main “chosen” one character—and it brought up my own conflicted feelings about the show Supernatural, which is littered with the bodies of the Winchester brothers’ female sidekicks.

My writing explores the darkness within myself and my past. In this case, I wanted to write about a frighteningly unhealthy relationship. I hope readers experience the uncomfortableness the narrator feels for participating in something profane and yet falling head-first into it.

Many EULAs take seventeen (or more!) hours to get through. I always feel like I’ve signed away a piece of my soul after agreeing to a super long one. Perhaps I have.

Years ago, while working online in curriculum development, I was set the task of helping high school students understand Hamlet. Many approaches exist—too many to enumerate here—but the one that changed my experience of “the Bard” and the English language itself was turning to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) whenever I had a question about a word. My favorite part of this process was learning about the history of the word: the obsolete definitions, the slang it once formed, the phrases in which it first appeared.

This story started life just over nine years ago—October 30, 2013, to be exact—as an assignment in an online workshop taught by Craig Clevenger.  We’d been focusing on escalation of events and status play between characters, so the jockeying that surrounds gendered expectations, especially involving sex, seemed like a good place to start.  Beyond that, I’ve always found carnivals unsettling because of their atmosphere of blatant disguise, so the theme and setting fit hand and glove for horror. 

One thing I find fascinating about parenthood is the fact that protecting your children too tightly from the monsters in the world can sometimes become, in itself, a monstrous act. I wanted to write a story with this kind of double vision, where viewed through one lens, the mother is protecting her daughter, but viewed through another lens, the mother is hurting her daughter, and it’s hard to say for certain which version is true.

My short stories often grow from a fixation on a certain animal. I loved the idea of a “ghost” being a hyper-specific emotional state, something petty and small enough to possess a bug. At the same time, I wanted the centipede to show the tantruming ghost something beautiful, an experience that a human body or mind couldn’t offer on its own.

In Folktales of Mexico, compiled by Américo Paredes (one of the founding fathers of Chicano studies in the U.S.), I read a story about a man who discovered that his wife was a monster. Any night the man was away, the wife stripped away her skin and flew through the air as a skeleton, terrorizing the people of the town and stealing infants to eat.