This story came from a writing prompt about how “kitchen spirits are the friendliest ghosts,” which of course made me think about the other, nastier spirits lurking within the household. I love writing about haunted places, and have always been interested in the parasitic nature of hungry spirits and their victims. After all, what’s the point of a haunted house if there’s no one within to be haunted?

The first draft of this came out of my head in November 2016, for obvious contemporaneous reasons. As is often the way of stories, though, it took a while before I realised what I was really telling myself in the writing. I’ve been on a journey of self-acceptance for my neurodivergence these last couple of years, and part of that is trying to break myself of the cringing need for everyone to love and understand me: to learn, instead, that if I am to love myself, my true self, I have to accept that I will never be able to prove myself to some people.

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.