I don’t have much of a writing routine, but this story started with an image—120 of them, actually—my classes of black boxes in 2020. One day, a box turned on her camera and asked if we were real and also if she was real. She sounded panicked and I understood why. I wrote the story in one day, then edited it the next. It was the easiest and fastest story I ever wrote.

Social media has become such an “integral” part of our lives that it’s hard to imagine a time when people weren’t sharing everything, from an aesthetic shot of a bagel, to birth announcements, engagements, and promotions. My mother used to lug out the family photo albums on my birthday and show bare-assed baby photos of me to all my friends. I shudder to think what she might have accomplished on a more modern platform.

Personally, I find monsters far more interesting if they share the same desires and pains as we do, if they are not so opaque or one-dimensional in their motivations. That touch of commonality evokes a different response than an alien or unexamined threat.

Speaking as a father, my greatest fear has long been failing my child in any one of many, many ways. So many ways. The protagonist of the story is a good man (probably, as it was deliberately written to be as ambiguous as hell), and he feels he is constantly on the cusp of failing his daughter. And there’s that other fear, that perhaps he already has, and the ramifications will be awful.

I’ve been interested in memory for—well, maybe for longer than I can remember. But my obsession with it started when I began a project to write a sequence of poems about my childhood. I became fascinated by the way memory distorts—the way that, when we look back at ourselves, we so often find ourselves looking at impossible angles into our past—down into our own faces, for example.

This story was inspired by the Japanese fairy tale, Kaguyahime, or The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. Kaguyahime was one of my favorite stories growing up, and one of the earliest I can remember from my Japanese heritage. It was also inspired by a desire to pay honor and tribute to the six women of Asian descent who were murdered in their workplaces in Atlanta in March 2020.

put off writing this story for months after I had the initial idea for it. That was partially because I was at work on a novel, but it was also because I couldn’t quite find the right way to begin putting words to the page. This changed after I was shaken by a small, horrific experience in my personal life; I began the first draft because I felt I needed to exorcise something awful from myself.

I spent a while working in commercial archaeology and studied for an MA in Landscape Archaeology at university. I now work mainly with GIS and historic mapping. What they all have in common is looking for details. Whether you’re trying to determine the soil change onsite to recognise an Iron Age pit, identify roundhouse gulleys on aerial photographs, or recognising historic features in the current landscape, you’re looking for clarity and consistency.

Modern Singapore is built on exhumed cemeteries and cleared jungle. The supernatural is (famously) the return of the repressed, and I’ve always viscerally felt that in Singapore. I always, always apologize before peeing on trees, like they taught us during compulsory military service. For me, ghost stories are about connecting with the dead. They’re about people and places we shouldn’t forget.

I read some research once—no idea where—that in war-torn countries, those hit hard with collective trauma, horror movies are very popular. I’ve wondered if that’s about agency. They say that someone who’s been through something traumatic but who has some agency to get out or fight back does better recovering than those who weren’t able to.