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.

I think that money provides motivations capable of damning us all, and that the man who accepts the offer would protest at great length about any characterization of himself as evil. He thinks he is above the temptation, and he may even be right. But since he is unambiguously human, we can measure what he is better than we can measure the representative of the unknown organization.

I have a lot of experience, both professionally and personally, with disasters. I won’t insult the people who’ve also endured these life-changing events and their slow, painful aftermath by referring to the good that can come of them, but there’s no doubt that they result in profound destabilization of forms, physical and otherwise, both in a positive and negative sense. Significant hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, flooding, ice storms, tsunamis, all that nature throws at us and the slew of human-created disasters as well, teach victims the hard way that their lives are fragile and temporally insignificant.

Living through COVID-19 made it absolutely necessary for me to tell this story. We are all being impacted by the very best and worst of human behavior right now, and the consequences will be felt for decades. I would like to believe that humanity will ultimately choose unity in an apocalyptic situation, if only to increase our chances for survival, but human history contradicts this. Even now, people still refuse to take the necessary steps to ensure their safety and the safety of the broader community.