Cannibalism begins in hunger, a simple mechanism of survival, but we all want to dignify it afterwards, because we know it for nothing but sheer, selfish betrayal of our own. Those who can, do, and as long as it gets them what they want, they don’t have to feel bad about it after, unless they make themselves: that’s the slippery, Randian parody of morality Ellis Iseland teaches Tim, in the story. Blood magic requires nothing less.

Most of my fiction tends toward science fiction or dark fantasy, but at the time I wrote this story I had been reading a lot of horror and weird fiction. Stuff from Ellen Datlow’s Fearful Symmetries and Laird Barron’s Year’s Best Weird Fiction and a lot of Robert Aickman. And so I wanted to try my hand at a horror tale with a lot of weirdness. But I also wanted to tell a love story, where the force of one partner’s personality destroys another.

The trigger for the story was this steroidal bodybuilder at a gym I frequented complaining about how the country was going soft. An image of boneless people flashed through my head and I went, “Hmmm…” I needed a way to melt those bones and chose a virus.

She’s the Mexican Medea, although unlike Medea she is punished for her actions and suffers for them. La Llorona, The Weeping Woman, weeps because she murdered her children, drowning them, and now spends her afterlife haunting the countryside, crying out for them. She is often dressed in white. I feature a lot of folklore, yes. My great-uncle told us the story of how he met the Llorona one night and she was eating prickly pears on the side of the road.