I’m pretty sure I still have a Post-It somewhere in my bedside table on which is scribbled in near-indecipherable handwriting “the witch falls in love with a GHOST,” that I think I wrote around 3 am one night when this story was just starting to float around in my head.

Extreme wealth seems to function as mental illness for many people, as it depends on a dehumanisation of everyone else to normalise the excess (like that hit documentary series, Succession). Perhaps it’s entitlement to power; perhaps it’s losing the perspective to see how unreal life becomes.

To live in the world today means accepting horrors as a matter of course, and the narrator certainly does that. I wanted it to read as if it’s all a big metaphor for something, but leave the something mysterious. That’s often how dreams feel to me, and sometimes the world feels that way too.

The other part was the frustration many of us feel if we’re able to become pregnant and our period is late, or we’re trying not to get pregnant for whatever reasons—that frustration of having no certainty about your very own body, no way to tell what’s going on in there, and that at any time, that bodily autonomy can be taken away from you.

Being a teenager is horrifying! There is the horror of your body suddenly being outside of your control, for one, and it’s so messy and gross and bloody and smelly and hairy and you have all of these feelings, all without your consent.

Years ago I read that Bill Gates has a turn-of-the-century fully AI-enabled house. Everything in it is specialized for its inhabitants. I wondered: What if it was left empty? Alone. Without purpose.

I’ve been meaning to write a boto story for so long—like years—but I could never really find the right entry point for it. There’s a really great Atlantic article by Sushma Subramanian called “The Dolphin Myth that Refuses to Die” that explores the origins and perpetuation of the boto myth in the Amazon. That article really got me thinking about my adoption.

I was moved to write not a dark fairy tale itself, but a dark story about fairy tales. My starting point was, “what if someone became obsessed with fairy stories, what then?” This made me think about the infamous Cottingley fairies, and the attempts to discover “real” fairies. I imagined an old French woman painstakingly hunting for real magic in her life.

Each volunteer might have their own reasons why working with incarcerated people is meaningful but maybe fundamentally it has to do with prisoners being humans, and like the rest of humanity, there is a need for them to be emotionally healthy and to develop both intellectually and artistically.

I don’t have the privilege to put school shootings out of mind all the time. If push came to shove, I’d absolutely die for my students, for other people’s children, even though it is more than we should ask of someone who doesn’t get hazard pay or combat training.