Grief causes us to make questionable decisions or judgements. When we’re grieving we do risky things and often trust the wrong people because nothing seems to matter, or maybe anything is better than what we’re currently feeling or experiencing. Romance and sex can be a wonderful distraction.

I think it started out in my head with the scene where the eyeball falls out of Muniza’s socket, and this almost sitcom style uh-oh moment where there’s just the worst person in the world witnessing that. The shame of falling apart while under intense, unsympathetic scrutiny. Then I got to thinking: what are the emotional stakes of that situation?

I like grimy stuff. Dirty, menacing, quick-witted exchanges between folks. I like crime fiction and horror that refuses to get world-rending, to get huge, that sticks to singular people. I love writing shakedowns, and that’s what happens to Chuck in that first scene. He’s got a need, and that need gets exploited

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.