Like most of my stories, “Wallers” started out with a simple sentence: “The day her mother brought Mr. Nelson home, Martha faded into the wallpaper.” I paused, had some coffee, added two more sentences, and then stopped. I had no plot, no other ideas, just that tidbit about Martha fading into the wallpaper, to be safe. And the story pretty much stayed there for . . . well, longer than I care to admit. And then I ended up on a panel about experimental stories.

We wrote this story during Clarion West when we collectively fell in love with the music of Be Steadwell after attending her concert with our classmate Gabriel Teodros. It was week five, we’d already written five short stories apiece, but for some reason, we decided that we needed to collaborate on a story together with her songs as a baseline. We won’t get into more detail because that ruins the mystique. So long story short, in the span of a few days, we all brainstormed the plot, wrote an outline and a rough draft.

I’ve always been interested in laughter as a behavior. It is such a strange phenomenon—how physical it is, and also how it can be so sudden, uncontrollable, and contagious. A while ago I was reading about theories for why we laugh and was intrigued to learn that we don’t have a clear answer. Some of the most popular theories include laughter as a recognition of incongruity, as a feeling of superiority, or as a release of tension. We think of comedy as being “happy,” but in a way, a joke is actually quite an uncomfortable thing.

This story started from what began as, and remains, the first line: “The caveat is that I’m going to lie to you.” (In fact, the original working title was actually “Caveat”!). While this story is first person, to me, the narrator is always as much, and often more, of a character than the people we see in the story. It takes some drafting to find the voice’s nuances, but once I do, I can find the rest of the story—what situations are most interesting for this voice? What is it trying to tell the reader or what is it trying to hide? What details does it notice and what significance does it attach to them?

My wife Chrissy and I were discussing submission calls that I used as prompts to produce stories. At the same time, my dog investigated something like a dead rabbit—something gross—and as always, I wondered what the heck he was thinking. What does the world look like to a creature like that? My dog also has strong herder stock and clearly sees himself as the sheepdog to our family. So by the end of the walk we imagined a ghost dog who was so protective he couldn’t bear to pass on.

This is my first time experimenting with the first-person plural, and I had no idea whether it would work. I’ve seen it done very effectively, for example Alice Sola Kim’s excellent “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying,” and I wanted to give it a try. It just felt right for this particular story. In addition to what you pointed out about collective responsibility, I hoped it would give the story an uneasy, dream-like (or nightmare-like) quality and put the reader off their guard.

Pre-pandemic, my best friend and I would go on annual weekend pilgrimages to haunted houses and ghost tours. A lot of what I write is in contemporary settings and houses in particular. There’s something about aspects of the horrific or fantastic seated in a familiar, comforting environment that gets me. I particularly adore haunted house stories that present as out of context problems or cosmic horror rather than those which are gothic or ghostly.

As a child, there was a window in my grandmother’s house that would produce the illusion of a coin on the carpet. Every time I went to visit my grandmother, I would bend and try to catch the coin with my chubby fingers. No matter how many times my parents and grandparents laughed and explained to me the coin wasn’t real, child-me would still try to catch the damn thing. One day, revisiting these memories it occurred to me: what if, one day, I tried to grab the coin and finally made it?

I have a mind-canon theory that this is an apocalyptic event and that this ultimately eats the world or comes damn close; but just as that starts happening, the story leaves the realm of the intimate and personal, and so becomes less interesting to me.

Dystopias feel very cathartic to me. In times of prolonged uncertainty, which we are squarely in right now—a pandemic, climate crisis, global political destabilization—the “crisis” can remain, for some people, ambient, or chronic. It might never become acute, or the cascading crises may be too complex or too nonstop to be able to process. That can lead to something called “disenfranchised grief,” a grief that’s displaced, not recognized, or not able to be mourned socially.