Where did the idea for this story come from?

I wrote this story over Christmas at my childhood home. The house is from the 1800s and has the type of basement that you can’t bear to spend more than a few seconds in. When I was little, if I had to get something from the basement, I would run down the stairs holding my breath and try to make it back up the stairs before I had to breathe again. The floor is unfinished, cobwebs coat every surface, the stairs are uneven and made of wood, and it always feels like you’re about to fall down them. In one corner there’s an old cistern, covered up, and I have never had the courage to look in it.

Here, that fear becomes a metaphor for an abusive relationship I was once in, the kind of manipulative situation that has you questioning reality, afraid to look into the basement out of fear that what’s down there is even worse than you imagined.

I’m always curious with stories that have a surprise ending, how many drafts did it take until you achieved the final draft?

This one sort of wrote itself, to be honest. I wrote the majority of the story before Christmas, took a week off for the holidays, and when I sat down to finish it in the new year, the idea was there, somewhere. I didn’t know how it would end until I wrote it. It was a relatively painless one to get out. Surprise endings are best when you surprise yourself!

In your opinion, why did the narrator kill their wife?

In this story, the narrator’s wife has been gaslighting her for years, calling her crazy, making her doubt her reality. At some point reality truly shifts, and the narrator in fact becomes all the horrible things her wife has been saying about her. She has long been trying to keep the image of her perfect, beautiful life together, even as it is perched over this precarious darkness. Now the darkness has been brought out of her.

To me personally, the story challenges the reader on traditional gender roles. I’m curious if this was your intention?

I got this feedback from a few readers. The intention was not to flout anyone’s expectation. To me, this is simply a story about a relationship that unfolds in a dark and tragic way. The fact that it is a queer relationship is merely a part of the world we live in. Queer relationships encompass the same spectrum of experiences—love, struggle, tension, and, unfortunately, violence—as any other relationship.

What is next for you after this story?

I’m nearly finished with a novella! Slightly genre-bending, but for now I’ll call it a queer eco-horror set in Berlin. Berlin is built on an ancient swamp, the product of successive melting and freezing in the last ice age. All sorts of things festered there for a hundred thousand years before humans decided to build a city over it, and now those things are reemerging. It’s another creepy tale about the hidden things that lie beneath our little lives.