The best horror often blends the real with the fantastic in ways that twist the heart even as it leaves the soul to bleed. “The Sound of Children Screaming” is one such story for me. What can you tell us about the birth of this tiny slice of nightmare?

This story came to me while hiding under my desk in the dark on a Friday evening while the lockdown siren sounded at the school where I work. It was late-August hot, and I’d stayed late to do some prep for the next day when the sound of gunshots in the neighborhood interrupted the silence of the empty building. I sat there under my desk shaking, knowing it wasn’t a planned drill, not after 5:00 p.m. on a Friday. I began to imagine every other job I could have, how most workplaces don’t even have a whole plan and special alarm in case a shooter comes into their workplace. And, bizarrely, I realized that because it was after work hours, I wasn’t even getting paid for the privilege.

Eventually the police cleared the building and I went home, but I was still shaken up. I began to read everything I could about the intersection of school safety and school shootings, and what I found only made me angrier. How almost everything we do in the United States in the name of “prevention” doesn’t help when shootings happen. How these drills and precautions inflict trauma on students and burden teachers with blame when shootings actually happen. And how there’s a whole industry around selling expensive “solutions” to schools, solutions such as bulletproof panic rooms installed into already-small classrooms. I couldn’t get those images out of my head, those useless, expensive, hulking pods just sitting in the classroom, a constant reminder of how school-age children in America have become acceptable sacrifices to a gun culture run amok.

What would I do, I wondered, if my students and I stumbled into another world while hiding in that bulletproof closet during an actual shooting? Narnia-esque portal fantasies often have warlike underpinnings. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was written in the shadow of the London Blitz, and reflects a fantasy of children already seeking refuge from war and violence. But what if the portal world were worse? And what would I do if the only alternative was taking them right back into the crisis we’d escaped?

But more than anything, I wanted to write a story on this topic that gave power back into the hands of the children at its center. I think we all remember the famous video clip that came out of the Uvalde, Texas shootings at Robb Elementary, of police standing around uselessly on tape beneath the caption, “The sound of children screaming has been removed.” Why was the screaming removed? Partly due to taste, but also because it’s powerful. I wanted to give these children the power of their voices back, the power to burn to the ground the whole system that made any of this possible.

I was drawn to both the poetry and the premise of the story—the snippets of narrative, the headings that are as much a part of the story as the prose, descriptions such as “the armor of an elementary school teacher” and “he grooms the blood from between his claws like sticky jam.” Did the story take this form with the first draft, or did it evolve organically through the revisions?

It took me months and months to write this story because at first I couldn’t figure out how to tell it. When you open a story with a school shooting, it’s hard to sustain the tension if you want to switch to a different set of events, as this story needed. I struggled with how to unfold the nested story in Sir Miles’s world in a way that kept the story grounded in what I really wanted to highlight: the culture of violence that makes school shootings possible as a phenomenon.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Nightmare Magazine’s brilliant editor Wendy Wagner, who advised me to consider all the possible stakeholders in the story, which allowed me to step back and see how the two nested stories contain identical players on parallel stages. Once the story’s format came together, I drafted it almost in the form presented here, although every sentence left me wrung out emotionally. Each individual paragraph probably took an hour or more to write.

You work with school-aged children. What would you have said to those children on their thrones, crowns of bone upon their brows?

I have thought about this question a lot, because at my day job, I write adapted news stories for disabled children so they can access the same topics and conversations as their able-bodied peers. When the Robb Elementary shooting happened last year, I remember for the first time being completely stumped at how to write an adapted story on the topic. I wanted to reassure my students that they were safe, that their teachers would protect them, but I realized I couldn’t honestly promise them safety. I knew that most of the violence happens in the first five minutes, before anyone is prepared, and that even the walls of the school wouldn’t stop the kind of bullets these guns fire. The situation makes me feel hopeless and powerless, because we know from the example of other countries that the only real fix for gun violence is at a policy level that transcends anything a school can do.

But I don’t want those children to feel hopeless. I want them to feel empowered. I want them to feel validated in all the emotions this topic brings up. So to them, I want to say: I’m really, really sorry you even have to worry about school shootings when growing up is hard enough on its own. You deserve so much better. But I love you. I’m here in it with you. I will advocate for you. And whatever happens, I will not let you face any of this alone.

Gaiman, Ellison, Due, Okorafor, and Delany have all spoken about the importance of writing angry and sometimes being horrific to protect the most fragile dreams. Why do you think it is important to write stories such as this? Is it equally important to read them?

I love this question, because I had the same thought while writing this story. More than anything, I wanted to talk out the story’s themes with a trusted friend. But because the subject matter is so horrible, I had trouble finding anyone willing to sit with me and go as deep into the topic as I needed in order to pull out the story. Most of the people in my life are either parents, teachers, or both. School shootings aren’t a fun intellectual exercise for me or anyone in these groups. It’s an existential threat that strikes at the heart of everything most precious to us. We’d rather not think about things so far outside our control, like ignoring a very large spider in the room that stays hidden most of the time.

But stories like these are important because sometimes we need to take a good look at that spider. I work in a school. 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.

This is my reality, and the reality of the children I serve, who have even less say in the matter than their teachers. We have to look at the spider every day. We will be there for your children if the worst comes to pass, and we will give everything for them. Please face that fear with us. Keep us company. Make the horror more bearable by witnessing it with us. Don’t close your eyes or turn your back on it.

I want to thank the people who didn’t turn away as I worked through this story: Jason Jones, Nathaniel Lee, Sara Derrickson, Becky Miller, Wendy Wagner, and my writing group, the Dire Turtles. I promise my next story will be something soft and fluffy. Probably dinosaurs. Feathered dinosaurs.

On a much lighter note, what do you do to recharge your creative batteries? How do you keep the writing spark alive?

I operate less on inspiration and more on sheer doggedness and a robot-like devotion to my writing routine. I used to think I needed that feeling of inspiration to write well, but over the years, I’ve noticed that readers can’t really seem to tell the difference between the stories where I poured out my heart and soul, and the ones where I sat in the chair and wrote for my designated time. I’m a big believer in the Pomodoro Method of writing for this reason. Apply butt to chair, apply hands to keyboard, and no checking your phone or wandering off to another internet tab until the timer goes off.

The other thing that helps a lot with my writing is . . . not writing! I think it’s possible to spend too much time wandering through my mind-palace in search of a story, when for me, the best stories are things I trip on when moving through life. I love being a writer with a day job for this reason. My job gets me away from my screen and out into the world with interesting people, which often results in some of my best stories, including this one.

I’ve also begun to carve out regular hangout time with writer friends specifically around creative projects and talking about career stuff, both in person and online. If I’m feeling creatively stuck, sometimes it’s more fun and energizing to talk with a friend about their projects. And for the same reason, I’ve been rediscovering the joy of workshops, especially when I can find one that I can fit around my day job.

What’s next for Rachael K. Jones? What do readers have to look forward to in the coming months?

I’ve got a bunch of stories coming out in the near future, although I don’t know the release dates for all of them at this moment. Check out The Deadlands this fall for a romantic story about falling in love with a bonsai tree. Over at Flash Fiction Online, I’ve got a piece pending about a guy who falls in love with himself at a transdimensional convention. I’m very excited about a couple of pieces coming out at Small Wonders and Worlds of Possibility, two newer flash fiction magazines that are already doing some really exciting work. And keep an eye out at Lightspeed for my forthcoming piece, “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus.”