What was the inspiration behind this story? Did you do anything different with your process while writing it?

I was one of the interpreters/co-navigators with a DeafBlind writer at a residency program, so we spent a lot of time together, and in between chatting about books and writing, we folded origami. I’d grown up folding paper cranes, but to fold with my DeafBlind friend required different techniques than making the folds by sight. So that’s where the concept of folding “in the dark” originated.

This seems like a tangent but is related—another DeafBlind mentor, a poet, mentioned to me how he often reads lying down, holding the Braille display in whatever position is most comfortable.

So all of these conversations had me thinking about how underused tactile perception is by sighted people like myself. I mean, if I knew Braille, I could read comfortably at night without ever turning on the light and disturbing my spouse, you know? So the story is really, for me, about what Hana tells Sunny early on when teaching her to fold: “It’s only in the dark to you because you don’t know how to feel the paper.”

It’s interesting to see one of our most basic fears presented here; I haven’t read a story in a long time that actually focuses on our fear of the dark. What elements of that fear did you hope to get across with this story?

Being lost in the dark is scary because you lose the ability to navigate, right? It’s about fear of the unknown. One thing I’ve noticed as a storyteller and a consumer of stories is that sighted writers often tend to describe what a setting looks like, and sometimes how it sounds or smells, but rarely do I read a story full of tactile sensations. So part of the fun with this story for me was really emphasizing Sunny’s fumbling discovery of the haunted house as she feels her way through. I wanted the reader to be immersed in the tactility of being lost in the dark.

But it isn’t just about fear of the dark. I also wanted the story to interrogate the concept of “darkness” itself. Again going back to Hana’s line—“it’s only in the dark to you because you don’t know how to feel . . . ” It’s this idea that darkness is only a limitation if you insist on relying on sight, but of course there are other ways of navigating the world, and this is something Hana shows to Sunny.

The long-arm hag . . . what a cool monster. How’d you go about creating her?

So much horror fiction is tall, distorted figures, like Slenderman. The long-arm hag fits into that mold of the humanoid distortion. But also, monsters are much scarier if we don’t fully see them. So I wanted the long-arm hag to be just present enough for us to have a sense of her, but not enough that she is ever fully grasped by the reader. Also, she had to be a tactile presence. And the long hair—I mean, you feel a hair across your arm or your face, or maybe a spider web, and it causes a gut reaction. It’s just this intuitive response—like the tickle of an insect, it’s startling. So she really taps into these primal fears.

What’s next for you? Any stories/projects you’re working on that you can talk about?

I got started writing horror on the NoSleep subreddit, and I continue to post new fiction there once a month, with a lot of those stories eventually making their way into podcasts.

In addition to short stories, I’ve started working on my first horror novel. It’s about a paranormal investigator hired to watch a ten-minute creepypasta video whose viewers all kill themselves before they reach the end. For $1,000 per minute, he agrees to view it, but soon realizes the biggest mistake he’s ever made was pressing play. Originally, I wrote it as a short story and submitted it to a contest for a movie option and a $7000 prize. It made the semifinals but didn’t win. After that I was thinking what to do with it, and I realized it would make a much better novel.