I felt that thing a lot of first-gen kids talk about feeling: neither here nor there, too Russian to be American, too American to be Russian, both and neither at once. I wasn’t embracing the beautiful, complex mess of self back then, either. Different and complicated felt like the last things you wanted to be, and I grasped at every opportunity to smooth my differences and complications away. Part of that was an acute obedience that, thankfully, I’ve mostly shaken off since. Finally, like Uly, I was an only child who early on came to consider our family computer my easiest and most tolerant friend.

I think fans can expect everything I write will have the weariness, dread, and anger of living on the knife’s edge of a failing world paired with my silly devotion to empathy. The narrator of “Home” is a monster but one that breaks my heart as much as repulses me. Fans can expect a lot of that but (usually) with more jokes. I love horror though, so maybe reader excitement will encourage more utility knife murdering. One can never say for sure.

I’ve always been interested in stories that begin after the epilogue—stories that acknowledge that life goes on, past the big moment of narrative catharsis. A character’s just been through a huge adventure, had a bunch of trauma dumped on them, saved the day . . . and what happens next? I love seeing characters reckon with what they’ve just been through, so I try to be really intentional about where I position a story within the broader timeline of a character’s life.

As I thought about what I was trying to say in this story, to make it more than just a transcription of a bad dream, it occurred to me it was really about the tension between belonging and unwelcomeness, the idea that someone who doesn’t even know you can project a feeling that you don’t deserve to be in the place you call home. How much of your identity are you willing to erase in order to escape that negativity? I’m the daughter of an immigrant, so that was definitely on my mind as I wrote this story.