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.

While I may not be a mother, there were other elements of the narrator I could resonate with in order to access her voice. In many ways, she represents qualities in myself that I’m uncomfortable with, pushed to an extreme. One of those is the instinctive voyeuristic streak that I think we all have as humans—the desire to experience someone else’s life, to know their secret business. It’s what draws us to fiction, to gossip, to pornography. What makes the story compelling is our urge to see more of the narrator’s shameful secret.

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.