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.

We wrote this story during Clarion West when we collectively fell in love with the music of Be Steadwell after attending her concert with our classmate Gabriel Teodros. It was week five, we’d already written five short stories apiece, but for some reason, we decided that we needed to collaborate on a story together with her songs as a baseline. We won’t get into more detail because that ruins the mystique. So long story short, in the span of a few days, we all brainstormed the plot, wrote an outline and a rough draft.

I’ve always been interested in laughter as a behavior. It is such a strange phenomenon—how physical it is, and also how it can be so sudden, uncontrollable, and contagious. A while ago I was reading about theories for why we laugh and was intrigued to learn that we don’t have a clear answer. Some of the most popular theories include laughter as a recognition of incongruity, as a feeling of superiority, or as a release of tension. We think of comedy as being “happy,” but in a way, a joke is actually quite an uncomfortable thing.

This story started from what began as, and remains, the first line: “The caveat is that I’m going to lie to you.” (In fact, the original working title was actually “Caveat”!). While this story is first person, to me, the narrator is always as much, and often more, of a character than the people we see in the story. It takes some drafting to find the voice’s nuances, but once I do, I can find the rest of the story—what situations are most interesting for this voice? What is it trying to tell the reader or what is it trying to hide? What details does it notice and what significance does it attach to them?