My wife Chrissy and I were discussing submission calls that I used as prompts to produce stories. At the same time, my dog investigated something like a dead rabbit—something gross—and as always, I wondered what the heck he was thinking. What does the world look like to a creature like that? My dog also has strong herder stock and clearly sees himself as the sheepdog to our family. So by the end of the walk we imagined a ghost dog who was so protective he couldn’t bear to pass on.

This is my first time experimenting with the first-person plural, and I had no idea whether it would work. I’ve seen it done very effectively, for example Alice Sola Kim’s excellent “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying,” and I wanted to give it a try. It just felt right for this particular story. In addition to what you pointed out about collective responsibility, I hoped it would give the story an uneasy, dream-like (or nightmare-like) quality and put the reader off their guard.

Pre-pandemic, my best friend and I would go on annual weekend pilgrimages to haunted houses and ghost tours. A lot of what I write is in contemporary settings and houses in particular. There’s something about aspects of the horrific or fantastic seated in a familiar, comforting environment that gets me. I particularly adore haunted house stories that present as out of context problems or cosmic horror rather than those which are gothic or ghostly.

As a child, there was a window in my grandmother’s house that would produce the illusion of a coin on the carpet. Every time I went to visit my grandmother, I would bend and try to catch the coin with my chubby fingers. No matter how many times my parents and grandparents laughed and explained to me the coin wasn’t real, child-me would still try to catch the damn thing. One day, revisiting these memories it occurred to me: what if, one day, I tried to grab the coin and finally made it?