I’ve always been fascinated by rising waters. I grew up moving between Goleta, California, a minute’s walk from the Pacific Ocean, and Kolkata, India, where the monsoons regularly turn the city’s streets into rivers. More recently, I’ve been having long conversations with my mother (she’s a historian) about the role of rivers in Bengali history over the past few centuries. The swelling of rivers with rain is absolutely essential to the life and livelihood of the people around it.

I don’t have much of a writing routine, but this story started with an image—120 of them, actually—my classes of black boxes in 2020. One day, a box turned on her camera and asked if we were real and also if she was real. She sounded panicked and I understood why. I wrote the story in one day, then edited it the next. It was the easiest and fastest story I ever wrote.

Social media has become such an “integral” part of our lives that it’s hard to imagine a time when people weren’t sharing everything, from an aesthetic shot of a bagel, to birth announcements, engagements, and promotions. My mother used to lug out the family photo albums on my birthday and show bare-assed baby photos of me to all my friends. I shudder to think what she might have accomplished on a more modern platform.

Personally, I find monsters far more interesting if they share the same desires and pains as we do, if they are not so opaque or one-dimensional in their motivations. That touch of commonality evokes a different response than an alien or unexamined threat.