Speaking as a father, my greatest fear has long been failing my child in any one of many, many ways. So many ways. The protagonist of the story is a good man (probably, as it was deliberately written to be as ambiguous as hell), and he feels he is constantly on the cusp of failing his daughter. And there’s that other fear, that perhaps he already has, and the ramifications will be awful.

I’ve been interested in memory for—well, maybe for longer than I can remember. But my obsession with it started when I began a project to write a sequence of poems about my childhood. I became fascinated by the way memory distorts—the way that, when we look back at ourselves, we so often find ourselves looking at impossible angles into our past—down into our own faces, for example.

This story was inspired by the Japanese fairy tale, Kaguyahime, or The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. Kaguyahime was one of my favorite stories growing up, and one of the earliest I can remember from my Japanese heritage. It was also inspired by a desire to pay honor and tribute to the six women of Asian descent who were murdered in their workplaces in Atlanta in March 2020.

put off writing this story for months after I had the initial idea for it. That was partially because I was at work on a novel, but it was also because I couldn’t quite find the right way to begin putting words to the page. This changed after I was shaken by a small, horrific experience in my personal life; I began the first draft because I felt I needed to exorcise something awful from myself.