I probably don’t need to summarize here how black and brown bodies have been portrayed historically in the media. We’re criminals, vagrants, drug dealers, and whores. So, I really wanted to play with the idea of villainy in this story by choosing an archetype for the protagonist that was unequivocally represented as evil in other media. This was yet another opportunity to force the reader to confront their own prejudice.

Growing up way out in the pastures in West Texas, I learned early on to shake my boots out each morning, because scorpions would sometimes have fallen in for, I don’t know, scorpion reasons—I always imagined scorpions are just real hopeful, are always thinking there’s scorpion burgers way in the toe-end of this boot—and then I guess they couldn’t get out.

I wanted to write a story exploring my conception of a “Midwest horror” that I first began developing for an H Word column that was published in Nightmare. I knew I wanted to delve deeper into those themes and that aesthetic, but I wasn’t sure exactly what story I wanted to tell. From my initial notes for this story: “The idea of midwestern horror specifically. Cornfields, farmhouses, wide sunny skies, grain silos, dirt roads, this sun-drenched aesthetic where tornadoes and storm clouds are just off-camera.”