I’ve always had a fascination with the fictional rules of possession: what laws govern this? What are the loopholes? Why is there so much vomit? There is usually (if a victim) no consent for the entity to possess a host, which is part of the horror. More broadly, I’m fascinated by the rules that constrain the monsters or people in horror. So like, choosing to watch a video you have been warned is haunted suggests consent. Forcing someone to watch that same video so they will be cursed entails no consent, and is violence.

The inspiration for this story: In the winter of 2006, I was living in Almaty, Kazakhstan, working for a company that specialized in educational exchange programs in the former Soviet Union. They had recently expanded their operations into Afghanistan, and they asked me to go down and help out there for the winter with recruiting participants for their programs. I jumped at the chance: I grew up in Fremont, California, which has a large community of refugees from Afghanistan.

The POV in “The Bleeding Maze” is admittedly pretty strange. It has sections with second person address, sections that are told from a first person plural perspective, and sections that are standard first person POV. I think what makes it work is that the binding factor that laces all these perspectives together—the maze and the experience of people who come in contact with it—is like a prism of mystery and horror. It’s the focus of the entire story, and any POV of the maze is simply a refraction of that mystery and horror.