The primary bond among the women in this story is their relationship to shame, which is a bond and burden I think many women, especially black women, share. The protagonist and her mother live with a lot of shame—body-shame and the shame of the curse, of being its cause and its consequence. Clara and Josephine haven’t yet experienced the shame of being a Clay, of having to live in that house, no matter how much they think they know about Cornelius and his family, and this is why they’re willing to seek out the protagonist.

I was thinking a lot about bodies when I wrote this story, in particular that being infected by or being turned into a zombie is an enforced physical and mental change, a concept that borrows from the Haitian zombie history. I was wondering how a character who has changed his body would react to being in this world where an enforced change is possible from a terrifying exterior source. My character is also used to hiding, to navigating unsafe spaces, which reflects the unfortunate reality that many queer and trans people experience on a daily basis.

Good horror movies are thinner on the ground than good written horror, in part because some of the folks who make them think sadism is enough. (More so, in recent years.) What I want from them is what I want in all good stories: an interesting perspective, a reason to care, a lack of compromise . . . and because the genre presents this pitfall, best avoided, a lack of nihilism for its own sake.

It’s been close to eight years since I last visited Puerto Rico. Since then, so much has changed, including the destruction that occurred because of Hurricane Maria. I’ve had so many conversations with my father regarding places that have disappeared, plazas completely missing because of the hurricane. When I was writing “Crave” I wanted to try to remember the smells of the island on my first visit at five years old. The island was in so many ways a magical place for me, so outside of the concrete jungle I grew up in in the Bronx, New York.