First of all, do you believe in miracles? And why?

No, except for when I do. I very much try to live my life as if miracles don’t exist because you want to focus on what you can actually do to make things better, not just wait for something to magically change things. And a lot of times, the word miracle is a way to describe something we haven’t put the work into understanding.

But also, to steal from Moneyball, “how can you not be romantic about baseball?” Sometimes you just see something, experience something, feel something, and you’re left wondering. Sometimes things just do feel like miracles.

What was the inspiration for this story? What drew you to the idea of auctioning the dead?

There were a few pretty big, pretty literal inspirations. In 2022, there was a story about a biotech company with a bionic implant that provided a rudimentary kind of sight to people with vision issues but then left all these people with these implants stranded when the company went belly-up. And these patients would both describe the technology as miraculous and the company as a nightmare. It was life-changing and life-threatening all at once. We live in a world where genuinely amazing things are possible, where lives can be changed via some technological breakthrough, but the system that they’re produced in is fucked, and when push comes to shove, miracles will always lose out to the financial incentives.

The other big thing was that during the breakout of the pandemic, a lot of tech companies were closing their offices and selling everything off. I remember seeing companies auctioning off incredibly expensive espresso machines and ovens alongside office chairs and monitors, and that just got tied up in the image of selling off intellectual property, this much less tangible but very consequential thing. Sell a coffee machine next to a patent for a new kind of coffee.

Also, while it wasn’t an intentional inspiration, Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence very clearly influenced my ideas of what a magical world fully captured by corporate entities and financial systems could look like. Mine is considerably less cool though.

I really enjoyed the element of humor in the story. One of my favorite lines was: “Gods and priests gambled the fate of the universe over a miracle they didn’t need.” Do you think Gods and priests should gamble less?

Yeah, I mean to pull the curtain back a bit, this is me trying to capture what it feels like to live under systems that incentivize short-term, profit-over-people thinking. Genuinely, if you’re trying to figure out why some aspect of modern life has gotten worse in the past twenty, thirty years, you could probably point to private equity and some people sacrificing people’s lives for a few more dollars. Hospitals, journalism, video games, sports, America, whatever. I’m definitely feeling that way now in 2025. We’ll see how that ages.

The ending in SF was so fascinating; it just changed so much of the story’s reading. Why land in SF?

San Francisco is a huge tech hub, especially with its proximity to Silicon Valley, and there’s something very sharp about the way big tech has tried to reshape the city in its own image, with very depressing outcomes for people’s lives. It’s not unique; you can see something similar in Austin or Seattle, but I don’t know those cities the way I know San Francisco.

As far as why it doesn’t get named until the end, I don’t know, that’s me trying to do something clever by finally naming the city right as our protagonist admits it isn’t for them, that the miracle isn’t for them before leaving it. It’s not meant to be a twist exactly—the BART and Oakland could situate the reader if they know the geography—it’s more like me trying to bring that understanding into the foreground at the end. The reader can decide how much that works.

Is there a project you are currently working on? And if not are there any themes, objects, or news that might be tickling your fingers?

No projects; I’m just trying to write and publish some more short stories and just do the work. It’s been a lot of stories about people trying to make sense of a senseless world, hope in a hopeless world, all that. Some pretty obvious news keeping that front of mind for me. I will say I want to write a happy ending at some point. I’ve been very stuck on bittersweet, I’m going to anticipate anything else I publish this year will be bittersweet, but I do want to imagine a better world. More for me than anything else.