From the very beginning, I was pulled into this story by the urgent, almost prophetic voice of the narrator. What was it like to write a story from this perspective? Was your writing process also nonlinear?

One day in the summer of 2024, I was seized by an intense maternal feeling toward a potential future child. From that came the I will, you will—the first-person future tense which contributes to the prophetic, instructive voice. When I think about parenthood, I think about diaspora, generational trauma, and immigration, and writing from the narrator’s voice, traversing these tensions, felt relieving. I’m finding I write about parent-child relationships a lot.

While writing I was also thinking of giants, and Sofia Samatar’s work, and the ending of “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones in Lightspeed issue 164 (bit.ly/45K9B5V), which had come out January of that year—how its last sentence grants a new understanding of every element that came before it.

My first draft came out in a few hours, mostly linearly—as I followed my intuition, each section illuminated and expanded dimensions of the story. Edits were mild but deeply necessary—my friends could definitely, or maybe, or could not tell what I was trying to get at, depending on who you asked. It needed nudging to convey all the nuances that I thought were so clear in my head.

How did the image or role of the giants come into shape for you? Were you inspired by any stories or events in your life?

The giants are many things—a home, a container of limited escape, a force of nature, a hope, a transport vessel, a terror to avoid provoking, an inaccessible mind, a phenomenon studied by scientists. It’s hard to describe how the giants took shape, and I’m not sure I know; so much of my writing process, especially for flash fiction, is not conscious decision-making but pursuing intuition. I had intentions: How the giants might be like how parents seem—or are—to children, or for the giants to embody the risk some people, like my family members, take to immigrate.

The themes of identity, birth, and transformation build throughout the story and lead to an extraordinary ending. Can you tell us more about what these themes mean to you?

I enjoyed exploring the idea of being reborn, and especially the adult desire to be reborn. Under capitalism, imperialism, and the nation-state, we are asked to justify living. This pressure I feel often. Immigrants, like my parents, are asked to justify their existence doubly so and seek penance for crossing a border. As we progress through life, the state sustains itself by adding to our debts—if not monetary, then social, moral, or other ways.

And although this part I’m simplifying, I feel people who are newly born have relatively little debt and might be temporarily excused for not yet having justification for their existence. They instead hold the currency of potential. (How much the state values this potential varies widely per child.)

Under this brutal system, which tries to inculcate its subjects with forever owing, I find the idea of being reborn tantalizing. The just-born are much closer to a clean slate than I am, and that relationship between the historied and their parcels of potential (glib, but the consonance!) I think is interesting. If you are a parent, perhaps you can seek rebirth by reincarnating: having a child, then living vicariously through them. Or perhaps you can feel like you are paying down your debt by producing your child’s currency of potential, or even better, by raising that child to become a productive worker. Or, perhaps through your guidance, your child can, in some way, aid your rebirth and renew you. Looking back at my story, I feel this web of feelings was in large part from where I channeled the narrator’s desperation.

On identity, I have been thinking about Sofia Samatar’s Opacities, where she thinks of writing as expanding outward, and publication and marketing as the opposite: a boxing-in, felt, of course, more keenly by people with representational bodies. She wrote, “We will settle for nothing less than the whole field of desire and history.”

There are so many examples of beautiful, poetic writing in this story including the line: “She will unfold from the ruins of the crash-palm-viscera like a butterfly unseaming from the chrysalis.” How do you decide when poetic language should have a clear meaning versus when it should be left up for interpretation for the reader?

It varies for each piece. By varying the imagery, time, and space, I gave my story the flexibility to build its movement. I set out to construct an uncompromising logic of obliquely connected symbols that progresses to its clarifying reveal. I think much of my story, especially on the first read, reads like poetry because, through symbolic variation and withholding a key piece of context for the end, it refuses to make clear narrative sense. In that narrative absence, I leave the reader to scrounge for their own meaning.

Still some poetry remains. Why are there flashes of light, and what do they mean? Why is there a ghost of immaculate conception? I am withholding elements of the story to gift them to the reader. What often haunts me long after I finish reading a story is what cannot be resolved.

What can your readers expect from you next?

I have a story forthcoming in Diabolical Plots, cowritten with Simo Srinivas, titled “We Burst Across the Theoretical Gore.” It will be free to read online. You are sweet damp roadkill. You are also a mountain lion. You are also the ravenous car.

If you’d like to read more recent work, in January I had a novelette come out in Nightmare, “Jennifer’s Daughter” (bit.ly/3ZSSxad). Sweet Lane just wants to make friends with the boy next door, who she’s afraid of, because, hey, that thing happened to her mom. Florida heat, swamp malaise, gators, Mom furtive and dripping blood in the hallway, illicit lemonade with your crush, and of course, Jennifer’s Body.

At the time of writing this it’s winter in the US Northeast, and I have been making soups, trying various new kinds of art-making, and burrowing into new books. I have been rediscovering: Reading is writing! You can keep up with my writing at my website, sarasmessenger.com.