Welcome to Lightspeed Magazine! We’re honored to share your story “Hell is Empty” with our readers. Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

This story is an example of how sometimes we need to make art in order to make sense of what’s happening around us. For context, I’m currently living in Minneapolis during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge. A week after Renee Good’s murder, I was still stuck and paralyzed and I needed to put my energy into something. I needed to put what was going on into words. Because that’s my job. So I sat down and I wrote it in forty-five minutes, while a helicopter circled above and I nervously waited for my wife to safely get back from her grocery run. I ended up reading it over the phone to her while she drove home. It originally ended at the gym, and she said, “I like it. But it needs hope. What are we currently doing to keep the light?” And then I had to struggle with that for a couple of days and wrote the last scene. It was so very helpful to think, “How do we keep the light?” When we got tired or overwhelmed or scared, this story became a blueprint for our household. How do we keep the light?

This is a short story for a big idea, and stories under 1,500 words can be particularly hard to pull off. Were you always aiming for this particular length, and why do you think it works the way it does?

I don’t think I had the time or brain cells to write anything longer. I have written a little flash before, but after working on two books, I fell into this way of thinking that everything I write has to be woven into a huge tapestry that is 320 pages long. And that’s not true. Flash can hit. Flash can get the world across. And we also didn’t have the entire picture of what was going on, a week after Renee. In many ways, we still don’t, as more people have been murdered and kidnapped since. So this is the most sense I could make out of the world in that moment. Less than 1500 words.

Also, there’s something about flash fiction that lends itself well to uncertainty. Short stories (and especially flash fiction) only give us a small glimpse. The world beyond that story is undefined, existing only in the imagination of the reader. So, in a time where we can only see a couple of feet in front of us, the reader can decide for themselves what, in the blank space after the end, do the characters do? What would the reader do? We all have the freedom to choose how we react in that space of “what next?”

That the story’s climax is purely emotional, a picture of silent togetherness, while unimaginable violence is being committed by literal demons right outside struck me as a well-done subversion of expectations. Why did you choose to end on that kind of note?

It’s how it felt/feels right now. Just waiting. Holding our breath. Are they going to leave? Is someone else going to get shot and taken from us? Are things going to escalate? When are they coming to my door? When are they coming to our neighbors’ doors? A lot of people in the twin cities (and around the country) have been sitting in their homes for months, unable to leave, just waiting in fear. There’s no absolution, there’s no final attack, the fear just keeps banging on the windows.

“No devils here. All just downtown.” To me, that strongly reflects the historical, disdainful thread in twentieth-century science fiction and fantasy toward cities. Was this at all in your mind when you were writing this, or were modern concerns like the ICE sieges and murders across the Twin Cities and elsewhere at the root of this? What were you hoping readers to take away from it?

This is unfortunately another answer that I’m going to give that is very literal and not very poetic. As a writer, I’m really glad if this story resonates outside of the current situation or has a specific motif that speaks to something bigger. As a person, I’m going to emphasize the only thing fictional about this story is that the attackers are literal demons coming out of a hellmouth. The epicenter of the attacks in the Twin Cities has been the Powderhorn neighborhood, which is in south Minneapolis, close to downtown.

I live in north Minneapolis, and I can see the skyline from my porch. The week I was writing this, I just kept going to the back door and staring out at the skyline. Our neighborhood is in a weird place where we have been affected, neighbors have been taken, choppers are above us at all hours, but we are not as actively terrible of a hot spot as Powderhorn. There are neighborhoods closer to the skyline that are just getting unrelentingly attacked. And nowadays, everyone is planning activities by neighborhood.

“They’re in this neighborhood, they’re planning on being in that neighborhood tomorrow, they were here in this neighborhood today, this was our neighborhood, this was the neighborhood next to us.”

So, my experience, sitting in North Minneapolis, is being out on the rim and watching it and feeling it from there.

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I have a couple of short stories coming out this year, and the paperback for my novel, The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World, hits this July. The hardcover came out last year and it’s been great to hear about it resonating with readers. There’s also a couple projects coming down the pipe I can’t talk about quite yet. I’m trying very hard to make sense of the world around me and see where I can be of most help as a writer in this time.

I will say that if you would like to help people in Minneapolis, here are two mutual aid organizations that are collecting donations so they can directly help those who are sheltering in place:

• canmn.org: “Community Aid Network (CANMN) is a grassroots volunteer-led organization located in the Bancroft neighborhood of Minneapolis, MN. We work to build solidarity with our neighbors, organize volunteers and redistribute resources to ensure everyone has the means for dignified survival.”
• yesodfund.org: “Shir Tikvah, a community in the Twin Cities, is moving tens of thousands of dollars directly to families facing housing instability and harm due to the occupation by ICE, and the need is overwhelming. Their most recent release of $50,000 was fully claimed in just 7 minutes. If you’re able, please give to the Yesod Fund to help meet urgent, real-time needs. This is direct aid, moving fast, when it matters most.”