If I’m writing a short story, I like to plan everything out in advance and then write from the bullet points; there’s not so much wiggle room when you’re writing against a maximum word count. If I’m writing a novel I also like to plan everything out in advance and write from the bullet points, with the difference that I generally get maybe two-thirds of the way through and realize that two or more of my bullet points conflict with each other and the entire house of cards is gonna collapse.

There’s a common slang we have in Nigeria called “japa.” This simply means migration from your country to another country for better opportunities and greener pastures. I was having a conversation with a friend who was talking about the hardship being faced by the ever-growing Nigerian population, hence, the reason for the mass migration. A spark of an idea was birthed during the conversation. What if this supposed greener pasture is not what we think it is? Perhaps, we are too engrossed with the news we hear about such places.

I like to think I’m a nice dad. And, possibly as a result, I write a lot of science fiction with nice dad protagonists. For this story, I wanted to challenge myself to go in the opposite direction and write the villainous origin story of a not-very-nice dad. So, I basically fought my best instincts as a parent, and explored a much more selfish point of view. Like most of my short stories, this is just a jumping off point. I’d love to write more about what happens in this cave with these people.

This really happened to me! But without the monsters. When I was ten my father got in a bad motorcycle accident, and my mom had to rush up to Albany Medical and left us in the care of family friends who were significantly wealthier than us. It was terrifying (and fascinating), and the scars on my psyche festered into this story after about thirty-plus years.

Widener is a real library, and a really weird one in many ways, although renovations since my undergraduate days have tidied up things like the passageway that literally went out a window. I’m a folklorist by training and inclination, so it wasn’t hard to take the structural oddities and graft on some additional weirdness.

You might be able to tell that Granny Weatherwax from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is a big inspiration for this story. They were probably my introduction to the “grumpy but helpful witch” archetype and I really wanted to work with that type of character. The idea of “twisting your wishes” is also an old one; I wanted to give my own spin to it. So this is sort of a story in which I play with older forms. But I obviously wanted to make it a bit more gay.

This is set in the same world as my short story “Amaryllis” (also published on Lightspeed) and my Philip K Dick Award-winning novel Bannerless. In fact, it features the same main character as Bannerless. I love writing about Enid, and this setting still has lots of corners I haven’t explored. Short fiction is a good way to do that. One of the questions I always wanted to tackle: what are other parts of the country like? What other technology might have survived elsewhere? What happens when those cultures meet?

I had been thinking a lot about constructed narratives, reality television and the blurred line between authenticity and falsehood. I had also been thinking a lot about the concept of a story that is out to get you. I had been thinking about the grand tradition of “murdergame” stories (Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, Squid Game, etc.). And I thought that a subversion of a murdergame story, where death is an escape and life is being trapped, had a lot of weirdness potential. And that’s the bedrock the rest of the story was built from.

Everything important in the story is in the spaces between words and actions—the waiting and the dread—which means there needs to be a lot of breathing room. In that way, it’s a very queer story: at least when I was growing up, so much of the experience of being a young queer person was learning to navigate this kind of communication where nothing was solid and the outcome could either be extremely dangerous or very wonderful, and you had no way of knowing which was more likely.

This story was in perfect alignment with that inclination of mine. All I knew when I began was one pivotal scene, and nothing else, not even an idea how to start the story so I’d eventually reach that point. Until I woke one night with the opening sentence in my head, scribbled it down in the dark, and hoped I’d be able to read my handwriting the next morning. (Luckily, I could!) And then I began writing as best as I was able the next, best sentence, over and over again. That’s how it is with most of my stories. But as to where this one differed—I had no idea whether anything I was doing would actually result in an eventual story.