To be honest, I can’t remember how it started, but at some point I came across The Jazz of Physics author Stephon Alexander. Listening to him play and analyze John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” gave me a map for this story. From there, I could record the odyssey of Dr. Charlene Jenkins and explore what it means to take risks and break free (or not) from the structures we’re born into.

About a year ago I was having lunch with a friend and journalist who mentioned that trucking was one of the largest employers of non-college-educated white men in America. A little while later, he made a completely unrelated comment about the best cures for terrorism being employment and purpose, while its most effective instigators are idleness and injustice. About half of “The Gamecocks” came together walking away from that lunch. The other half was borrowed and embellished from stories I heard from an uncle of mine in North Carolina.

I think there’s something within Western culture that trains us toward a kind of cynicism from an early age. Perhaps it’s the way we’re advertised to from the cradle with a survival-of-the-fittest ethos (Leggo my Eggo, Who ate all the Cracklin’ Oat Bran, Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids). Or the dog-eat-dog capitalism we witness adults subjected to. Or the Kafkaesque bureaucracy we sense beneath standardized testing. Or the massively depressing “classics” we’re given to read in public school.

I wanted to write a story driven by that anger, that sense that the people who have come before us have ruined everything, that reveals what we’ve lost. But I also wanted to see a generation that tried to fix some things. People resist so many arguments to fix things because of the short term. We’d rather poison ourselves, kill what sustains us, if short term it gets us something good. Population growth boosts economies even while it pushes communities to pave over green spaces, pushes agriculture to keep up with increasing demands.

I’ve been reading a lot about corvid intelligence and doing thinking about how they would develop as thinkers. When I am doing something like this, I end up trying to create the art of the creatures I am hoping to understand. What does a dog riddle look like? What is squid poetry? What myths do crows tell one another? Some of these are accessible, but most are opaque to anyone but me, so I never show them to people.

My wife and I are occasional recreational gamblers, who visit casinos when time and finances permit. We are aware of the drawbacks, among them that the odds are overwhelmingly that you will go home having lost what you came to play with, and that the games have a compulsive aspect that can lead you to keep playing anyway. The premise of a casino where the stakes are life memories led me to the realization that, even if you win, you will go home with a set of life experiences that don’t involve you.

I think everyone has that secret story of an unspoken person who is supposed to be here but for some reason is not. I started thinking about the what ifs: What if that person was here? And if that person was here, would she understand me more than those who are here? Would she have not fit, like me? But as I wrote the story, thinking it was going in that direction, I realized that sometimes the missing are the ones we can mold the most to fit ourselves.

The story is part of a longer series of fantastical travelogues which began during traveling in Europe, and they’re based on both my own literal and emotional journeys. I was interested in exploring new ways to tell short stories, particularly fantastical tales, and I found that the “travel guide” form provided a great metaphor for the kinds of inner travels we take throughout our lives. And so these travel stories, for all their fantasy, are actually a kind of autobiography!

Around the time of 9/11, I was working my first full-time job in an information services company similar (physically, not metaphysically!) to the one I’ve depicted in the story. The political turmoil of that time was a rude awakening at a formative age; it really got me thinking about diversion points and the ways the world could (and should) be different. So the speculative conceit and the weird ambience of the story were born back then, but it took years of stewing.

I have a logical mind, almost robotically so. I like data. I like statistics. Here are some numbers courtesy of the FBI: In the United States, approximately eight out of ten violent crimes are committed by men. Eight out of ten burglaries. Eight out of ten robberies. Eight out of ten arsons. Eight out of ten physical assaults. Nine out of ten murders. Ninety-seven out of one hundred rapes. Ninety-seven out of one hundred —and those, of course, are only the rapes that are reported.