I wrote this story for a contest. The prompts were “veteran” and “art museum.” I’ve written several stories set on Kata Space Station (including “Gateway Night,” which appeared in the DAW anthology Love & Rockets in 2010), and I thought that would be an interesting place for a museum, since it’s where four different kinds of people interact with each other.

This story is a total wish fulfillment fantasy for me. I grew up in deep South Texas, very close to Mexico, and when the Trump administration started closing down the border, I kept seeing places I knew in the news, little towns no one ever cared about before. For example, one news report showed young men corralled for deportation in the McAllen International Airport, a place I’ve flown in and out of multiple times.

I keep carnivorous plants, including a Nepenthes I’ve had for many years. I used to post photos of my Nepenthes online, but a subset of men would compare the pitchers to genitalia. Which configuration of genitalia changed each time, but there were always comments, and I began to resent sharing my plant at all.

I had a lot of scraps of ideas that hadn’t coalesced into a story yet, and after a long enough period of agitating in my head, they all clumped together. For example, I had this idea of a tidal-locked water world whose only surface liquid water was on the side locked to its star. I liked the idea but couldn’t really get a plot to adhere to it.

There’s an established trope that magic can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, and I thought, what if I really push that? What if someone without the proper training is a live wire, shocking everything and everyone around them? In that case, you don’t want these kids to know magic until they are emotionally ready to control it.

Space is such a fertile ground for interesting world-building, and I thought this idea of characters living in asteroids to be a fascinating and also somewhat plausible world-building tool. I didn’t think so much of where to place them, so much as I knew where they would be based on the kind of people they are. I always think character first, and everything is in service to that.

I wrote the bulk of the first draft while I was on a cruise ship and experiencing the deep ennui that comes from being on a cruise ship. So that’s intrinsically buried deep in the DNA of this narrative in many mysterious and arcane ways. The second piece of inspiration is that a couple of years ago, on social media, I had seen an image of a mermaid in a bathtub with a bunch of tally marks written on the wall, and that painting really struck me. It’s always fun to take things seriously, and I started thinking about the sequence of events that might lead a person to keep a mermaid in a bathtub against its will, and the logistical challenges of essentially having both some guy in your house, and also a big goldfish.

I wrote “The Girlfriend Experience” while attending Clarion West last year. I masochistically put my hand up for Monday critiques, so it was one of the stories in our very first day of workshops. In retrospect, it might’ve been a subconscious litmus test to find out which of my classmates were prudes. (As it turns out, none of them; Clarion West Class of 2024 is wall-to-wall perverts, and I could not be happier.)

When I sat down to write “Apeiron” I had a decent sense of what I wanted it to be. A lot of the thinking about the story happened off the page, over years. I knew I wanted it to feel like a fable, but with more modern elements. I knew I wanted to expand on creation myths and delve into the psychology of gods. I knew I wanted it to be dreamy. What form all of that would take was the part I was least sure about. I figured I would work that out as I went.

We’re supposed to take care of one another, empower and uplift one another, hold one another accountable, show interest in one another’s histories, present experiences and dreams for the future, keep the home we share safe and clean for all of us who live here now and will live here in the future.