John Hunter was a medical revolutionary during perhaps the most wretchedly disgusting period in all of Western medical history: England in the 1700-1800s. At a time when most physicians treated the symptoms of a disease without trying to comprehend the cause, Hunter was a dogged experimentalist who was absolutely intent on understanding the inner workings of the human body. And in order to study the human body, Hunter needed—human bodies.

I actually find setting pretty difficult, even though it’s one of my favorite aspects of a story when done well. Usually I think of myself as a more character-oriented writer. But I love writing about physicality, especially the small details like how one character eats versus another, or the sensation of leaving gravity. In this piece, I was making a conscious effort to pay attention to specificity, because this character has very little past or future. She’s entirely invested in the present moment.

I love that so much contemporary SF is bringing #ownvoices narratives to the surface. My attempt is to do that while directly confronting current events, politics, social justice, in provocative narratives that interrogate the foundations of SF, dismantle and demolish them, then recycle the debris to build a new house where a new kind of SF can live, thrive, and grow. It’s a work in progress.

Merc already had a very specific idea of where the story should go, and most of a draft, when they recruited me. They had wanted to write the story on their own, but they needed the climax to revolve around poetry, and they didn’t feel their poetic chops were up to the task. So they asked me for help, as someone who they knew well and who understood the Principality Suns ’verse, and who had a few more poetry publication credits under their belt.

 I believe that the more science finds answers, the more there will be a craving for myth and magic. Why? Because myth and magic speak to that indefinable something in the human soul that needs to believe rules can be broken. Tatter is definitely a trickster figure. That said, I think of her as on the benign side of the line. She’s more a Spider or Coyote than a Mephistopheles. She lacks the selfishness of Hare. Tatter wants to understand what it is to be human.

 I’m drawn toward the idea of simultaneous truths. I like stories that can be interpreted as both magic and not-magic. We interpret our world through an ambiguous mess of the things we can see and the things we can’t see. The things that we can’t see are the hardest to prove, but often the most important. I wanted the ending to reflect the ambiguity of our reality, in which the mundane and the wondrous coexist.

the influences on this piece come more from poetry and theater than from fiction. A poem can be a gut-punch precisely because its focus is so sharp and limited, while its language is wide-ranging and allusive. But formally, the story is not a poem; it’s a dramatic monologue, a kind of soliloquy. Both of these are very old forms of literature indeed—and yet, they are perfectly suited to the relatively new experience of reading online.

I still see so much epic fantasy centered around soldiers and royalty, chosen ones and dark lords, assassins and magicians. And that’s not to say any of those are bad, far from it! But I’ve always wondered, where were the stories of the epic fantasy interns? The postal workers? The low-level bureaucrat, the civic engineer, the dude working at the bodega? Where do these people and their lives and their lines of work, their passions, fit into a strange, magical secondary world?

Storybook romances like those seen in Hollywood are popular for a reason: They offer a sense of certainty and security that doesn’t exist in the real world. Lovers in these stories are “destined” to be together, are “perfect” for each other, feel “completed” by their “true love.” These phrases all carry with them a sense of finality, of having reached the conclusion of the story: You have found your love, and now you’ll never have to worry again.

 With this story, I actually knew the title before anything else. I was watching some nature documentary about elephants, and the phrase “elephants’ crematorium” sprang into my head. While I knew that elephants’ graveyards aren’t actually real, that idea stuck with me and began percolating. The rest of the story came as I developed just why this group of elephants would be self-immolating, and then the parallel human aspects came from that.