Most of my protagonists are very young, but Oliver’s story strayed into territory that interested me as an adult. Eleven-year-old me would have found the conflict between water and road incredibly frustrating. What can a childhood sense of absolute right and wrong do in the face of an ancient, intractable grudge?

My mom always asks me why I don’t write more nice stories. I don’t think of what I write as particularly dark, but I have always been drawn to black humor, bleak settings, flawed characters, and violent climaxes. Those elements often appear in my work. They keep things entertaining.

Many of my stories (including this one) usually start with me remarking to someone “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if . . . ” Only I don’t know how to write humor, so the hilarious idea (in this case it was “wouldn’t it be funny if instead of helping him save the world, the dragon ate the farm boy?”) usually gets paired with something decidedly unfunny.

“For Solo Cello” demonstrates a great insight into what internalized ableism can do in a person’s life. What was it like digging into these themes? There are so many different ways in which society can put blinders on a person. We often don’t realize that we are participating in our own oppression. You see this […]

I adore fairy tales, and with “Natural Skin,” I actually started with the core of “Snow White”: a young, beautiful girl with black hair and red lips, and an older woman full of murderous jealousy. For this story, I decided that I wanted to write about the complicated relationship between sisters as they go through puberty, watching their bodies change into something foreign.

For Paul and his mother, I wanted to write about people with no options. They recognize that the other needs serious help, but for both this help is beyond their means and so they can only watch as the other fails. And this helplessness has led to frustration and a breakdown in communication between the two; they no longer talk, and Paul prefers to dwell on what he remembers of her before his death.

I was living back in Tel Aviv for a little while and was captivated by the area of the giant bus station, which is were a lot of African refugees, and Asian economic migrants, had settled, and I wanted to kind of explore that, and in turn explore contemporary Israel, and Golden Age science fiction . . . a whole bunch of stuff.

Looking back through humanity’s history, we find time and time again that civilizations destroy themselves, either by starting wars with other civilizations, or by starting wars against their own people. It happens fairly regularly once a civilization gets big enough, and to me it’s this interesting paradox of “We have to work together to establish a niche for ourselves in the world, but if we get too big it falls apart.”

Short stories don’t give the writer a lot of time to work a wedge into the reader’s brain so you can split it open and fiddle around inside. A solid visceral image is a very fast, effective way to do that. Reading is often portrayed as an intellectual activity, but it can also be very bodily. Nothing reminds people of that, or grounds them in their bodies and short-wires the defenses that separate mind from body, quite like a little body horror.

The seed of this story actually came from watching my young son navigate kindergarten. Anand was having a really difficult time for much of the year; his instinctive response to frustration was often to lash out, and while he rarely actually hurt anyone (he’s quite small), that kind of behavior is obviously challenging in a public classroom setting.