I gave my character Sandy a bicycle because riding a bicycle connects you to the landscape you are traversing in a way that driving a car does not. You feel each hill; you rejoice in each valley. You have the time to appreciate the land. When you’re on a bike, you can’t rush the journey.

You have to laugh to keep from crying—policing injustice, ghosts, family estrangement, adultification, systemic racism—none of that is funny. But hard things are made more bearable by sprouting a little seed of joy in your heart and watering it with laughter at the absurdity of every unfair thing.

Something I have been thinking much about is human evolution and the way technology has essentially become what defines it, but with it comes climate change, comes war and disasters, comes progress—yet even with that progress, it seems we are always taking two steps forward and two steps back.

The crimes that the world heaps upon women, the cycle of violence and beatification—there’s nothing gorgeous or rich or poetic about that. And at first, I thought that was something the title needed to convey. The evil we’re fighting is banal as fuck and let’s not forget it.

I wrote the first draft of “Babywings” after rereading Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” The older I get, the more magical realism hooks its claws deep into me. Coming at the story through this genre, at a sideways angle, has allowed me to grapple with themes that are, for me, more emotionally challenging.

To me, caste, race, class, privilege, identity, are all forms of societal structure designed to divide people into “us” and “not us.” Education, culture, and language have become part of these structures now, along with the weaponization of language.

There’s the old saw about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic; I think we were playing with the notion that magic in the hands of human beings would eventually be indistinguishable from technology—including the lifecycle that takes it from genuine awe-inspiring discovery, to commercial adaptation, to profit-maximizing iteration, to a climate-destroying tool for focusing wealth.

During the writing process, I discovered this was a story about control. Before Roger Abbott was convicted, he was a jaded man. Pessimistic and hopeless. A disgraced journalist who lost his family and found himself in a pit of disillusionment. But he wanted to share his story. His whole truth.

Embalming is clearly a set of tools that achieves remarkable results in the preservation of bodies, but of course its intention is a communication—either to ourselves or to the gods—of our feelings about death and eternity. C. S. Lewis said (I’m paraphrasing here) that we are animals, and therefore live in time, but that we are also partially divine, and therefore contain an awareness of eternity.

One thing I find interesting is the cyclical nature of humanity, of repeating pasts and histories, of being unable to move forward somehow even as time passes, at the way we always seem to be causing our own destruction even when what we truly desire is peace. Injustice is something that has persisted throughout human history, and it is something that seem as though it will always be prevalent.