I have always found the dynamics in nail salons and spas to be as fascinating as they are uncomfortable: There is this strange intimacy, this literal erasure of distance, that contrasts so sharply with the transactional nature of the service being performed, and with the socioeconomic gap that often exists between customer and worker. When I first heard about fish pedicures, I thought they were weird and funny but essentially harmless. Then I read an article about how the Garra rufa fish don’t naturally eat dead skin; they are induced to do so through starvation.

I’ve found I’m writing about a certain kind of nostalgia—a sense of loss/longing for a present moment which has eluded our grasp. Much of this, I imagine, comes from parenthood. My son is headed off to college next year and there’s a great awareness of just how quickly time passes and how easily we can fall into the illusion of having “more time.” I’m thinking here of the moments when our children ask us to play but we’re too busy (often for legitimate reasons!) and yet, soon they’ve grown and are no longer asking us to chase them around the house.

The seed of the idea came, appropriately enough, when we were contemplating the process of collaboration. It occurred to us that, when writing a tale together, we were in effect inhabiting one mind . . . We can’t recall who exactly it was who had the original idea inspired by that insight, but we batted it around as we do, then got stuck in. Eric began the tale, did a couple of thousand words, then passed it on to Keith to finish. There was little plotting done between us—we simply let our respective subconscious minds take the idea where it would go.

The original inspiration for the island came from a Smithsonian Magazine article about North Brother Island, which is located between Manhattan and the Bronx. It was once the location of Riverside Hospital, designed to contain smallpox and other infectious diseases in the late nineteenth century. The island got repurposed a few times over the years, becoming housing for war veterans and later a rehab center for heroin addicts. Then, it was abandoned in 1963 and has since become a place reclaimed by nature.

I’ve been really into establishing “space habitat folklore,” and gremlins are a big part of that. My gremlins are inspired by the originals—the ones that would go around causing malfunctions in airplanes, and in an off-Earth habitat where your survival is dependent on all your machines working well, gremlins would be a natural way to explain random malfunctions. The gremlin trap is a bit of worldbuilding that I’ve had in my back pocket for a while. The idea here is that Martian kids build these traps as a way to learn basic mechanical principles.

This story started with the title. It was just a phrase that popped into my head one day and became a brain worm of sorts. I had no story, no character, and no setting for it, but those two words felt like they had a lot of potential. It was also around this time that my mom was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and her condition made apparent to me the connection between our memories and how they coalesce to create who we are. Anything affecting these memories fundamentally alters the self, however the “self” might be conceived.

My ideal reader, for short stories at least, has always been someone who is willing to take a journey blind without advance promises of specific story elements, to wit: “This story is about a heroic quest and there is at least one elf in it.” My ideal reader is someone who won’t complain afterward that they only like stories if the main character is “likeable,” if it takes place in a world where they would like to live. And I fortunately meet this kind of reader all the time. I think I’m talking to one now.

The entire story also started with another image (years back—I’m a slow writer!): the opening image of the trees that were constantly dropping their leaves in the perpetual autumn of this planet, creating huge piles of dead leaves that never disappear. It’s an image that I find both beautiful and chilling, and that is the tone I hoped to set for the story.