There’s a common slang we have in Nigeria called “japa.” This simply means migration from your country to another country for better opportunities and greener pastures. I was having a conversation with a friend who was talking about the hardship being faced by the ever-growing Nigerian population, hence, the reason for the mass migration. A spark of an idea was birthed during the conversation. What if this supposed greener pasture is not what we think it is? Perhaps, we are too engrossed with the news we hear about such places.

I like to think I’m a nice dad. And, possibly as a result, I write a lot of science fiction with nice dad protagonists. For this story, I wanted to challenge myself to go in the opposite direction and write the villainous origin story of a not-very-nice dad. So, I basically fought my best instincts as a parent, and explored a much more selfish point of view. Like most of my short stories, this is just a jumping off point. I’d love to write more about what happens in this cave with these people.

This really happened to me! But without the monsters. When I was ten my father got in a bad motorcycle accident, and my mom had to rush up to Albany Medical and left us in the care of family friends who were significantly wealthier than us. It was terrifying (and fascinating), and the scars on my psyche festered into this story after about thirty-plus years.

Widener is a real library, and a really weird one in many ways, although renovations since my undergraduate days have tidied up things like the passageway that literally went out a window. I’m a folklorist by training and inclination, so it wasn’t hard to take the structural oddities and graft on some additional weirdness.

You might be able to tell that Granny Weatherwax from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is a big inspiration for this story. They were probably my introduction to the “grumpy but helpful witch” archetype and I really wanted to work with that type of character. The idea of “twisting your wishes” is also an old one; I wanted to give my own spin to it. So this is sort of a story in which I play with older forms. But I obviously wanted to make it a bit more gay.