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.