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.

This is set in the same world as my short story “Amaryllis” (also published on Lightspeed) and my Philip K Dick Award-winning novel Bannerless. In fact, it features the same main character as Bannerless. I love writing about Enid, and this setting still has lots of corners I haven’t explored. Short fiction is a good way to do that. One of the questions I always wanted to tackle: what are other parts of the country like? What other technology might have survived elsewhere? What happens when those cultures meet?

I had been thinking a lot about constructed narratives, reality television and the blurred line between authenticity and falsehood. I had also been thinking a lot about the concept of a story that is out to get you. I had been thinking about the grand tradition of “murdergame” stories (Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, Squid Game, etc.). And I thought that a subversion of a murdergame story, where death is an escape and life is being trapped, had a lot of weirdness potential. And that’s the bedrock the rest of the story was built from.

Everything important in the story is in the spaces between words and actions—the waiting and the dread—which means there needs to be a lot of breathing room. In that way, it’s a very queer story: at least when I was growing up, so much of the experience of being a young queer person was learning to navigate this kind of communication where nothing was solid and the outcome could either be extremely dangerous or very wonderful, and you had no way of knowing which was more likely.