Despite being from a big family, I realized I hadn’t written many sibling stories, and I wanted to change that. I loved getting to explore the sisters’ relationship and follow how it changed and grew over the course of this story. The plot grew out of my suspicion of colonization stories, and of the assumption—still prevalent in more science fiction than I’d like—that there’s a non-problematic way to colonize. And, while I admire the ethos of “leave no trace,” I also wanted to explore its limitations.

This story had its roots in something I saw years ago, an article on the strangest things people had ever turned into New York Subway lost and founds. (Caveat: this story originated so long ago, that I may not even be remembering the details of its origin story correctly. Do you think I can turn a lost inspiration into a lost and found?) Anyway, I remember there being a lost and found snake.

I’m mixed Black/white, and grew up with many European fairy tales. I also have a lot of thoughts of my ancestors who were stolen from their homes and enslaved, and their cultures stripped from them, and that cultural knowledge lost for future generations—effects that I grapple with myself. So I identify very much with my witch, Agnes, when she says, “But this food, I made it mine, like House is mine . . . They don’t get to take it, too.” I’m making the European fairy tales and other trappings of colonialism that I’ve inherited one way or another, mine.

The other theme of antisemitic blood libel comes into the story because it is hard to write anything with an even vaguely Eastern European setting involving ostensible human sacrifice while trying to ignore how historically, Jews were often accused of human sacrifice in the region and persecuted accordingly. I was curious if there were any specific links between construction sacrifice types of murder ballads and other folk traditions, and antisemitic blood libel—and I indeed found some folkloristics research about this that’s linked at the end of the story.

At one point the story asks, what if we understand being changed and making change as inextricably entwined? That’s something I’m thinking about a lot and I’d love readers to think about, too. How might we rethink our ideas of change so that we move smoothly from learning to acting without stalling in between? I think about this particularly in conjunction with social media and twenty-four-hour news, which can be useful resources for learning about instances of oppression and injustice, tragedy and disaster.