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.

This story was in perfect alignment with that inclination of mine. All I knew when I began was one pivotal scene, and nothing else, not even an idea how to start the story so I’d eventually reach that point. Until I woke one night with the opening sentence in my head, scribbled it down in the dark, and hoped I’d be able to read my handwriting the next morning. (Luckily, I could!) And then I began writing as best as I was able the next, best sentence, over and over again. That’s how it is with most of my stories. But as to where this one differed—I had no idea whether anything I was doing would actually result in an eventual story.