This story began with a writing prompt from Alexandra Manglis, who is the Undisputed Prompt Champion of the World. It was an image of a giant redwood washed up on a beach. From there, I pulled in other elements I’m obsessed with—queer relationships, non-hierarchical social structures, environmental collapse—and worked at weaving together those threads.

ike all the other Legends of the Burnt Empire published exclusively here on Lightspeed, “A History of Snakes” is drawn from the original Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata. I adapted it and revised it slightly to fit into the world of the Burnt Empire but it’s essentially the same core story from one of the many nesting tales-within-tales serpentine structure of the original.

On this one very hard day, I offered to go into a trailer after someone had died by suicide—to retrieve necessities and to get the dog. This of course is not that story. But I wouldn’t have written this story if that wasn’t something that happened. In writing these sentences, I feel stiff and disconnected. But in writing this story, I did not.

It’s fascinating to examine the history and cultural relevance of soap, the way we’ve fable-ized its discovery with this violent, erroneous story (the first soaps weren’t discovered after burning bodies in rivers; they were instead made from heating oil and wood ash), the meanings we’ve assigned to it over the centuries. It feels especially poignant now, when so many are meditating daily on contamination and cleanliness.

My partner wanted me to write a story about the moral panic incited by Pokémon (more on that in a minute). I wanted to write a story that drew on my obsessive thoughts about material waste. He and I often discuss the vast amounts of stuff in the world and have wondered more than once about its fate—about for instance, the millions of Funko Pop toys that must be out there, whose destiny will be to flood the landfills. Or they will form an entire stratum upon the surface of the earth, to be studied by future visitors.