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.

How did “Bhatia, PI” originate? What inspirations did you draw on? As a series of conversations, but basically as a joke, and I mean that seriously. The basic premise—of a fraudulent paranormal investigator running a shoestring-budget out-of-parents’-home operation sort of birthed itself as a minor character I created for a sketch webseries that never came […]

I wrote this story as a present for a dear friend. It is about their stuffed fox, who is a proper and upright gentleman and would never stoop to any sort of trickery.

The inspiration for “NeuNet” is actually alluded to directly in the story. I watched a YouTube video (now lost) that suggested that using humans as batteries as in the movie The Matrix would be inefficient; using them as computers would be a far more useful proposition. That idea wriggled around in my brain for a while, until finally bursting out of its chrysalis when I saw the call for submissions.