Midland, Texas was the closest big town to where I grew up, and it had a mall, and in that mall there was the Gold Mine—this videogame arcade. Every once in a while, while our moms were shopping, a friend and me would get ditched there with a couple dollars for quarters, which we’d always blow through in about ten seconds. Or, we’d lose them even faster when we put them up for the next game.

I started playing around with the ideas that people believe they know everything about their partners and that they wouldn’t change a thing about them. If such an idealist were confronted with multiple variations of their partner, with one of them being the original, would they be able to find the exact one? Would they be tempted to pick one with more desirable traits than the original?

I had been thinking about mermaid stories for a while, because mermaids are having a real cultural moment right now and I wanted to write something about them. I hit on the idea of doing a “reverse selkie” story: about a human woman who removes her skin to become a fish. But I didn’t have a plot for it. Then I had a dream about salmon, and when I woke up I realized that, for a salmon, a human marriage would be a magical fairy story.

I’ve been reading corporate memos my entire adult life (I think most of us have) but it wasn’t until Covid that those memos started to come off as slightly dark, if only for the things that it was assumed we already knew. Like, if you took a random corporate memo from during the pandemic back in time and showed it to someone from, say, 2010, they’d have a lot of questions. (Also, and this is definitely related, more often than not I find corporate memos inadvertently hilarious.)