At its heart, this is a genie story. This is the story of the guy who asks a magical figure for a wish and does not get precisely what he asks for. The great power he asked could have been a wizard or a demon, with little rewriting necessary. The story actually began with the anecdote told in its middle about the time traveler commissioning Shakespeare for a love sonnet, and could have been just that, but I wrapped another story around it.

“Witch” can mean so many different things. For me, in this story, it embodies a woman who has defied the patriarchal order, and escaped the social and religious strictures that she was born into, to become a person of power and knowledge. She sees the hypocrisy of her family, and the cruelty of the religious right, and disowns them. There is always a price to pay for such things. Not everyone can be saved. And sometimes, the only way to save yourself is letting go of everything else.

I remember first seeing the trailer for Detective Pikachu and feeling like it was a sign that we’d reached a new stage of what my friend Jay Springett calls “cultural fracking”—the capitalist process of endlessly extracting new value out of the sedimentary layers of meaning that comprise mass culture from the past. I wanted to jump ahead a few stages, to a future where this process had been mostly automated and was now just mashing together genres and franchises more or less at random.

The title came to me first and I envisioned a woman inserting her toes into the bottle openings and dancing on them like a ballerina on toe shoes. That got a little complicated, so I changed it to her rolling on the bottles. The roaches came into the story because she was practicing in the yard and they would naturally be out at night. I had to do research on roaches, look at pictures of them, because I wanted the readers to like Treevia and Oswald so I had to like them too.

The story came about because I was reading about the Trolley Problem, a philosophical thought experiment—basically, the Trolley Problem asks you whether you would pull a lever to save five people from a runaway trolley . . . if it meant guiding said trolley toward one person instead. So: would you, could you, be responsible for one person’s death if it meant saving five more? It’s since sparked a lot of debate as to its usefulness, but for the story, I wanted to explore the personalities this thought experiment brings out in people.