I’m drawn toward the idea of simultaneous truths. I like stories that can be interpreted as both magic and not-magic. We interpret our world through an ambiguous mess of the things we can see and the things we can’t see. The things that we can’t see are the hardest to prove, but often the most important. I wanted the ending to reflect the ambiguity of our reality, in which the mundane and the wondrous coexist.

the influences on this piece come more from poetry and theater than from fiction. A poem can be a gut-punch precisely because its focus is so sharp and limited, while its language is wide-ranging and allusive. But formally, the story is not a poem; it’s a dramatic monologue, a kind of soliloquy. Both of these are very old forms of literature indeed—and yet, they are perfectly suited to the relatively new experience of reading online.

I still see so much epic fantasy centered around soldiers and royalty, chosen ones and dark lords, assassins and magicians. And that’s not to say any of those are bad, far from it! But I’ve always wondered, where were the stories of the epic fantasy interns? The postal workers? The low-level bureaucrat, the civic engineer, the dude working at the bodega? Where do these people and their lives and their lines of work, their passions, fit into a strange, magical secondary world?

Storybook romances like those seen in Hollywood are popular for a reason: They offer a sense of certainty and security that doesn’t exist in the real world. Lovers in these stories are “destined” to be together, are “perfect” for each other, feel “completed” by their “true love.” These phrases all carry with them a sense of finality, of having reached the conclusion of the story: You have found your love, and now you’ll never have to worry again.

 With this story, I actually knew the title before anything else. I was watching some nature documentary about elephants, and the phrase “elephants’ crematorium” sprang into my head. While I knew that elephants’ graveyards aren’t actually real, that idea stuck with me and began percolating. The rest of the story came as I developed just why this group of elephants would be self-immolating, and then the parallel human aspects came from that.