I’ve had this short little piece of fiction on my back burner for a while. At the time that I started it, I’d been going through a Kate Griffin phase. Her urban fantasy (e.g. Matthew Swift series, Magical Anonymous, etc.) engages with a unique perspective of the modern world – where magic and Other Things can be found not in nature, but in the metallic, electric world we now live in. How are perfectly ordinary objects and people sometimes made greater or strange by a shift in perspective? I was inspired by the ways in which she – and Stephen King to an extent – juxtaposes eerie atmospheres against wry narrative voices to create this novel effect. Griffin also plays on the “we” versus “I” division (as in, there is often very little separating the individual from the community) and I tried to capture that in my language.