SmokeLong Quarterly

How did this story first come to you? Was it an image, a character, an emotion?

Definitely an emotion. To look at a friend’s life and wonder how they can want something that not only feels out of reach but difficult to imagine wanting for yourself is really interesting.

I wanted that understanding to still evade the narrator by the end. I didn’t want there to be a moment of “Wow, this baby is so cute and, wait, I do want this—!” I’m sure people experience that and I’m happy for them! But for my narrator, I wanted there to be an acceptance of that inability to understand. And despite that, the narrator can still give their friends the rest they need.

The narrator and friend are in different places in their lives, yet there is a tenderness and affection there—and also a dissonance (the narrator is trying to understand wanting this conventional life). Did you think about their history together when writing this story? Have you written about them elsewhere?

I haven’t written about them elsewhere. I like the idea of them being contained in this blip of time. But I’ve known that my narrator is a queer nonbinary person and their friends are a straight couple. As a queer person, I understand the ease that comes with being in a LGBTQIA+ space and the disconnect when outside of those spaces. While the piece is not about queerness, it was helpful to know that the character’s background added another layer to their disconnected feeling.

There is an interesting juxtaposition between the first and last lines. I’d love to know more about the decisions you made with the opening and the end and whether these were always the lines, or did they change as you worked on the story?

The first and last lines have always been the same. After writing the last one, I knew there was nowhere else to go.

I liked having a specific opening line and a broad closer. In big moments—A friend giving birth! Amazing!—the self falls away. We lose details of the narrator in the final paragraph because they’re in awe of holding a little being who’s going to become someone. They also realize that there are many ways to be born—the narrator’s friends have been born as parents while they’ve been born in queer spaces.