Lindsay Starck’s story “Your Baby Is the Size Of . . .” appears in the Spring 2024 issue of The Southern Review. Here Starck expands on her use of the collective voice and her thoughtful construction of this alternate reality centered on microplastics.

Emilie Rodriguez, Editorial Assistant: You open the story with a quote from The Guardian. How did it inspire you to write this story, or did something else inspire you?

Lindsay Starck: That Guardian article wasn’t my first encounter with microplastics—I do some volunteer writing and editing for the Minnesota Chapter of the Sierra Club, and for years we’ve been concerned about the presence of microplastics in our ten thousand lakes—but it was the first time I’d heard of microplastics in human placenta. The idea that our bodies are subject to plastics before we’re even born…? That felt terrifying enough to warrant a story.

ER: One of my favorite things about this piece is the way you’ve organized it through these segments that finish the title of the story: “Your Baby is the Size of… an inflatable neck pillow.” How did you come up with this idea?

LS: I wanted something that would feel both playful and sinister. There are apps for tracking the growth of one’s fetus through comparisons to fruits and vegetables, and I’ve seen many of these images on social media—so it seemed like the perfect fit for telling a story about a plastic baby in utero. I actually decided upon the form of the story before I knew anything else about it. This form has the added advantage of contributing to plot and suspense by building toward a conclusion that is both known and unknown… A baby will emerge, but what will it be like?

ER: Why make the choice to focus the story on the nurses in the labor delivery unit rather than the mother?

LS: For whatever reason, I love pieces written in the third-person plural. I knew that I wanted to begin with a collective voice, and then winnow characters down until only one voice remained. Not everyone can handle the idea of the plastic baby; in the end, the narrator will find herself (almost) alone. So, I needed a group, and the nurses seemed like the most logical collective.

ER: The narrator had parents that were conservationists, people who were trying to save the world in order to save their child. While on the sidelines in the story, her parents inform the already potent nature versus human intervention conversation that the piece has woven throughout. How did parenthood provide an access point for you to engage with the climate fiction aspect of this story?

LS: Many of us are deeply concerned about climate change and fearful about what the future will look like. But that concern and that fear are strongest when they’re connected to our own families and communities. It’s one thing to know that within a few decades, polar bears might not exist; it’s another to realize that one’s child may live in a world without polar bears. Similarly, it’s one thing to know that within a few decades, there may not be enough freshwater to go around; it’s another to realize that one’s child could be among those who are thirsty. For us to take collective action, we need to find ways to make climate change personal.

ER: The world of this story, while dystopian, seems incredibly realistic. Low birth rates and microplastics are already making headlines today. What genres do you believe this story fits into a discussion with?

LS: I’d say it’s a literary fiction / speculative fiction hybrid. And like many writers and readers of speculative fiction, I believe that this genre has the power to move us to action. Sci-fi and fantasy allow us to imagine different kinds of realities, and give us space to come up with creative solutions that we can then apply to real-world problems.

ER: The narrator is an older woman, close to retirement. She stays in the unit, while all her coworkers fall away as they’re horrified by the incoming plastic baby. What unique perspective do you think she brings to the story?

LS: In the first half of the story, she’s weary, resigned, and deliberately closed off. All she wants is to survive this job and go off the grid. But then the mother-to-be comes along with her plastic baby, and everything changes. When we talk about climate change, we’re often focused on the work of young people, and what the world will look like for the next generation; but there are so many older Americans (see the work of Third Act, for instance) who are also thinking about these issues and working toward solutions. Any story about the end of the world—or the beginning of a new one—needs to be multi-generational.

ER: The piece revolves on conversations: the nurses talking to each other about the baby and about the world crumbling around them, the mother-in-law who wants the nurses to convince her daughter to terminate the pregnancy. Why choose their discussions to be the main method of storytelling?

LS: Well, there’s the formal constraint of the collective voice in the first half of the story. Because we’re not in a single character’s mind, we can’t get much description of the thoughts or inner monologue of any one person, so description and dialogue become the more logical modes of storytelling here. We hear a little more thought and a little less dialogue when we shift to the single narrator. As I write this, I’m also thinking about Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, of when he describes the end of the world (“when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening”) and fills the void with “one more sound: that of [man’s] puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.” So, maybe that’s another reason why I thought that a story like this one should be filled with conversation.

ER: You have constructed a very well thought out and terrifying new reality. What are some of the challenges that come with this type of world-building?

LS: One of the challenges for me was figuring out the significance of the plastic baby in this story. Was he the first one, or was the world already full of plastic babies? Were people shocked by this development, or had it already become the new normal? I tried to sketch in just enough detail for readers to get a sense of his importance without including so much detail about the world that the focus shifted away from these particular characters in this particular situation. It’s always hard to figure out what a reader needs to know about the world in order for the story to land; often this means writing a lot of exposition and then paring it away later.

ER: At the end of the story, the mother rejects the baby after she’s delivered him, an ending that you built so well. Were there alternate endings you explored?

LS: Usually my answer to this question is yes! I often write three or four endings to a story before I hit upon the one that fits. But I took my time with this piece, and with this narrator, and by the time I reached the delivery scene (because of course, with the structure, it had to end with a delivery scene), I knew exactly how I wanted the moment to shift from the mother on the bed to the mother standing beside her.

ER: I see you recently released a new novel, titled Monsters We Have Made, which is incredibly exciting. What projects are you working on next?

LS: Thank you for asking! It took me seven years to write Monsters We Have Made, so I’m very happy it’s finally out in the world. Do you mind if share my elevator pitch?

Suspenseful and thoughtful, Monsters We Have Made explores the aftermath of a terrible, mysterious crime, examines the way that dreams and fictions shape our lives, and affirms the enduring power of even the most complicated familial bonds. Come for the monsters, stay for the love story!

 Now I’m resting and working on a few new short stories that also experiment with form and genre. But “Your Baby Is the Size Of…” remains one of my favorites, so thank you for including it in the Southern Review and for taking the time to talk with me about it!

Lindsay Starck is based in Minneapolis, where she swims in the lakes and skis in the streets. Her short stories have appeared in the Southern Review, the New England Review, Ploughshares, and the Cincinnati Review, among other places. Her second novel, Monsters We Have Made, was published by Vintage Books in March.

Emilie Rodriguez is a Latinx writer from San Diego and holds an MFA from Louisiana State University. She is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and the former editor-in-chief of the New Delta Review. Her work has been supported by the Sundress Academy of the Arts Residency. Rodriguez won the 2023 Patty Friedman Writing Competition in the short story category. Her work is forthcoming in the Peauxdunque Review.

Suphil Lee Park’s story, Rooted Out, appears in the Spring 2024 issue of The Southern Review. Here Park explores the nature of cultural exchange and lineage within one’s own family and how she established the distinct environment and folklore in her story.

Emilie Rodriguez, Editorial Assistant: There’s a comparison in your story that I found fascinating between nature and reserves in the US versus in Korea. How did you capture the unique setting of the Korean mountains?

Suphil Lee Park: I was born and spent most of the first two decades of my life in South Korea, during which time I went on hiking quite often with my family. Admittedly, many descriptive details in this story–mineral spring water carried in plastic jugs, burial sites along the trail–are not based on hearsay or research but are derived from my firsthand experience in the country.

ER: The narrator feels disapproval from all sides: her parents in the US, her uncle and aunt, even her cousin. How do you see the spooky atmosphere of the forest merge with that theme of disapproval?

SLP: With this kind of unanimous disapproval (real or perceived) comes a sense of helpless disorientation—a feeling of being lost and not belonging anywhere or with anyone. This sense of disorientation physically manifests when the narrator arrives in South Korea and later ventures into the woods. She literally gets lost and is left in the dark. In that sense, the forest becomes the embodiment of this disorientation the narrator constantly struggles with.

Interestingly, the forest happens to be the place where the narrator finally connects with her cousin, and all because they experience this extreme feeling of being lost and unable to find their footing, together.

So the woods also happens to be the place where the narrator is forced to confront her repressed fears and insecurities. It is here that she learns to accept herself and those around her. That’s what confronting your own fears and delusions under unexpected, extreme circumstances does. You’re forced to come face-to-face with your own weaknesses and biases, instead of finding them in others and judging them for that mirror reflection. And only then can others’ approval come.

ER: There’s an agreement between the narrator and her cousin that they’ll each grow in their fluency in Korean and English, respectively. In what ways does the language exchange influence their character development in the story?

SLP: I believe understanding the perspective of someone from another culture has much to do with the linguistic elements of that culture. Not that it’s impossible to understand someone from another culture without learning their language, but that it becomes exponentially easier to do so when you have some grasp of their language. I would even go so far as to say that each of us is born into a specific language—some of us more than one—because so much of society is built on and around these linguistic frameworks.

In our most intimate—and hence most complex—relationships, we often find language to be an incredibly versatile tool; it can soothe, tempt, confuse, assail, or mend, among many other things. However, the unchangeable fact is that words are always a choice, however they are used. And being human, we can always make unwise choices–by saying the wrong thing, leaving the wrong thing out, not saying enough or saying too much–intentionally or not. That’s what makes human relationships so fragile and complicated, especially in the context of fiction where these relationships are established, damaged, or transformed by far fewer words than in real life.

With each linguistic choice these characters make in the story, they either push each other away or pull each other in. So it’s significant when the characters stop faulting each other for their linguistic and cultural blunders and imperfections and instead choose to really communicate—instead of taunting or bantering—in the other’s most natural tongue. This is when they overcome their insecurities related to the other’s language and learn to become comfortably vulnerable in the other’s presence. It’s a verbal way of shaking hands on their final, reconciliatory moment.

ER: The Korean folktale of the young man lost in the wood adds an element of terror and fantasy to the story. Why choose this specific folktale to set that tone?

SLP: I had in mind a character who, having lived mostly abroad, has always fabricated and reimagined her home country through the folktales her mother told her at bedtime as a child. When you keep reimagining a place this way, it becomes fictional, almost mythical, in your head. And what better way to explore this nature of nostalgia and our tendency to fabricate when trying to make sense of “the little known and much fantasized about” than through folklore?

With the urban elements—in our global age, pretty generic around the world—removed, the narrator enters the forest, the territories of the truly unknown, where she’s soon left to her own devices, with only her cousin to rely on. She’s tempted (the berry wine and nap), put to the test (conflicts with her cousin, then the scrambling in the dark), and needs to find the truth of her situation (the goblin light and the hooting sound), which nicely parallels the structure of this particular folktale, although her story definitely ends in a happier place.

It also made sense because the protagonist would likely think up something that further exacerbates her situation instead of improving it; her mind would rush to a terrifying story set in the woods, I thought, instead of a comforting one. That’s how the human mind often works, especially under stress.

In Korean folktales, a mountain often serves as a place for spiritual and martial training, enlightenment, and encounters with divinities or mythical creatures. It’s where their protagonists often come face to face with difficult truths, their true potential, or their innermost desires and voices. Hence, many Korean folktales are set in the woods and often start with characters getting lost in the woods, usually only to meet mysterious, suspicious people, tigers, or goblins. So you could say “Rooted Out” itself follows the convention of how a Korean folktale is told and hints at an actual folktale coming into play from the very beginning.

ER: I know that you write in various disciplines; poetry, essays, fiction, and recently you translated the book, “If You Live To 100, You Might As Well Be Happy” by Rhee Kun Hoo. How does writing across genres influence how you wrote this piece?

SLP: Writing and working across genres keeps me open-minded about formal and other experiments with whatever I happen to be working on at any moment. But more than anything, I think my other writing commitments–including translating–have made me a better editor and critic of my own work. I used to be married to specific parts or sentences of my prose pieces–probably having something to do with my poetic, sentence-level attention–but I’ve now learned how to recognize the heart of each writing piece and detach myself from the fluff and fillers (unless it’s a stylistically-driven piece that’s all about the fluff and fillers). I no longer feel as much pain and resistance when parting with what doesn’t keep that heart beating.

ER: While the story focuses mainly on the narrator and her cousin, the uncle, the narrator’s parents, the aunt, they all loom in the border of the story without being super present. Why make the decision to not include them as much?

SLP: One of the central themes in this story is misunderstanding—cultural, generational, or otherwise. As you mentioned, there are allusions to the older generations echoing throughout the story, especially in the ending where the point of view switches to the uncle. However, most events revolve around the two young women. Many young Korean people of their generation end up studying or working abroad, more than any other generation before them. They are the perfect age group around which to center a story about this relatively new phenomenon of cultural misunderstanding and conflicts among those with Korean heritage.

ER: The theme of running, running to Korea for the narrator, her cousin wants to run to America, comes into a physical manifestation as they sprint away from what they perceive to be an unknown force in the woods. How does running, metaphorical and physical, work to amplify the emotional forces at play here?

SLP: I cannot find a better way to put this into words, so I’ll have to resort to quoting from a book: “Nearly every other task outside of honest conversation, writing, philosophy, art, self-expression and the like . . . is often an attempt to run from, not towards, one’s life and one’s self . . . [I]t’s obvious after a certain point that there is no escape.” It’s from The Notes of the End of Everything by Robert Pantano and rings truer than anything I’ve read or personally written on this topic of running.

When it comes down to it, I think whatever we run from often lies within, rather than outside. Even when we run from external forces and extreme circumstances, what we actually try to put behind us is our own fears or dissatisfaction; which is to say, even under the exact same circumstances, some do not choose to run (and importantly, even when they can afford to), if they don’t experience the same internal reality that urges them to run. This also resonates with some principal teachings of Buddhism: differentiating your internal reality from the external one and recognizing your capability to change the internal reality, if not the external.

I’ve always struggled with this desire to “run” myself; from a place, a language, commitments, emotions, and even people. So I wanted to depict two young women running from and towards what they don’t fully understand, and how this aimless running leads to the inevitable collision and hurt, but also reconciliation and a long look at themselves.

Running is crucial to survival when there’s a source of danger, but I feel it’s even more important to know where we’re running towards, if our destination truly grants us security and peace, or at least, a comparatively safer space, and why we keep running towards this or that. Life can often feel like an act of constantly debating and deciding where I can run toward, where I should run toward. I continue to find myself running toward books and writings, and so here I am.

ER: There’s this emphasis of tradition and lineage through cooking that we see with the uncle. Why add this element of cooking to the piece?

SLP: I believe cooking is central to many immigrant and culturally-saturated narratives. When you think about it, even common terms like “comfort food” or “soul food” convey a strong sense of nostalgia and the idea that specific foods bring back your most cherished memories and can make you feel at home.

Eating is also the very first form of social interaction for most animals, including humans. Even the fetus interacts with the external world as it consumes the result of its mother’s dietary intakes; it takes parts of the outside world, of another person (mother), and a nonverbal exchange takes place. Often, it is through sharing meals that we form and build relationships.

To the uncle (and the older hikers along the trail) in the story, food has an even stronger social importance as he’s from a generation that experienced a post-war famine on a national level. Hence the Korean way of greeting another by asking if they have eaten and the culture of a feast of side dishes that automatically come with the main menu in traditional Korean diners. Fascinatingly, this post-war famine also overlaps with parts of American military history, as many Koreans procured new food ingredients from U.S. army bases in the country. So, of course, I thought, this older character would see the act of cooking and eating together as the primary way of showing affection and socializing, especially with his loved ones whom he wants to be closer to.

Throughout the story, I tried to lend the narrative these echoes of Korean history where I could–the war and post-war ramifications–so that “Rooted Out” will be set against the subtle backdrop of a culture that was destroyed and then rebuilt, a place that’s still healing. But I was careful to keep the echoes muted so the readers can mostly follow the young women’s point of view and see how they experience the world, until the ending where they’ll have more insights into the uncle’s perspective.

ER: How do you see the change in POV to the uncle at the end of the story functioning in this piece?

SLP: One of the story’s central themes—misunderstanding—becomes more layered and interesting when you also consider the Korean generations beyond the two young women’s. It gives you more context, and, in terms of the narrative structure, hindsights; and I’m a big believer in the omnipotence of hindsight, which sometimes proves to be the only way to transform the past without altering or disregarding the facts of it. The same goes for a fictional story.

South Korea has such a complex modern history, marked by many national and global upheavals. The uncle’s voice is crucial to bringing the story to its twisty, comical, and nuanced ending, as he represents the generation that most vocally and gravely misunderstands the two young women’s generation. His generation often avidly endorsed or harshly criticized the younger generation’s desire to explore the world beyond South Korea or even to find a home outside it. By following the uncle’s point of view, you get glimpses into why his generation might have helped engender this modern phenomenon in South Korea and why some might still oppose it: the war, economic and political instability, and a need to find a better life for themselves and their families amid all the chaos, and a deep attachment to a home that was destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up, quite literally.

Juxtaposing the uncle’s chapter at the end, while bringing the story into more perspective, also adds a subtly humorous tone (I hope) to what the story has to say about human nature: our fear of the dark, our tendency to blow things out of proportion and interpret the world from our limited perspectives, and the ways we misunderstand, trouble, dismiss, or embrace each other.

ER: What are you working on now?

SLP: I’m currently working on the translation of a feminist Korean thriller, A Twist of Fate, to be published by Bantam in March 2025. I was told it’s actually the first book in translation that Bantam has ever acquired, so I’m beyond thrilled.

I’ve also been juggling a few manuscripts of my own: my second poetry collection, All That’s in Bloom Is in Flames, which alternates between the voice of the marginalized prophet Cassandra and the voice of a beekeeper, and which explores the role of poetry amid global challenges such as wars, the climate crisis, and the mental health crisis. As for prose, I am working on my currently untitled short story collection that includes “Rooted Out” and my very first novel.

Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆 李 朴) is a multi-genre writer and translator born and raised in South Korea. She wrote the poetry collection, Present Tense Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera 2021), winner of the Marystina Santiestevan Prize, and a poetry chapbook, Still Life (Factory Hollow Press 2023), winner of the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She is also the translator of If I’m Going to Live to One Hundred, I May As Well Be Happy by Rhee Kun Hoo, published by Ebury and Union Square & Co. She received fiction prizes from Indiana Review and Writer’s Digest and had a notable essay in the 2022 anthology of Best American Essays. She’s serving as the nonfiction mentor for the 2024 AWP mentorship program. You can find more about her at: www.suphil-lee-park.com

Emilie Rodriguez is a Latinx writer from San Diego and holds an MFA from Louisiana State University. She is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and the former editor-in-chief of the New Delta Review. Her work has been supported by the Sundress Academy of the Arts Residency. Rodriguez won the 2023 Patty Friedman Writing Competition in the short story category. Her work is forthcoming in the Peauxdunque Review.

Victor Wei Ke Yang’s story, “Chicken,” appears in the winter 2024 issue of The Southern Review. Here, he discusses, the process of writing a story about codependent addictions, revision, and balancing complex narrative tensions.

This story has a lot of ambitious threads in it that I found were weaved wonderfully throughout: the gambling addiction, the codependent and almost abusive relationship, the immigrant parents who don’t quite understand, the loss of identity (whether through Danny’s life being adopted or the narrator’s return home to Kentucky). What was it like writing these into the story without letting one get lost?

That’s too kind. Thank you, Emilie. I think I have the awful tendency of wanting to create a world fit for a novel within the container of a short story . . . hence all the threads. I feel like I should tell you some very fancy answer where I posted all the throughlines onto different colored post-it notes, and then counted how many of each color I had, and then rearrange all the pieces so that I was clear where and when to focus on what, with whatever tool people use these days (Scrivener, Excel formulas, ChatGPT, who knows) . . .

I wrote and rewrote this story a lot. I wrote the first draft in my MFA workshop at the start of the pandemic, in 2020. I had the privilege of having a lot of really smart teachers and fellow readers lend me their thoughts. And then I wrote it again. And again. I wish short stories didn’t take me this much work. Or maybe I do. It is pain and pleasure all at once, the process of revision. 

Danny’s gambling addiction causes a lot of strife between him and the narrator, and yet I never feel like either one of them is the “bad guy” in the relationship. What was it like balancing how much they loved each other while also showing us their complicated issues?

Gosh. This was really hard. I remember three springs ago, during the pandemic, I was in a fiction class on Zoom led by the brilliant Jenny Zhang, and in workshop, one of my classmates asked, Who’s the addict in this story?

Danny, of course. Or that was what I thought. Then the discussion turned. The narrator, someone offered.

This was their logic: He’s obsessed with taking care of Danny. Exerting control over Danny. Being addicted to the addict is another kind of addiction.

This really helped me think about the story in a new light. I wanted the reader to root for these two guys. I wanted there to be sweetness and happiness and tender moments. I tried to capture that in the voice of the narrator, the way that he so clearly loves Danny. And yet—I hope that the prose is able to show the unreliability of this narrator, that there are, as you have said, much darker undercurrents to their love. The narrator, in some way, is wedded to the status quo of the dysfunction of Danny, and the dysfunction of their relationship—and when it seems like Danny is finally getting better, I think, is where we get to the ending.

How did you construct the sense of fear and adrenaline in the last scene of the story in the car?

Ah—I think this question ties in nicely with the last one. I wrote so many endings when revising this piece, and for the first few years, the story concluded with another iteration of Danny’s freakout, the narrator reassuring him, etc etc. The usual stuff. But it never quite felt right. Then I showed up to one of my classmates from my MFA program, Jennani Durai. She was the one who suggested the ending in this version. Thank you, Jennani!

Ultimately, it harkens back to some lines on the first page, namely: “[Danny] had this miraculous ability to collect himself when I most needed it. I joked that this was the secret to love: only one of us was allowed to be crazy at any given time.”

What projects are you working on now?

I’m in (what I hope are) the last stages of revising a novel with my agent. In short it follows a Black-Asian gay couple as they are at the cusp of adopting a baby. The plot has changed quite a bit, but I think the overall thrust is still the same—I’m curious about exploring what it means to love someone who turns out not to be the person you thought they were. That, and how to overcome the baggage of our families and our past when trying to create a future. I’m also working on a memoir, keeping up the stamina to write, and figuring out if it is possible ever to be kinder to ourselves. That last thing is not a big project at all . . .

Victor Wei Ke Yang has published in The Rumpus, Best Small Fictions 2021, and the Chicago Tribune. He was a writer-in-residence for the City of Boston and works to support Asian American grassroots organizing.

Emilie Rodriguez is a Latinx writer from San Diego and holds an MFA from Louisiana State University. She is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and the former editor-in-chief of the New Delta Review. Her work has been supported by the Sundress Academy of the Arts Residency. Rodriguez won the 2023 Patty Friedman Writing Competition in the short story category. Her work is forthcoming in the Peauxdunque Review.

Shraya Singh’s story, “The Chicken Shop”, appears in the winter 2024 issue of The Southern Review. Here she discusses how Hindu-Muslim conflict impacts childhood, especially in the early 2000s, the realities of cleaning chicken, and deep, platonic childhood love.

Emilie Rodriguez, Editorial Assistant: The religious turmoil between Hindu and Muslim communities in this piece is always at the forefront, constantly influencing the narrator and Rahim’s relationship. Why choose two young boys to focus on for this story?

Shraya Singh: As a child, I had never truly considered what it meant to be from a non-dominant religion in a country like India, where religion is so culturally ingrained in the day-to-day and is something you have to experience whether you truly believe in it or not. Because of this, I knew of the differences between myself and those from other religions growing up, but it had never truly been at the forefront of our interactions or our relationships until we got older. This was why I thought that exploring such a relationship through the lens of two young boys would be a good way to explore how the views I’ve had, and those of others around me, have changed as we have grown up and developed a deeper understanding of our religions and how they interact or conflict with each other. Of course, I know that it is different now, since Hindu-Muslim conflict is at the forefront of a lot of people’s lives and younger children are more aware of the rising conflict over the past decade. That also dates this piece as happening around the time when I grew up, when it was easier for a Hindu-Muslim friendship to form without the constraints of other societal pressures and when it was easier to ignore all the differences between the two.

ER: There’s so much love that the narrator has for Rahim; getting Rahim books he doesn’t have access to, having dinner with Rahim’s family despite his own not approving, etc. When he no longer expresses it as openly as he did before due to the rising conflict, there’s still so much compassion for the narrator that I feel in your writing that goes hand and hand with the guilt he feels. How did you find that balance in writing him?

SS: I don’t think I was actively trying to seek that balance while writing him. I knew that I wanted him to be a character that people could sympathize with but could also hold accountable for misdeeds or mistakes [that he has made] and perhaps that is what led me to make sure that he was more complex than a boy who lost access to a close relationship. I think the retrospective narration definitely helped me achieve that balance, and in truth, I feel that it was the only way the balance could have been obtained because of the characters’ ages during the bulk of the story: it is easy to not realize the importance of even a tiny action in the moment, and it often only becomes clear in retrospect.

ER: One of the threads that I find so beautiful in your story is this idea of what it means to be brave. As Rahim gets braver, our narrator assimilates more and even dreams of leaving completely. Do you think that would have saved their friendship, if the narrator had been braver, or did they need to understand each other’s point of view more?

SS: I’m not sure that being braver would have saved the narrator’s friendship with Rahim. I think the narrator needed to go through the growth, introspection, and reflection that he did in order to reach where he is now, and without the slow disintegration of his friendship with Rahim, it never would have taken place.

ER: One of my favorite scenes in this story is when we see the narrator cleaning the chicken. It’s visceral and grotesque and a perfect cumulation of all of his feelings about his declining friendship with Rahim and the political turmoil. How did this scene come to you?

SS: When I was back at my parents’ home in Gwalior (in India) before moving to the states two years ago, I really wanted to make some chicken for me and my brother but my mom is a strict vegetarian, so she practically refused to even touch anything I planned on using to make it. I’m not sure if this is widely known, but it’s very hard to get frozen chicken in India (unless you live in a metro area) and so I ended up having to go to the vendor on the street and choosing one of the chickens in his giant cage and bringing the fresh meat back home. Even though I wore gloves while washing it and pulling apart the weird white stuff (the skin? the cartilage?) and rubbing all the blood off, it was slow-going and took me over an hour (with multiple breaks for gagging because the meat was still warm) and felt very uncomfortable. That scene in the story is the first thing that made it to the page and is pretty much how I felt during that whole experience. I don’t think I ever plan on making chicken again unless it’s cold and frozen and long, long dead.

ER: Have you wondered what would happen if they ever did meet again as adults?

SS: I have wondered but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to truly imagine what it would be like if they did. Of course, I want them to meet again, but maybe having them interacting directly isn’t the right move for the story (or any future extrapolation).

ER: What was the revision process like for this story? Were there other endings considered for it?

SS: In an earlier version of the story, it was not told from a retrospective perspective, and I feel like that version didn’t allow for the narrator to truly realize his guilt and understand the impact that his actions (or lack thereof) had on his friendship with Rahim. Apart from that, the revision process has been pretty straightforward, the story somehow shaped itself around the chicken shop and the meat washing scene and, in a way, the shop was as grounding for me during the writing and revision process as I feel it is for the characters (and readers!) within the story.

ER: Do you think romantic tension played a role in the strife between the narrator and Rahim?

SS: This is a touchy subject for me because at times I feel like literature places a greater emphasis on romantic love over platonic love and I dislike how, despite their being two different types of love, they somehow always end up in a hierarchy where romantic love is considered the deeper and stronger of the two. In my life, because of where and how I’ve grown up, I have always placed a greater emphasis on friendship when it comes to relationships and I think that is what I wanted to bring forward in this piece: how friendship and platonic love can be as intimate and important and beautiful as romantic love and how, for many people, it is more necessary. I do, however, think that there is a possibility of romantic tension between the narrator and Rahim, and I think their relationship could have evolved into something else had they been allowed to grow older together in their friendship, but as it is now, I was focusing more on the external pressures and internal conflict between them. I find that deep love in friendships when it comes to Hindu-Muslim relationships is underrepresented in the media that I have come across in comparison with Hindu-Muslim romance (which is a popular trope in Bollywood movies). If readers pick up on something more then maybe they’re onto something that I wasn’t putting in there, but still managed to slip in through the cracks!

ER: What was it like to write the narrator’s family, a family that pushed the narrator to ignore Rahim?

SS: It was easier to write than I thought it would be, primarily because I went to a Hindu-majority private school where kids would talk about things their parents said about other castes, religions, and economical classes all the time. Even though I heard the word “Muslim” or “Musalmaan” mentioned often, I didn’t quite truly understand what it meant to be a Muslim in an area that was Hindu-dominated, yet the comments were mean enough that they stuck with me all these years. I guess it’s something that many go through, not realizing how unjust the words spoken around them are until you’ve grown as a person yourself and understood more of where those comments are coming from and what beliefs they are rooted in.

ER: Are there other writers or pieces of fiction that influenced this story?

SS: I think the primary thing that influenced this story was The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and how intimate the protagonist, Amir, is with Hassan despite the huge class imbalance between them. That was one of the few books that I had been recommended to read as a child that was not by a white author and the friendship portrayed is so deep and beautiful and remorseful, which was something I hadn’t seen done so well in literature before.

ER: What projects are you working on now?

SS: I’m working on my MFA thesis! I recently finished up with a novel workshop class and I plan on polishing the first 100 pages of my novel and adding as many more as I can by the time that I graduate in the spring. This way, I can get my advisor, Greg, to read them before he’s no longer obligated to or paid by the university to do so.

Shraya Singh is currently an MFA candidate at Eastern Washington University where she is also the Fiction Editor for Willow Springs magazine and a fledgling writer. She is from a small town in Uttar Pradesh in India and her work is often set in rural India and discusses themes around religion, religious intolerance, class and caste-based discrimination, as well as relationships that stretch across the intersections of these themes.

Emilie Rodriguez is a Latinx writer, originally from San Diego. She is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review, an MFA candidate in Fiction at Louisiana State University, and the former editor-in-chief of the New Delta Review. Her work has been supported by the Sundress Academy of the Arts Residency. Rodriguez won the 2023 Patty Friedman Writing Competition in the short story category. Her work is forthcoming in the Peauxdunque Review.