Most of my inspiration to write comes from reading, so I did read something that bordered on the mother-daughter discordant relationship. I can’t remember what it was, though. I just know I wanted to recreate that and put my own spin on things.

Music is a touchstone throughout the story; no matter what’s going on in their lives, the characters seem grounded in the protagonist’s memory with the music that was playing at the time. Is that a theme that you revisit in your work, or was it specific to this story? What do you think makes music so powerfully associated with memory?

Music is a huge staple of my personal identity, so I think it always reflects one way or another in my work. However, for this in particular, I wanted to show every memory of the past associated with a song, the reigning anthem at that point in the protagonist’s life, as the memories themselves are often painful, and music for me has always been a useful suppressant, redirecting my mind from bitter introspection.

Which is the same effect it would have on readers, who would naturally focus on or be distracted by the music, rather than give full attention to whatever gruesome past I or the protagonist was exposing.

Why I think music is so powerfully associated with memory? To be honest, I really don’t know. I just thought it’d be cool to write this story.

What was the most challenging part of writing this story? What came easiest?

The most challenging part of writing it was being so close to the protagonist that at certain times, I felt she and I were one.

Diving into some ugly parts of my past that was needed for the story was hard. Pouring life, my life, into the protagonist like that was hard. At the end of the day, there’s only a thin frangible line separating fiction from truth, nothing really stopping them from walking right into the other—as I did often in Odd Peas in a Pod. That part was hard.

What came the easiest?

The music, for sure. The whole story is really just a front for wanting to share my prized playlist with anyone who reads it. (Winks)

The parent-child relationship is one that is ever-evolving and often painful for both. Your protagonist seems keenly aware that her mother has an inner life of her own. How did you navigate that relationship during the creative process?

First by acknowledging they were more than just fictional characters. Then by creating a world that allowed them to be true to themselves. Most times, it’s easy to forget or hard to accept that motherhood can be a burden to those unprepared for it. That mothers can be detached from their children. Have their own addictions and traumas and demons. Just like everyone else. The protagonist UNDERSTOOD that—it was essential for the progression of the piece.

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I’ve been working on, well, a lot of things. And readers can expect to see a lot of things. Hahaha.

• • • •

Babel opens with a quote by Antonio de Nebrija about language. Can you talk a bit about the importance of language to the story of Babel?

I guess the title Babel really gives away how central language is to the story, doesn’t it? The magic system in this world is called silver-working—the art of capturing the meaning lost in translation from one language to another. That’s something I think about all the time, as someone who grew up bilingual and has worked as a translator—there’s never a perfect one-to-one correlation in meaning between any two languages. You always have to make choices about what you emphasize and what you leave out. I’ve always loved the saying that an act of translation is necessarily an act of betrayal. I think this fundamental impossibility of communication makes for great textual metaphors about coloniality, racialization, and a whole bunch of other axes of difference. We are all constantly translating ourselves to the world, and hoping someone will listen and understand us.

What did you learn in the process of writing the Poppy War series that you brought to writing this book?

There’s all the obvious technical stuff—pacing, structure, character development, and all that. But I think what made the biggest difference was developing a sense of project management. Babel is on a technical level much more difficult than any of the individual Poppy War novels—it’s a standalone that doesn’t have room to leave plotlines hanging, it uses a five-act structure rather than a simpler three-act structure, it juggles a larger cast of main characters, and it just needs to cover a lot more story in the same number of pages. It’s not a debut novel. But working on the trilogy for the whole previous four years taught me how to break a project into its component parts and plan accordingly. I’d learned a lot of things about my own process by the time The Burning God was in. For instance, I can never start with an outline. I need to write about 20,000 words of brainstorming to figure out the vibe of a story and where all its critical nodes lie. Then I’m able to go back and superimpose a structure over it all. Each successive book after the trilogy has felt easier and easier because I lean into the parts of the process that work for me and I cut out the parts that don’t. Character sheets, for instance, don’t help me at all. Characters come alive in the action, and I can’t get a sense of who they are until I’m watching them make critical decisions. Worldbuilding bibles don’t help either; I need to visualize things moving around in the world before I can sit back and impose some formal rules on the setting. Anyhow, by the time I got to Babel, I had good understand of how I tick as a writer and how to pace myself accordingly. Then a very structurally intricate book didn’t feel so hard. I like to think that the Poppy War trilogy was a nice set of training wheels to help me swing hard for what I really wanted to do.

One of the first things to happen in Babel is that a boy is given a new name and has to assimilate to a different set of cultural “norms.” It reminds me of Ellis Island, and the way that the people working there would give immigrants new names if they found their actual names to be “too difficult” for them. Then the boy is put in this precarious position between one of his countrymen and several white people, which kind-of stands with a number of uncomfortable things he has to do in order to protect himself, some subtle, and some less so. I think some readers place these sorts of events and experiences in the distant past—do you feel like a lot of the struggles Robin Swift faces are actually still common today?

Migration obviously is not a thing of the past; neither is Anglicization of names to fit in better with a society that isn’t too accommodating of “foreign” sounding names. My legal name is Rebecca, not my Chinese name; my parents put the Biblical name on my passport because they knew they were going to immigrate to the United States. Any reader who places these sorts of things and experience “in the distant past” probably . . . is used to environments where their names and identities are part of the dominant culture. Babel explores the lives of students navigating a world that clearly wasn’t designed for them, a world which they nevertheless badly want to become a part of. That’s not a unique aspect of Victorian history; it’s just being a BIPOC student at a predominantly white institution.

The book uses an interesting storytelling style, in terms of point of view, voice, and footnotes. I find it extremely engaging. Maybe engrossing is, in fact, a better word. Can you talk a bit about your decisions and goals in terms of these elements?

I’m glad you’re enjoying it! After I finished The Poppy War, I wanted to try on an entirely different creative voice. I was afraid that if I just dove in and wrote another epic fantasy novel with a gutsy, sharp narrative voice, I would end up producing an echo of what I’d just finished. So I backed off writing for a while and just read a lot of works that were as tonally different from The Poppy War as possible. I ended up falling in love with the Victorians—there was Dickens of course, and Austen and the Brontë sisters. William Makepeace Thackeray was also big for me. I was really fascinated by the pacing and language style—it is so intricate and observant and naughty on a sentence level, which was something I had tended to sacrifice in favor of moving the story along at breakneck speed. With the Poppy War trilogy, I was aiming for sleek, minimalist prose. With Babel, I’m exploring a maximalist style wherein every paragraph is just jam-packed with wordplay and footnotes and gossipy asides. It makes for a denser text, but all the reviews so far indicate that readers have really liked it, which is a relief!

This is also a deeply researched book. What are some of your favorite bits of research that went into it, and are there bits of research you found super interesting or compelling, but that didn’t make it into the book for one reason or another?

This time, thankfully, I got to include everything that I wanted to. That’s the beauty of a footnote—if it distracts from the main text, shove it in a footnote. Works well for academic papers, too! I’m just kidding.

I think what I struggled with is that the books I was reading about the Victorian area were mostly interested in the 1850s onward, which, to be fair, is what we usually think of when we think Victorian. (Babel sits in that bridge period of 1830-1840). So I was finding all this fascinating stuff about food and transportation and mechanical inventions I really wanted to cram into the book, but since the climax of Babel needed to happen by 1840 for important historical reasons, I had to leave out a lot of the later references. I think pop culture is obsessed with the late 1800s. But I think the very first years of the Victorian era are so critical for so many historical reasons, and I’d love to see more art examining the beginning phases of the Industrial Revolution, the ramping up of colonialism, etc.

The text is rich in information, yet interesting and emotionally effective. We get so much about so many things, and yet we’re also completely invested in the character. What is your strategy or technique to making this work?

I think the secret to introducing a whole lot of worldbuilding without bogging down the story is to filter it all through the perspective of a character—usually an outsider, who is as new to this world as the reader is. In this case Robin Swift was a very convenient vessel, because he explains why you’re getting the version of Victorian England you’re getting. I’m not British, which is a big impediment to convincingly writing a novel that is British to its bones. I spent time at Oxford, but the strange and exciting things I noticed about Oxford are not necessarily the same things that someone who’d grown up in London would notice. So when the world in all its details feels overwhelming to the reader, that’s because it feels overwhelming to Robin as well. When the reader is learning and attending lectures, Robin is, too. I wanted to write a dark academia in which the characters actually learn (I have a big axe to grind about supposedly dark academia novels in which the characters show zero interest in their studies), so the reader gets to come on Robin’s journey through his four years of undergraduate work. One book I think has done this particularly well is Vita Nostra by Sergey and Marina Dyachenko. By the end, you’re as wrung out and ready for it all to be over as Sasha is.

What, for you, is really important about Babel? What stands out for you as central to this book?

Babel is about a lot of things, but its beating heart is the relationships between the four members of the cohort—Robin, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty. I think what makes the dark academia genre tick is those nebulous, tricky interpersonal relationships between friends; people you meet at a crucial point in your life, when you’re still trying to figure out who you are. There’s nothing quite like the intensity and tenderness of a friend group where everyone is a little in love with one another, and where everyone hates one another because of it. And there’s nothing more devastating than watching the group identify an outsider and push them away. This is why The Secret History succeeds. Richard and Camilla and Charles and Francis and Henry are all so messy. And Bunny. It is devastating to see when a friend group has a Bunny. Robin, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty’s relationships are underwritten (though not overdetermined) by their socioeconomic positions and colonial situation, and playing with that web of love and hate was tremendously fun. I’ll let you figure out who the Bunny is.

What were the biggest challenges for you in writing Babel?

The fact that I was writing it during the first and scariest phase of a global pandemic. I didn’t find anything about the book technically difficult—I really enjoy doing research, and crafting intricate plotlines feels like second nature now, after putting out a trilogy. But the bulk of Babel was written between the spring of 2020 and the spring of 2021, during which time I was isolating with my partner in Florida. I couldn’t see any of my friends or family. I wasn’t in school that year—I deferred the start of my PhD until I could attend classes in person—and being out of the academic environment, when I didn’t get to go to seminars and talk about readings with my classmates, was very hard on me. I get a lot of energy from bouncing ideas off of others. I don’t like writing full time and I hate being alone with my thoughts. So naturally I was frustrated and less than mentally well, and every paragraph I extracted from myself during that time feels like a miracle. I’m still kind of stunned that the book is finished. I was depressed most of the time that I was writing it. Now that I’ve read the finished version with fresher eyes I’m really quite proud of it, but I don’t remember a single day in 2020 during which I looked at my work and felt happy about it.

When Robin meets Ramy, it’s so heartwarming, so touching; really, brilliantly written. What are your favorite things about Robin Swift, and about Ramiz Rafi Mirza? What was the best part about writing these characters, and what were the most significant challenges?

The friendship between Robin and Ramy is based on my relationship with one of my closest friends, so it was easy to write all of that from the heart. We also met at the beginning of a program where we were the only two BIPOC students, so we were outsiders together. This was five years ago; now they’re going to be in my wedding. And we also felt that wonderful chemistry right upon meeting—we also sat on the floor for hours and chatted about everything we could think of. Nothing was off limits; nothing was too personal. I wanted to capture that lightning-in-a-bottle feeling of meeting a kindred spirit and knowing, immediately, you would be best friends. That feeling is so rare, and it’s marvelous when it happens.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about Babel?

I just hope you all enjoy it Stylistically it’s a bit different from the Poppy War trilogy—it’s slower and more introspective, and it employs a slow burn to devastation rather than the high-octane constant action you might be used to from me. I’m excited to be stretching my story-telling abilities and try out new forms and genres; I hope you’ll come along with me on the ride.

What else do you have coming up that you’d like readers to know about?

Yellowface, my literary fiction debut, comes out in the summer of 2023.

Second time was in a barbershop, when, in her second trimester, she decided to shave her head. It was Nas’s Undying Love blasting through the bookshelf speakers. I kicked so hard that, for a second, she thought the gunshots imploded in her own belly. She doesn’t tell me about the part where she shudders and looks down at her feet, hoping to see me as blood-red spillage in warm, breathless puddles around her feet.

Before the pandemic, Mother and Felicia were shark and remora; Felicia being the shark, gobbling whoever crossed her path and spitting them out, bone-chewed, palsied; and Mother cleaning up her messes—but each dependent on the other. Felicia’s eyes can stare poison into yours; her hands are so evil they can, they say, reverse Midas’s touch and turn a good thing to rot.

• • • •

Just two months ago, she dated a perfumer named Jarvis, an eccentric man with an eccentric zest for life. He would drive by, waving at everyone, jamming Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life in his 2003 Corolla model. His gifts to her were nothing of the ordinary: bizarre paintings, electric glass figurines, jardiniere of daisies, celosia, hibiscus—flowers he would later experiment with to create enchanting scents for her. All of which now lie in a broken compartment of her wood shelf, biting dust.

“She couldn’t keep ordinary flowers alive for three days,” Mother would scoff, “how much more a relationship?”

But she only says those things when Felicia is halfway down the street.

Once, a boy primly dressed in a school uniform picked an eraser from the dusty road and was seconds away from feeding his stomach, before Mother yelled, hitting it off his palms. We walked him, too shocked by the sudden interference to cry, to his mother, who was all but carried away in an overloud conversation. The clueless lady stopped mid-laughter to thank us. Mother smiled but once she turned back, began grumbling: “If something happened to that boy, wouldn’t she blame the devil? The innocent devil! How can a woman be so clumsy? A woman for that matter.”

The same happens when our neighbour has to borrow a bit of salt in the process of cooking.

“So they can’t afford common salt? Or her good-for-nothing husband didn’t return with his car and cannot walk to the junction to buy salt for her? Can he not see that she’s pregnant? By the way, omo mi, who still drives a beetle in this age and time?”

I wonder what she says about me when I turn my back.

Always, I shudder through her gaze and walk on bloody nails, but I still don’t know what it is about me that upsets her so. Maybe it’s her own self that she despises, and I am merely an extension of that hate. Mother and I are strangers in a home once small, but now so big that our shadows barely cross paths. I do not know of a father. It’s inconceivable to me that any man would weather her storms long enough to put his thing inside her.

I sometimes wish I never made it here. Felicia’s oldest son never did; there are old rumours to account for it. Some say she is a witch and ate him during pregnancy, which is why, months after his sudden demise, her skin donned a brighter glow. Some say she traded him for wealth. But for as long as I know, she lives in the same wood, ramshackle apartment on Benson Drive owned by a church deacon and solid believer of Biafra.

They say fate shit on her when she conceived the twins, Joy and Happiness. Two! She had no idea how the hospital television could see inside of her belly, so she didn’t believe it. Later, Joy would tell me, they could taste the crude mixture of soda and menthol when she tried to turn them into blood. And when she visited the nurse wife who tried to pull them out using some kind of suction cup, they clung to each other, half foetus and half-human, fighting in the belly of death.

“Our brother”—they always assumed he was a boy—“was weak. But we are not o. We no gree.”

Three days after she imagined they were dead, Felicia felt a kick.

“Joy wanted to wait for a month, so it would surprise her that we were still there.” She laughed. “But it might have shocked her to death, and we could not risk our second chance.”

They call her by her name. They don’t believe she is their mother—they believe they are hers.

Crazy. Bat-shit crazy. I hear them talking sometimes:

“I didn’t want to live as a girl in my second life. I wanted to be an owl. Do you know that an owl can turn its head in any direction? It can see everything.”

“Not everyone makes it to the second life. Shut your mouth before you jinx it.” And they giggle and hug each other, like the air between them is a threat, like they must have when Felicia tried to poison her womb. Peter was a boy who confessed his fondness of the wilder twin, Joy, made him restless at night and waked him with a yearning in his groin. They found him the next day without his tongue, tied to the bed in his tousled room that smelled of vinegar and dead rats. From a vintage, sturdy radio, Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing played on and on. See, even I am careful not to get too close.

Winter of 2004, I watched Mobb Deep’s Drink Away The Pain in my grandfather’s parlour on MTV. Even though my village is only a few hundred metres away from the city, it is not the kind of music they are used to, but my grandfather let me do whatever I want. I had considered taking his old rifle and shooting the chickens that would leisurely saunter across the living room, quaking against my hip-hop songs, picking breadcrumbs from the floor. But that particular day, it was my fault for not cleaning up, and grandfather keeps the chickens to feed his gods. And, of course, Christmas.

I’ve always known Mother wanted to escape. Most times, I didn’t know what she needed escaping from, other times, it was to smoke when the women were cooking, so grandfather couldn’t tell that the smoke that followed her wasn’t firewood—but I always could. For years, she’s been smelling like charred wood. Do you know that a fire impulsively yet slowly preys on you before returning your ash to earth? I thank God my addictions don’t have bellies.

I don’t know who or what Felicia’s kids are, and so I keep my distance. As for me, I was born alone, washed up from shores of blue loneliness. It’s even right, now that I think of it, to question their actuality. We never see Felicia with any man. We just know she fucks different men—but we’ve never seen with our own eyes. The same is the case with my mother. Two odd peas in a pod.

Grandfather was a native man. If he took his ear close enough to the ground, he could hear the footsteps of the gods. I didn’t believe in gods, or God, until I heard Tupac’s Only God Can Judge Me. This gangsta whose music I bopped to from the womb. Grandfather also said Felicia’s name tasted like unsalted lime on his tongue.

In the village square, they’ve heard her scores, too. Try speak of her and watch the air quarantine you as everyone moves back in disassociation, like you farted through your mouth.

My mother has too many secrets that she is always angry, always nagging—even in silence. So many secrets that when she opens her mouth to speak it is filled with the stench of decayed years. You can’t put out a fire if you’re a part of it, I wanted to tell her the day she accidentally burnt herself with hot coal. But I couldn’t press pause on Lauryn Hill’s Lost Ones long enough to talk to her. You would know if you’ve heard the song. It’s so consuming.

That Christmas Eve, I woke from a nightmare to the sound of grandfather killing the chickens. I closed my eyes and imagined their necks breaking, spluttering blood, their feet scratching air. He wanted to talk to his gods, which meant he had to feed them first. I wonder who feeds them now that he is gone. Before the bonfire, mother talked to her own God, and all she wanted was for him to erase every mistake from her life. Fifteen years later, here I still am, her prayer dwindling in the cloud, unresolved, or perhaps swept out of God’s reach.

planting messages hidden in cross-stitched

pillows, refrigerator magnets, fingers dragged

across shower-fogged mirrors, until

the house is full of ghosts.

He comes together slowly. It takes much longer for him to be born than it took his mother to die. She was beautiful in those last moments, though, as she blasted into oblivion. He can remember it in his molecules, which used to be part of her, of course. She was everywhere at once, every color, every shape. She did everything light can do, all at the same time. He misses her. Maybe he has brothers and sisters in some distant corner of the galaxy, millions of lightyears away. It doesn’t matter. They’ll never meet.

Eons pass.

He’s trying to be a good star. He creates things, using whatever he finds at hand. Gasses are easiest to gather, so he makes some baubles with those. But they don’t do much. In fact, they’re kind of boring. He tries to toss them aside, but they follow, spinning in lazy circles wherever he goes. His galactic orbit takes him past a scattering of little rocks, and he takes some, mashes them together. They stick better than the gassy things, but still they’re not much fun. He tries to throw them away, but they’re heavy and awkward, and he can’t toss them very far. Soon they’re orbiting him just like the gassy things.

More eons.

He misses his mother.

A comet zips past, and when he grasps it he discovers ice. What a strange and wonderful substance, he thinks, melting and freezing, melting and freezing. It’s hard to master, though. When he tries to make it into a planet, it melts and falls apart. Then he has the brilliant idea of combining ice with crushed asteroids. Gravity works its magic and . . . voilà? No. Definitely not voilà. The ice evaporates and he’s left holding another hot little rock. He tosses it away, but like the others it hangs there in space and follows him around without really doing anything, another reminder of his shortcomings.

Making planets is the only thing he’s allowed to do and it sucks.

More eons.

He can barely remember his mother, whom he never really knew in the first place.

He tries to ignore his ridiculous creations, but they won’t leave him alone, circling around and around and around. Is this what it’s like for all the stars, he wonders? The whole galaxy, the whole universe, feels flat, stale, tired. If only he could melt away like his failed ice planet. But he’s a star. He has too much gravity. Too much him. And he knows, because he was there when it happened to his mother, that before his life ends he will swell unimaginably red and huge, and it will be unbearable. He’d take the explosion that follows, but he’s not even sure he’s big enough; he might be one of those stars who collapse into a tiny white rock not unlike these stupid failures he can’t get rid of.

Still, he does what he can. He bears down and tries to halt the trillions upon trillions of thermonuclear reactions happening inside of him at every moment. All he gets for his trouble is a series of farty flares and a few new black spots in embarrassing places.

He can’t help it. He shines. He’s a star.

He’s lost track of time, forgotten his mother.

But what’s this? Something . . . sparkly? He’s supposed to be the sparkly one, but one of his planets is sparkling too. And . . . is that ice? It sure is! Did the ice planet experiment work after all? As he settles in for a closer look the ice starts to melt. He pushes the planet away, just a little. That’s better. Then he sees one of those puckish comets careening straight for it and gives it a tug so the comet swings wide. But now it’s too close again, and the bits of ice that cap it handsomely at either end are starting to melt. He pushes it away. Another comet. He sends this one wide too, but here comes another, right on its tail. Oh, for heaven’s sake! He loses his temper, gathers the rest of his asteroids, and flings them wildly. For a moment this feels like a pretty good move: the asteroids settle into a belt, and another incoming comet is destroyed. But no, now the asteroids are being pulled out of orbit towards his favorite, one by one, and he knows he’s the one causing it, but honestly gravity physics is so complicated and he doesn’t know how to stop.

As he’s batting away one asteroid after another he notices something about the planet he hasn’t seen before. There’s something . . . on it. Stuck to the surface and moving from place to place. Lots of things, actually. He doesn’t understand what they are or what they’re doing, but he likes them. They make silly noises and stomp around and chew on each other. It’s fun.

But now, disaster. He’s taken his eye off the ball, so to speak, and here comes another asteroid, quick and wily, and it’s too late to pull it off course, and before he quite knows what’s happening the worst possible thing of all has happened; it’s struck his planet dead center, and now the whole thing has erupted in fire and smoke and ash.

There’s nothing he can do to fix it.

It’s ruined.

He turns away. He knows the planet will freeze, but he doesn’t care. It’s dead now anyway.

He starts worrying about the future. He thinks he feels himself getting bloated, even fat, and wonders if there isn’t just the faintest reddish tinge to his rays. It’s probably nothing, he tells himself, but he hasn’t paid much attention to the passage of time lately. He wonders if his mother felt like this when her end was near. She probably made the best planets, he thinks. Way better than mine. She never would have let them get smashed up by asteroids. She was the best star.

For the first time, he cries for her.

Eons pass.

He’s idly playing a game with the biggest of his gassy things. It’s not much fun, but there’s nothing else to do. They’re competing to see who can throw an asteroid the farthest. He’s a little surprised by how good the gassy thing is at this game. Not as good as he is, of course, but pretty good. It’s stronger than it looks.

As he’s winding up for a real zinger he notices that the gassy thing’s orbit is bringing it closer and closer to his favorite planet, the one he ruined. He’s about to turn away when something catches his eye. The planet is green again, and blue, with wisps of white across its face. Prettier, even, than it was before. How is this possible? It isn’t. And yet, it is. There’s so much he doesn’t understand. But maybe his planet has more things on it now. Maybe they’re even better than the stomping, chewing things that were on it before.

He’s afraid to look.

He’s glad, now, that he made the gassy things. He’s experimenting with the biggest one again, tugging it this way and that, and he sees that if he places it just right, it does a lot of his work for him, slinging asteroids and comets away when they get too close. He’ll still have to keep a close eye on his planet, to make sure nothing terrible ever happens again.

It’s hard, caring about things.

He wonders how long his planet will survive.

He’ll have to wait and see.

Meche, the protagonist in “The Memory of Chemistry,” first appeared in my novel, Ink—an immigration dystopia originally issued in 2012 and reissued by Rosarium Publishing in 2018. Her character is, in fact, a reader favorite, and over the years a number of them have expressed interest in finding out what happened to her after the events of the book. I’ve always resisted writing a sequel, to be honest, because what follows dystopia is the unbelievably hard work of living.

But at a friend’s urging, I decided to write a prequel story focused on what made Meche who she was in the novel—a ferociously smart and self-possessed chemist who used her science as a form of resistance. Still (as she did while I was writing Ink) Meche wanted to take her story somewhere other than what I had first imagined. So I followed.

It turns out both Meche and I wanted to explore the emotional landscape of aging. How you cross a threshold after which, no matter how innovative or brilliant you are at your craft, no matter how deep your activism, no matter how rich the well of your experience—you will be defined, and invisibilized, by your age. So I set out to do the unpardonable to a favorite character: to let her get old and see her.

Chemistry is a very strong theme throughout this story, with sharp looks at how it can be a mechanism of art, freedom, and destruction. What led you to look at chemistry through this lens?

There’s always magic in my stories, and chemistry is magic. At one level, its processes demand as much ceremony and discipline, as much arcane knowledge, and the same kind of will and curiosity as the most complex imaginary magical system. At another level, it is a very ordinary form of magic—without barriers, and accessible to anyone who bakes, cooks, cleans. It is a science that appeals to me for this very reason—everyone can perform acts of chemical magic.

This story doesn’t shy away from politics, considering the emphasis it puts on revolution and change, and especially not the dark political clouds over the United States these days—and at the same time, the story deals with it in terms of anticipation or as memory. Was that your first choice during writing, or was it something that developed, or something else entirely?

In the process of writing, the story turned into both prequel and sequel, undoubtedly because I am—like Meche—an aging Latina in this country at this precise moment in history. We grapple with trauma. We fight in what ways we can for what we love. We grieve for what we’ve lost and for what cannot be reclaimed. We have long memories, in a society that insists on short ones.

And we live with our ghosts.

You tied the story tightly around insects. Beyond the clearer relations of luciferase and belief, where did the relationship between insects, chemistry, and this story manifest for you?

It started with bees, their uniquely transformative work and the astonishingly preservative nature of what results from that work. The other insects followed.

It’s always intrigued me that insects—creatures we rarely think about except when we are hellbent on exterminating them—are the repository of so much folk belief. They’re divine messengers, symbols of soul or scourge, portends of death and new beginnings. It’s no coincidence that, in our day and age, immigrants are represented by the monarch butterfly, which flies as far as 3,000 miles across the continental Americas to reach home.

Sadly, we have been less attentive to insects and the integral part they play in the wellbeing of our world than we should have been. According to reports, a third of all insect species are endangered. The total mass of insects has declined so precipitously that the data suggests they will vanish within a century, impacting the ecosystems in which they are essential—which is every ecosystem.

Is there anything you’re working on now that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

One of my stories is upcoming in the anthology Dreams for a Broken World, edited by Julie C. Day and Ellen Meeropol. The anthology benefits the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which aids children in the U.S. whose parents are targeted progressive activists or who themselves have been targeted as a result of their progressive activities.

I’m not a little girl anymore
I’m looking for a confrontation–
me in my stacked up curls, eying
the sign that says keep out–
placing anyway the spoon inside
my mouth–

Once I find you just right, I
will remain addicted.
My mother warned me but
listening is never the same
as agreeing–

my entitlement repulses you,
you say, but I know:
you like me anyway

I like brown bears with
greedy mouths
I like the consequences
of dissolving into the innards
of a brand new house
that is already occupied.

In the beginning

In the beginning was the trigger warning:

• Prepare for insects.
• Prepare for words in Latin and Spanish.
• Prepare for science and other species of the supernatural.
• Prepare for losses that rewire the chemistry of the brain.
• Prepare for aging and the way it flays you back to the first cell.
• Prepare for ghosts.

• • • •

On display, four chambers

1) Melipona beecheii: Stingless bee

I am on a call with my sisters, watching them migrate their method online. Bending the world, but also bending to the world, deep as genuflection.

They are handsome, dark and sweet, and somehow wilder in these years of our third age.

Words are honey in our mouths, these days. Our well-rehearsed fingers coax new pleasure from worn piano keys and old lovers. Our heads fill with the leaping fancies of remembered magic and unexplored science. But we are old, dear ones.

On Zoom we don’t show our years: solid cells turning to sponge invisibly, fractures and leaks that cannot be seen in the mirror of each other’s eyes. We pretend these days are like the ones that brought us together. Our goddess days, filled with crystalline songs of love—in sublimation, in transmutation, in chemical formulation.

“Hold on,” I whisper, my hands flexing over the keyboard.

If I am past my best working—as academic and corporate America seem to believe I am—I can still fill hexes, turn base to gold, and conjure up what would not be here without me.

2) Hypolestes trinitatis: Damselfly

In La Habana, before the revolution, my grandmother’s buñuelos de yuca y malanga and pastelitos de guayaba betrayed the neat and precise method of a born scientist.

It wasn’t only in the kitchen. She also had an encyclopedic understanding of which household tasks could be achieved by reaction rather than action. When she cleaned tarnish from the heavy pieces of colonial silver in the house—there was a lot of it, and the servants weren’t allowed to touch any—she used boiling water, baking soda, and aluminum foil.

The revolution divested her of the family’s canefields and distilleries, of the silver, of the servants, even of the aluminum foil. It turns out a government can nationalize anything and everything.

Except your brain.

My grandmother’s brain held the exact formulation of base, yeast, and congener needed to continue to produce our family’s wildly popular rum off-island. From Miami, she and my grandfather turned the remaining second- and third-rank properties in Puerto Rico to the manufacture of O’Gorman Reserve in exile.

That formula was the basis of their wealth, and my father’s, and, much later, mine. I say this with neither pride nor shame. We don’t choose what we inherit, only what we do with it.

My grandmother always spoke to me in Spanish, though she knew I preferred English. “You don’t get to claim Cuba as patrimony if you can’t speak the words exactly as el prócer y poeta José Martí wrote them,” she would tell me. She never just said José Martí without appending the honorific, all run together and with an emphasis that would have rendered it in all-caps, had she been texting me.

My grandmother wore her hair shellacked into white curls, and despite Miami’s heat and lax dress code, in every memory I have of her she wears a dark, beautifully tailored linen suit of mourning, a strand of pearls stark against the fabric.

I loved those pearls. Every set, every strand—choker- to opera-length—was clasped together by a brightly jeweled damselfly. “Caballitos del diablo,” my grandmother would say, every time she caught me staring. See? Always with the Spanish.

Why would anything as beautiful as a damselfly be called the devil’s pony, I asked. My grandmother didn’t know.

The damselflies fluttered their wings and fanned themselves every time I looked at them. Sometimes their iridescent blue and green needle ends curled and lifted up, as if they were waiting for one of us to grant them permission to stop clutching pearls and fly free.

Was it real? Was it magic? Were they alive?

Science is a process. Sometimes its answer lasts no longer than a wingbeat.

Here’s a secret: My grandmother was made of poetry and flights of attrition, and of chemistry as homely and meaningful as rising bread.

3) Ascalapha odorata: Witch moth

My mother contrived to combine oxides, roots, honey, milk, and lime to make her paints during the needful days of the embargo.

Half by instruction, half by deduction, she learned to heat sulfur, soda, and clay to produce a signature ultramarine blue that found its way into all of her early paintings. Later, after she had fallen out of grace with la revolución and managed to place one size-ten foot on the dry land of the United States, she kept to her make-do chemistry. Art supplies were easier to come by here, sure, but the money to buy them was not.

Even after she married my father, even after the cost of paints was no concern, my mother wasn’t done experimenting. Midway through her career, she perfected a completely biodegradable formulation of her signature ultramarine to suit her new style of work. In most of my memories, she wears flecks of that blue pigment crusted on the red-brown of her neck—like a duplicate of the strand of glass beads always draped there, holding a Lady of Regla pendant between her breasts.

My mother had a magnificent body. It says something about our society that it wasn’t until she decided to make art with it that she found acclaim in the United States. She created full-on reverse impressions of herself in half-cured cement, wet sand, or slow-baking mud. Her poses were always ecstatic or horrific, never anything between (“because all else is noise, amor”). Then, she would splash her proprietary colors onto those ghostly seemings of her missing self, and step away from their predicted senescence—a matter of hours, days, weeks.

My mother never announced where her ephemeral artworks could be found, but a whole listserve was dedicated to tracking them down via the eclipse of large witch moths that suddenly appeared when she was done. Her followers—she amassed thousands, maybe tens of thousands, before her death—called themselves “mariposas brujas” after those moths. Whatever memory I have of my mother’s art is thanks to them.

Here’s another secret: My mother was made of mothlight and grounds that shift underfoot, and of chemistry excited into color.

4) Photinus consimilis: Firefly

Red drupelets dissolved on Emma’s tongue. My gaze, as ever, was on the fireflies that winked on and off above our heads as we lay on our backs in the twilit backyard of my childhood.

This was the moment. The moment we knew our futures.

Yes, we heard both sets of parents on the patio, speaking with each other in Spanish cadenced to their countries of origin. But arguments about despotic regimes of right and left and politics in exile were not our future.

Yes, we heard the sounds of the canal that bounded the yard: liquid, plopping noises where frog or fish or aquatic reptile rose to the air and resubmerged. And farther away, we heard the sound of children along the same green meander, dipping their toes in its water. But neither zoology nor children were our future.

Yes, we heard the sea’s distant roar, too, underpinning it all, the way she underpins everything in seaside cities, with her cycles, her sudden furies and her grandly bounteous whims. But oceanography wasn’t for us either.

We were ten, and chemistry had one of us by the throat, the other by the eye.

When we were called to go back inside, Emma told her parents she wanted to dismantle the components of the raspberry’s flavor so she might reconstruct it again, to her own ends. I never spoke to anybody about what that moment in the backyard meant to me.

Luciferin is the compound responsible for a firefly’s light. When triggered by the enzyme luciferase, it flares into light. The color spectrum of what is emitted depends on microenvironment—and surely that’s why some folktales speak of the flying beetles as fire stolen from the gods, while others call them ghost eyes. Either way, they are a straight-up dose of chemistry, with an alchemy chaser.

Emma and I bought fluorescent glo-sticks in green and yellow, broke them open and tossed the dye into a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, soap, and yeast. Chemical luminescence may be less magical than bioluminescence, but it is every bit as satisfying. Especially on those occasions when the mix would thickly mushroom above the lip of its container and cascade over in slo-mo. It left glowing tracks on every surface it touched.

When we weren’t mixing chemicals, Emma and I held hands—because that is what Latina best friends did back then. Emma wore chartreuse. Emma loved Jules Verne and The Little Prince with a passion bordering on zealotry. Emma liked the night best, and her calls to me (about nothing and everything) came fast and furious from 1 to 3 a.m.—while her parents were sleeping and she had the extension in the family room all to herself.

One time, Emma revealed during one of our calls that she had broken open a glo-stick from a variety pack her mother had picked up for her, and had painted her exposed skin with it. She was glowing blue as we spoke, she told me, as if she were one of those blue ghost fireflies found only in North Carolina, whose light shines more steady than intermittent during their short season. I never actually laid eyes on blue-ghost Emma, but I can still see her.

Like the women on both sides of my family since time immemorial, I am associated with an insect. I’ve worn that insect’s emblem—a small golden bee—on each earlobe since I left the hospital a few days after birth. It is a fine creature by which to be represented, and one whose being is fully enmeshed in a chemistry both useful and delicious. But it is not the insect I love best.

Who would choose to make honey instead of light?

Years later I’d find this quote from chemist and theologian Michelle Francl Donnay: Luminescence is light that comes from within a material, photons shed as atoms and molecules change state. It’s not reflected, it does not consume like a flame. It’s kenotic, releasing what has been hidden within.

Here is my final secret: Emma was the banked fire; Emma was the blaze. Emma was the messenger signaling to me, every night, that there is light hidden in the deepest dark.

• • • •

Narrative half-life

When I was a child, nobody thought to give girls chemistry sets for Christmas or birthdays, so we improvised.

I carted an empty liter of coke and a roll of my grandmother’s Miami hoard of aluminum foil in my backpack to school. Emma met me outside, between periods, near the dumpster. I knew she had broken into the custodians’ storage room because the toilet bowl cleaner she brought was contained in an industrial-size jug with no-name labeling. Unlike many of the brands sold at the supermarket, this version had enough hydrochloric acid to effortlessly wipe away the scale left by Miami’s hard water.

“Boom,” Emma whispered as she half-filled the coke bottle with toilet bowl cleaner.

“Boom,” as I eased the tight foil balls into the neck and quickly capped it before tipping the bottle back up.

“Boom,” as we ran to what we gauged was a safe distance.

The explosion was tremendous. Bits of garbage made it up into the furthest recesses of the roof. The principal called in our parents and threatened to prosecute us for domestic terrorism. Our parents, peeved by both the threat and our disruption of their routines, reacted in exactly the same way. Maybe they even consulted with each other.

They enrolled us at Our Lady of Perpetual Help School and let the nuns know they should send us to chapel instead of science class.

Boom.

C₁₈H₃₂O₂ is linoleic acid, an omega-6 fatty acid which cockroaches recognize as a necromone. My grandmother would smear a gel of the stuff under the cupboards and along thresholds to keep the palmetto bugs out of our kitchen. None of the insects would venture where the scent of a familial death lingered.

Linoleic acid, when exposed to oxygen, quickly forms a skin. My mother added oils rich in linoleic acid to her paints, to speed drying time whenever she painted on prepared surfaces.

Nudge things just a little—from C₁₈H₃₂O₂ to C₁₆H₃₀O_2—and you’ve gone from omega 6 to omega 7, the palmitoleic acid that is one of the long-chain fatty acids present in rums like O’Gorman Reserve. It’s a precursor of the esters that lend the five-year-old golden añejo its fruity aroma, and make the 20-year-old amber reserva remind you of wood and toffee. It is part of what gives the rum its elegance, its poetry, my grandmother used to say. Not poetry but prose—my father would counter—willing to get down and dirty in the tawdriest company, and with the least need for occasion.

That wasn’t the only or even the greatest thing mother and son argued about. My father advocated easing the embargo on Cuba to allow investment—because ordinary folks were the ones suffering the rationing and shortages, he would say. My grandmother, genteel but thundering, argued that any rapprochement delayed the discontent required to topple a dictatorship.

But at the heart of everything, chemistry. Useful chemistry. Good chemistry. Chemistry of home and art and family.

One Saturday like many before it, Emma spent the night at our house. We made videos of ourselves dancing and singing along to Abriendo Puertas. My mother came into my room, shook her head and, with the unerring instinct of an artist, popped a collar here, added a color there, and we ended up looking much cooler than we really were.

We still had make-up smeared on our faces and our clothes tightened with strategic knotting when my grandmother woke us to go to Mass the next morning. She made us scrub our faces and laid out proper clothes for us. We lollygagged. We tried on accessory after accessory, hoping to find a way to bring some Gloria to Jesus’s house.

I think they got tired of waiting. My father got in the car first and my mother—having seen my grandmother safely ensconced in the back seat—was stepping away from the open car door when he turned the key in the ignition.

The explosion knocked Emma and me to the floor. The shelves behind us followed, then the light, the books, and the boombox playing Gloria Estefan. The Cuban-in-exile domestic terrorist group Omega 7 never owned up to the car bomb. They had been presumed dormant for about a decade but everyone knew it was them anyway—chemicals have a signature.

Di-iso nonyl adipate (C₂₄H₄₆O₄), also known as DINA, is a plasticizer added to cling wrap to keep it flexible and make it easier to handle. Maybe I mentioned this fact to Emma’s parents in the fuzzy days between my family’s death and the funeral. Maybe it was part of our small talk, as they helped me cut through the cling-wrap of hundreds of condolence baskets with smoked and canned delicacies sent by my father’s business associates, my grandmother’s board cronies, my mother’s followers.

DINA is also the acronym for Pinochet’s secret police—the group that had tortured and killed one set of Emma’s grandparents and had driven the rest of the family members into exile. The organization no longer officially existed at the time of my family’s killing, but perhaps fear, like trauma, can linger intergenerationally.

Or maybe DINA’s memory was freshened by the news of a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, which played interminably and repeatedly on TV as Emma’s parents helped me with funeral arrangements. Sarin was originally created by a DINA chemist at one of Chile’s colonies where torture and bio-experimentation coexisted.

In any case, Emma’s parents heard me talking about DINA during those days of chattering grief, and I think they came to believe that empirical formulas might also serve as empirical prognosticators.

Emma held my hand through the funeral. Tiny, stingless bees materialized from the substance of my tears, then mapped the geography of my face before lifting into flight above my head.

Emma saw, and held on anyway.

No one else noticed the bees that day. Even today, there are only a few people who can see them, flying in silent figure-eights around me, everywhere I go. Because you need to love someone to see what ties them to the friable earth of their past and the orphan lands of their future.

A week after the funeral, Emma disappeared. I knew then that, even as they comforted me, her parents had been formulating their plan to move Emma as far away from me—and the chemistry of tragedy—as they could manage.

Boom, boom, boom.

• • • •

The one constant in my life has been the search for Emma.

As a kid, I hadn’t much else I would allow myself to think about. The personal and material guardians my parents had appointed when I was born were efficient and kind, but not friends. It didn’t take long for me to find out that though the trust my grandmother had set up for me was vast, spending a chunk of it trying to find a friend whose name had been changed and her location meticulously hidden wasn’t something my guardians could be swayed to approve.

By the time I came of age and could determine for myself what I spent my money on, the ache of Emma’s loss had changed. Her mystery was something I played at solving when I needed distraction from tough research projects in college and grad school, or when I caught a few bars of the Gloria Estefan song we had been listening to when everything literally came crashing down around our ears.

I was certain that, no matter what might have happened to her in the intervening years, she would not have abandoned chemistry. So I scoured scientific citations and journals, foundation and society sites, and dipped into LexisNexis, focused on looking for scientists whose profiles tempted me to believe they could be Emma-in-disguise.

Verna Jules caught my eye because of her name’s similarity to Emma’s favorite childhood author. She turned out to be of Liberian-Barbadian heritage, a second-generation crystallographer, and adept at the most complicated and spectacular head wraps.

Antonia Principito—this time the mash-up of The Little Prince’s author and its title in Spanish prompted my attention—was a Pinay chemical physicist whose strategically timed swearing in Chavacano immediately endeared her to me.

And a week before defending my dissertation, I flew out to meet Anita Clarke—whose research centered on the volatiles in Willamette and Meeker raspberries at the University of California at Irvine—and, no, she wasn’t Emma either.

But they were all funny and earnest and brilliant, so we became friends as well as sisters in vocation. You see how I did that? In vocation, invocation. There is no question each of them is a goddess—the only question is whether I summoned them into my life, or if Emma did.

• • • •

Necessary existence

“You all need to come to live and work in the U.K.,” Anita said in one of our virtual hangouts some six months after I developed my first batch of artificial skin as a bench chemist at Nova Pharma.

It had been six years since I bought my brownstone, eight years since I moved from sunny southeast to snowy northeast, and ten years since I had first met the sister scientists on the call.

“Swansea University loves its scientists. Plus, it’s right by the sea, Meche,” Anita said. “Weren’t you saying how much you still miss living close to the ocean? It would be perfect . . . and prudent.”

Antonia and Verna both noisily disagreed at the same time as I did, so the screen filled with our faces before reverting back to a frowning Anita.

“We were born here,” I ventured after an uncomfortable silence. “Even the latest upswing in xenophobia isn’t enough to chase us away.”

Anita turned her head to look at something on the messy second desk behind her. “Science before nationalism, my loves.”

“It’s not so simple,” Verna said.

“Of course it’s simple.” Anita whipped back to face the webcam. “Weren’t all your parents asylees or naturalized citizens? With the proposed National Identity bill threatening to turn citizens into non-citizens on the basis of recent immigration history, you’re all in line. First gens are never as American as they believe they are.”

“There’s plenty of time to turn things around,” Antonia said, exasperated. “The bill hasn’t made it out of committee yet, and those of us who are STEM high skills or influential in other desirable professions have already started enlisting our connections to stand up for us. We’re not powerless. That bill is never going to become law.”

“Get real, sis,” Anita said. “When things get tough, those ‘connections’ are going to start ghosting you. And while Miss Pass-for-white over there may end up in the second or third cohort of the proposed biometric tagging, all the Black and brown immigrant-proximates like you and Verna are going to be at the front of the line, along with the fresh-off-the-boats.”

When we didn’t respond, Anita added, “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Then she got up abruptly and started rummaging through the papers on her second desk.

“Is turning your back a new form of goodbye?” Antonia asked acidly.

Anita shook her head. “I have something to show you. Talk amongst yourselves while I find it.”

“I thought physicists were supposed to be the messiest scientists,” Verna said after a moment. “That desk belongs in Antonia’s house.”

“So unjustly maligned,” Antonia said, shifting in frame so our view was nothing but clean workspace. “See? Neat as a pin.”

Anita turned back with a clipping in her hand and held it close to the webcam, but since the image was reversed she ended up reading it out to us. The article was from a business journal, not a scientific one. A Swiss start-up had employed a number of scientists to develop new drug-monitoring systems that bypassed the need for full diagnostic analysis at a lab. One of the scientists, M. A. Antes—the only woman scientist the start-up had hired—was working with luciferase to create a sensor.

“Yeah, so?” Verna said. “There are hundreds of chemists playing with fireflies.”

“The name, dummy,” Anita said. “Em A —but pronounce that ‘a’ the Spanish way—like ‘Ah’—and Antes, the Spanish word for before. Emma, before.”

“Too silly,” Antonia and Verna said in almost the same breath.

“Meche?” Anita asked.

“It can’t be that easy,” I said after a moment.

She laughed. “Easy? As soon as I saw this, I tried getting in touch with her. The Swiss law that forbids bankers from disclosing the existence of an account without the account holder’s consent must apply to scientists too. The company wouldn’t even admit she works for them. Even after I read the whole article back to them.”

“Hit up the journalist,” Antonia suggested. “In my experience, they so love to hear themselves talk they don’t even notice when they’re giving up secrets.”

“Already on it.” Anita flashed a smile. “I’ll report back when I know more. But, at the risk of becoming tiresomely repetitive, digging into another scientist’s mysterious life journey would be a lot more fun if we were doing it together, from here.”

I thought back to that virtual conversation a lot in the years that would follow it. The years that proved that some scientists are seers, while others let faith cloud their vision. My notice came by certified mail, as I knew it would—because Verna and Antonia had gotten theirs before I did.

An older woman repossessed my passport at the official tattooing station, and by the time another technician was inking the biometric mark that would thereafter tell my story from birth to death—and curtail my civil liberties between—she had Googled me and remembered who I was. That is, she remembered the public tragedy of my family’s assassination and the small girl who seemed to endure it all so stoically in the news accounts of the day.

“It was horrible what happened to you, to be suddenly orphaned like that,” she said as I passed her again on my way to the station where the biometric tattoo would be scanned to test that all the information would display properly. I nodded at the woman’s words, but didn’t tell her that I was feeling orphaned again, only this time of country.

As my fingers played over the blue lines tattooed on my inner wrist—not my mother’s ultramarine blue, but an equally distinctive shade—I thought about how whatever government chemist had come up with the formulation for the tattoo pigments had earned their keep. As I looked around in line I could see all the marks clearly, no matter the color of skin they were inked on.

I took the subway after getting the tattoo. It was empty in the car, just a few folks staring morosely at their toes. Halfway into my ride, the doors opened between stations and a dark moth—some seven inches from wingtip to wingtip—flew in. It beat its way erratically over to me, then draped itself on my wrist, its velvet soothing the inflamed skin around my tattoo.

“Death in the family,” the woman two seats away from me said in Spanish. Anglos always say I don’t look Latina, but mi gente always know me when they see me.

“That’s what a mariposa bruja symbolizes,” the woman continued. “I haven’t seen one of those since I left Veracruz, where there was lots of death.” She was holding a cloth-wrapped bundle from which a mouthwatering corn aroma emanated. My eyes slid to her wrist. Black tattoo, which meant she was a temporary worker, here on rotation for some company that wanted her labor for a season only. Then I winced—this informal tattoo checking was quickly becoming the new normal.

Like my father and grandmother, I had always been privileged by my light skin. It was only my mother who knew what it was like to have her skin read automatically by strangers. And since racism replicates itself even in reinvention, I bore the tattoo color that conferred the most privilege within this new oppression. Blue was for citizens, if only second-class ones.

“It can’t mean a death in the family, because all of my family is long gone,” I replied finally. The woman held my gaze for so long I had to drop my eyes. They landed, instead, on the strange nipple-like mole on her neck. A third teat, the witch hunters of old would have named it, and by that condemn her to be burned. Every era has its brand of tyranny.

“Maybe the moth is foretelling that I’m going to die,” I said, suddenly very keen on keeping this subway conversation going.

“No. It means something specific to you right now, not in the future,” the woman said. “I could see that in your expression when it flew in here.”

“It reminds me of my mother. I haven’t seen one of these moths since she died.”

She nodded knowingly. “Did she speak your name to a saint when you were born?”

It was such an odd question, but I knew the answer. I had a devotion to Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre all my life for a reason. My mother—artist, santera, and doyenne of la revolú in all its forms—believed in signs. I, a scientist newly tagged by my country, suddenly believed in them too.

By the time the moth finally flew off my wrist—four stops before mine—it left behind a trail of blueish-silver scales that obscured my tattoo, and I had the first inklings of what I would do with the artificial skin I had invented.

• • • •

At first, my routine at Nova Pharma stayed the same. The team of scientists I worked with pretended not to notice the tattoo while we performed tests or ran instruments together. My one woman colleague still joked with me about how lucky I was—to be tall and therefore spared the indignity of standing on a stool to work comfortably at lab benches designed for the greater average height of men.

But as each new regulation tied to the National Identity Law was instituted—geotracking us, psychometrically profiling us, reducing our lives to bodily data to be used for law enforcement or corporate benefit—I started to realize that no matter how valuable an employee I was, Nova Pharma would eventually cut me loose and demand that I hand over my key codes. On that day, I’d lose access not only to the data on the artificial skin I had invented, but also the tools I needed to analyze that data and move forward with experimentation.

I started keeping two sets of documentation—one an electronic logbook of work to be countersigned by corporate reviewers, the other a handwritten notebook nobody but me saw. The fortune I had inherited enabled me to purchase the computers and equipment needed to turn a section of my home into a lab in which to continue with my new vocation—to make low-barrier, redi-mix versions of my “instaskin.” I had plans to distribute those freely to anyone who needed to outwit the surveillance state.

By the time Nova Pharma’s head of HR notified me that I had an hour to gather my things and vacate my post, my homebrewed instaskin was in its fifth version, formulated entirely with components that could be purchased at any of the drugstores and household retailers still open to those of us who had been tagged.

There were thousands of equally personal, small rebellions during the decade the biometric tracking was in use in the United States.

Everyone from low-level municipal bureaucrats to entrepreneurs found ways to counter the civil and human rights violations it ushered in. People offered shelter in spite of housing bans; laborers committed to mutual aid when we became completely unemployable; gang members networked with church ladies to transport those most endangered by deportation to safe spaces. Even high school students took a stand—it was teenagers who broke me out of the internment center where I was held for a time.

Still, there were thousands of families split up, tens of thousands of people deported, hundreds of thousands who would never again feel at home—even after the worst of the legally sanctioned oppression was over. You can read the words of others about that time: some memoir, some academic footnote, some news report. My own testimony is in the visits I make to the gravesites of friends killed in violence; in the PTSD I can’t seem to shake; in the fact that I expended every last cent of my family’s fortune—and every last dreg of scientific inspiration allotted to me—to fight the annihilation and erasure the government intended by its policies.

When the government finally instituted an official tattoo-removal program—the only form of restitution it ever offered—many lined up for the procedure. Still, as anyone who has ever had a voluntary tattoo removed can tell you, you can never unsee its trace on your skin.

“La verdad una vez despierta no vuelve a dormirse,” José Martí wrote. “The truth, once awake, will not go back to sleep.”

The ghost remains. In wound and scar and the molecular basis of memory.

• • • •

“Join me,” Anita urged again, virtually, when my compatriots and I first resurfaced after those of us who had been tagged were again allowed to access the internet.

Verna shook her head. She had turned completely gray during her long stint in one of the internment centers in the Midwest. But her eyes were ageless and filled with the dream of discoveries deferred.

Antonia also declined Anita’s offer. She was looking after some ten children whose parents had been disappeared, and her life’s work was now trying to reunite them with any remaining family members.

And me? Well, in the intervening years I’d fallen in love with a man whose resistance had also permanently marked him, and I had rooted myself on the piece of land he had shared with the tagged. It was the only place I felt at home, and I wasn’t going anywhere.

“Sisters,” Anita tried again. “I’m this close to telling you I’ve found Emma. A Chilean national has accepted a guest post at Swansea, to explain the leap she’s made in genetic reporting—going from firefly luciferase to the much brighter luciferase from deep-sea shrimp for in vivo imaging.”

Verna and Antonia scoured their notes in the Emma dossier we’d built together, and peppered Anita with personal facts to check—as if she didn’t have those same notes in a file (v. 20) open on the laptop in front of her.

“She’s about your age, Meche,” Anita added when she noticed my silence. “And her research abstracts are rife with references to literature, including Jules Verne. Doesn’t that sound like your friend?”

Instead of answering, I thought about an article I’d read just that morning, about ghost imaging that doesn’t actually capture the image of an object. Instead, it reconstructs it, creating a Frankensteined whole from information provided by two streams of light: one that scatters around the object to form a random reference pattern, the other that passes through the object itself.

“I think this investigative caper conclusively shows that flavor chemists are better at solving mysteries than chemical physicists or crystallographers,” Anita said to fill my silence. Predictably, her words threw Verna and Antonia into an orgy of rebuttals.

I said nothing. I pictured dragonflies, witch moths and fireflies joining the bees that were flying lazy lemniscates around my head, just out of view of my laptop’s camera. The composite image was the structure of my universe in ghosts: scatter patterns and brightly shining blade running me through.

• • • •

When we finally connect by phone, we don’t speak of the past. She’s Evangelina now, not Emma, and every time she says this new-to-me name I’m reminded that while she will always be my first love, she is also a stranger.

Her English is no longer slack and loose as it was in Miami. It is beautifully precise, but all the quirks of expression I once lived for are gone. She is a citizen of Chile now, married to another Chilena—a journalism professor—who is staying in Santiago while Evangelina works for a semester from Swansea.

She describes for me how much her work has advanced since she switched from firefly-light to shrimp-light. “It goes more swimmingly now,” she says at the end of her disquisition, then can’t help laughing at her pun. “And your own work, does it revolve around insects, too? I seem to remember . . . ”

“Bees,” I say.

“Yes.”

And while I’m gratified she remembers, it’s clear she wants to steer the conversation away from this or any recollection from our past lives. We spend the rest of the call talking about the recent opening of a five-thousand-year old Eastern European tomb where archeologists found sealed vessels filled with honey.

I don’t think the discoverers sat down to snack on cake drizzled with the ancient honey, but they could have—honey’s shelf-life is eternal. It is an inhospitable substance, so hygroscopic it sucks the life out of microorganisms and the mischief out of bacteria. This means it offers perfect recall of time and place. The plants whose nectars were gathered may have vanished; the gathering bees may have been driven into extinction; the land that birthed both may no longer be what it once was—but the honey keeps their ghosts intact.

My ghosts buzz above my head as I hold the phone to my ear. My ghosts beat their paired wings in regular 4/4 time from within the chambers of my heart. My ghosts open and end our conversations with the promise of return.

• • • •

C6 H12 O6

The land we walk through today is filled with remembered history. This boulder, glacial debris from 2.6 million years ago, remembers when there was no woodland around it, just a sheet of ice 2,000 feet thick. A little farther down this path, a 300-year-old eastern hemlock recollects sheltering upstart revolutionaries and their Oneida allies on their way to Fort Stanwix. And farther yet, is the 100-year-old yellow birch my husband, Del, remembers his grandfather tapping for sap to make old-fashioned birch beer.

During the worst of our nation’s period of formalized xenophobia, this woodland hid an unplanned settlement for those at risk for deportation and internment, and though it’s been decades, Del and I can still remember where each homesite stood. But age is without mercy, and it won’t be long before we have to leave this home—and its history of seismic shift, solidarity, and sanctuary—for a more sensible residence.

Still, for today, we are on this sacred ground where our past and our present overlay. Evangelina-Emma is here too, for today, walking beside us. She and I have not become best friends again, but she’s come for this first in-real-life visit because we’ve agreed this is how it should have been—us old and in each other’s company.

Del and Evangelina-Emma are deep in conversation, about a landrace strain of raspberries that grows on a ridge where the woodland meets pasture, when one of the wheels of Del’s chair gets stuck in a deep rut. When he can’t free it by himself, my first love helps my last love get unstuck so that we can keep moving.

It’s almost dusk when we make it to the thicket of raspberries. It is late for bees and early for fireflies, but the whirr of insect wings is in the air anyway. Evangelina-Emma complains about how her dentures have ruined her ability to discern one raspberry strain from another and it’s a good thing she didn’t become a flavor chemist after all—but she climbs halfway into the canes to hunt for the bright red gems, regardless.

I watch her pop berries into her mouth, and hear her humming happily to herself between mouthfuls. I’m almost certain it is a Gloria Estefan song, and when it finally dawns on me which song it is and what it calls back, I reach for my husband’s hand. When I turn to him, his eyes are on the bees flying above my head. When we first met, it took Del less than a day to see the bees and, like the young Emma, he didn’t let go in the face of their incomprehensible being.

Neither belief nor explanation are necessary in the magic of accompaniment—just the will to be present in a spirit of love and community.

When my husband’s gaze moves from the bees to me, he smiles and reminds me that I’ve scheduled a Zoom session a scant twenty minutes from now, so that my sisters in vocation can finally meet the long-lost sister they helped me find.

I nod and start over to where Evangelina-Emma is honest-to-God cavorting in the canes, but my husband’s voice brings me to a stop. “Do you ever wonder whether what you and your sister scientists shared over all those years was less a mystery to be solved than it was a mystery to be prayed?” he asks.

“No,” I answer around the lump that is suddenly in my throat, “I don’t think it was either. I think it was always a shared question about the mysteries that invoke us.”

The bees change the pattern of their flight from waggle to round, tracing increasingly greater orbitals around me, then the three humans (and infinite non humans) here with them, then farther yet—as if they were dancing the shape of an ever-expanding atomic molecule.

But no matter its shape, it is still a bee’s dance—communicating risks and benefits and what can be foraged right here, right now.

My bees dance for friable pasts. For orphaned futures. For the solace and grief of ghosts. For the privilege of growing old. For me and mine and the times. But mostly, for the chemistry of memory and the memory of chemistry.

AS: Yeahhhhh, when I went to World Fantasy in Montreal, as my first return to in-person conventions, it was so weird because I pretty much forgot how to social. Just being around people seemed bizarre in ways I can’t completely explain. I spent a lot of that time in a weird daze. But something I love about the genre community is that awkward is kind of the default: Nearly everyone relates to or even actually feels a similar sort of awkward. People who don’t experience that awkward are far less common in these circles. In any case, I am nervous about the whole thing, but I’m also really looking forward to seeing you!

CY: Summer is workshop season, when writers are gathering in groups with workshop leaders—usually published authors, editors, or teachers. People often don’t realize how much there is to learn about writing and storytelling, and how much effort goes into learning it. Learning to write is like learning anything else—there is a lot of study and practice that has to go into it before we learn to do it well. And we’re never really done learning! There are moments in my book club meetings when I cringe over someone’s comment about one thing or another, and I think, “You have no idea how hard it is to tell a story this well!”

AS: Absolutely. In fact, I really admire writers who are constantly learning new things, improving their craft, and challenging themselves in different ways. I do think that some writers somewhat accidentally stumble their way to writing a great story—and then usually can’t replicate that success because they don’t really understand the way their own story works. And of course, there are some bad teachers out there! But I think many writers benefit from studying craft, and from receiving the right kind of feedback, all to get a better sense of what works and why.

CY: I haven’t had a chance to work this way with writers in a while, and it’s one of my favorite things to do. For the non-writer readers out there, there is a lot that goes into writing a story that someone wants to publish. No one—not even your favorite writers—sprang fully formed from the brow of Zeus. Forgive the mixed metaphor, but there’s an awful lot of gristle in the sausage as it’s being made!

AS: In interviews I sometimes ask writers about their revision processes, and even a short piece can go through multiple iterations, rounds of feedback, and sometimes, massive restructuring. So much time and energy and love gets poured into something that a reader may finish in under fifteen minutes; not to mention the understanding and knowledge gained from countless hours of study and practice. It’s similar to the beautiful little dessert at a Michelin starred restaurant, which is far more than just the ingredients and the time spent preparing; it actually represents weeks or even months of development and years of education.

We hope you will find some delicious works within our pages, and we hope they will be as memorable for you as they are for us.

• • • •

In the July issue of Fantasy Magazine . . .

Short fiction by B.S (“Odd Peas in a Pod) and Sabrina Vourvoulias (“The Memory of Chemistry”); flash fiction by Lindsey Godfrey Eccles (“A Star is Born”) and Michelle Muenzler (“The Life and Death of Atomic Tangerine”); poetry by Shilpa Kamat (“Goldilocks”) and AJ Wentz (“Self-Inflicted Haunt”); and an interview with author RF Kuang.