And we all have a role to play in combatting white supremacy’s vestiges in this country as it targets the most vulnerable folks in our communities. (Relatedly: we all have a responsibility to stand against and disrupt the rise in anti-Asian racism and harassment in the States.

So swaths of my writing have just been me trying to figure out why that is. I’m always circling around the idea of what can constitute a “home”-whether it’s a place, a person, a feeling, or something else-and, aside from the greater Houston area, Kansai is maybe the only other place so far where I’ve felt shades of that particular warmth. The answer’s pretty mundane: I’ve been the recipient of-and been deeply grateful for-the kindness and warmth of friends and strangers, locally and abroad, and that will never not be interesting to me. Does Owen feel challenged, or replaced, or just stimulated? The cat comes into the house at a moment of tension between the narrator and his boyfriend, Owen. And then a song called “From Now On,” by She Her Her Hers, stayed on repeat throughout the very last edit. Music helped, though: I was listening to a lot of Jazmine Sullivan, Hyukoh, and Men I Trust in drafting.

Putting that on the page felt difficult in the way that capturing the world as it’s experienced can be difficult. But it’s also synonymous with daily life in the States (and that’s just if you’re very, very lucky). That constant intermingling of American violence with daily minutiae alters the way we approach our individual narratives. I can drive to the puppy day care to drop off my dog, find myself terrified when a cop pulls up behind me, and then elated when a toddler waves at me in the grocery store ten minutes later, with the knowledge that some guy with a gun could walk in and make it a horrible day for everyone.

Scrolling through a news feed, we’ll run up against phone-filmed footage of state-sanctioned killings alongside dire GoFundMe requests alongside, like, videos of adorable pandas. Once I had a firmer sense of the plot, its level of difficulty felt like a challenge more than anything else, and also a lot like life as it’s actively being lived. Totally-I was anxious from technical and thematic standpoints, but I’m always antsy about clarity and precision. When you came up with this idea, did you worry about pairing the warmth of pet ownership with the horror of murder? Put otherwise, what possibilities did this open up for you? In “ Foster,” your story in this week’s issue, a man agrees to take care of the cat of his brother, who’s serving a prison term for killing two people.

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