The Story Behind the Story: “When Death Calls”
A behind-the-scenes look at how this short fiction came to life.
When Death Calls is available to read at ANARKISS, first published in May 2024.
When Death Calls is a short story told from the perspective of a teenage girl who died from pregnancy complications after being forced to carry her child to full-term because of restrictive abortion bans in America.
For this flash fiction piece in particular, there were two main inspirations behind it — a television show and an essay.
About a decade ago, I first watched the Black Mirror episode, Be Right Back — one of my favorites from the sci-fi series. While artificial intelligence is all the rage these days, it was less so in 2013 when this episode first aired, but the chilling thing about Black Mirror has always been its foresight when it comes to the intersection of technology and social commentary. In this specific episode, a widow uses artificial intelligence to first recreate a virtual version of her dead husband, so that she can communicate with him as a means to process her grief. But later on, more advanced AI technology allowed for an android version to come to life, who looks nearly identical to her husband.
The second inspiration was an essay penned by one of my favorite writers on Medium, Colby Hess, titled Robocalls from Deepfaked Dead Kids. Essentially, in real life, parents have been using AI to recreate voices of their dead children who were victims of gun violence and use those voices to send robocalls to government officials to lobby for gun control. I thought that this was especially disturbing and made me contemplate the ethics of using AI in this manner to fight for important advocacies, especially if traditional tactics have fallen on deaf ears.
I am not one to shy away from social justice issues in my fiction; in fact, oftentimes, they are the driving force behind them. For this story, I wanted to explore the ethical dilemma of leveraging the dead, who obviously aren’t able to provide consent, to lobby for change for our most pressing issues in the present time.
I’ve already written many stories about a variety of societal problems, but I have not touched on abortion rights yet. Though this is an extremely sensitive subject, I believed that it was an important topic to center on — not necessarily to make my case for a certain side, but at least to get readers to discern and question their own viewpoints about the issue at play.
Fortuitously, I completed writing this short story when Alabama made the controversial IVF ruling that frozen embryos are people. It only reinforced my conviction that When Death Calls was necessary and urgent fiction.
Given the controversial nature of this story, I expected that it would be hard to shop around and it likely would take time for it to find a publication that would welcome the opportunity to publish difficult material. I received five rejections (all from US-based lit mags) before I got the acceptance notice from ANARKISS, which is based out of the UK. It may have been pure coincidence that a UK-based zine was willing to publish a piece that spotlights America’s absurd abortion policies, but I do think that partially played a role here.
Additionally, I personally thought that my piece fit the theme of the zine’s second volume, Power Dynamics, really well. In particular, they were seeking art that “explores how systems of oppression impact upon society to create a (non-consensual) dom-sub dynamic, until we reclaim the power.” ANARKISS takes pride in being a counterculture zine that combines art and activism. I don’t think there’s any other publication that would’ve been more appropriate to host the story of When Death Calls than ANARKISS.
So, Long Story Short (SLSS) is a Medium publication where I pull back the curtain on my original works of short fiction that have been published in literary magazines and journals.
I write about the why and the how, and I aim to post my thoughts within two weeks from the story’s first publication, while the story is still fresh on my mind.
By doing so, I hope to have written artifacts beyond the stories themselves and be reminded of my motivations, inspirations, and evolving writing process, as well as the state of the external world and my inner life in that moment in time.
Thanks for following along.
For more short fiction writing, consider subscribing to my Substack newsletter of the same name, So, Long Story Short.
I write drabbles and offer a behind-the-scenes look at my original works of short fiction published in literary magazines and journals.
