Jessika Bouvier: Through multiple points in her life, Eleanor is forced to uproot herself to nurse a family member. First her parents, who have both passed by the beginning of the story, then her brother, Liam, who was removed from his cult’s grounds by the state and left in her care. Can you talk about the interplay between Eleanor’s role as a caregiver, and her views on suffering?

Abby Schroering: This question makes me think about two things. The first is that, somewhere along the way, Eleanor picked up the idea that it is possible to live without suffering, and that life without suffering looks like being able to live completely and totally for herself, unimpeded by the needs of others. So, by this logic, she won’t be free of suffering until she is completely alone, or at least until everyone around her can live without her.

The second thing it makes me think about is that it is not uncommon for one person to be solely responsible for taking care of another person, and that actually is too much to ask. It takes a lot of people to take care of one person—one might even say a village—regardless of their stage of life or ability to take care of themselves. Eleanor doesn’t live in a world where there are networks or structures or systems in place to provide that kind of community-based care. Like, what I want to know is, where were all of her parents’ friends? Where did all of the other people who were in Liam’s cult go? Why aren’t there any neighbors? Where are all of these other non-blood relations that adults in a society structured around care would have? Without them, Eleanor has to absorb it all by herself; and, between that and having to work, she doesn’t really have space to even think about what a brighter version of her life might look like, beyond waiting for what she sees as her suffering to be over.

JB: Closely related: you chose such loaded word choices to convey Eleanor’s viewpoint. On her parent’s deaths, which occurred in quick succession [emphasis added]: “What the coupled death had cost in grief it made up for in expediency.” She thinks of this as a “trade.” The economy is everywhere, from Liam’s canned-bean towers to pyramid-scheme steak knives, punctuated by interjections from Eleanor’s corporate responsibilities vis-a-vis virtual direct messages. To me, part of the “Samhain” secret sauce is this combination of class struggle, omnipresent decay, and grief. How do you view these components working?

AS: For me, the tragedy of Eleanor’s life is that, in her very specific circumstances, she’s done everything that she’s “supposed” to do—like, she probably did well on standardized tests, she has a full-time job, she’s trying to take care of her family—and, yeah, I do think that she views it as a kind of exchange. If I graduate, if I do this job, if I fulfill these familial duties, then I will have earned economic stability, health insurance, and a sense of some kind of fulfillment. But what becomes clear to her over the course of this one, pretty bad day is that, actually, whatever entity she thought she was bargaining with has not held up its end of that deal. She’s crushed by medical debt, yes. She’s not processing her grief because she’s too focused on making it seem like she’s still being productive through any number of major and minor catastrophes. And, as you say, everything is falling apart—there’s the physical decay of the house, and there’s also the spiritual decay. Everything is branded, advertisements are everywhere, her job is vapid drivel, and everyone’s energy is going into keeping up those facades instead of, I don’t know, figuring out what’s poisoning everyone or why people keep blowing things up.

JB: I also thought there were clear parallels between Liam’s cult and Eleanor’s corporate job, which functions by similar rules. Can you speak to this a little more?

AS: Ah, I see what you’re getting at. Because they are both driven by a primary goal of extraction under the guise of a larger mission. Because they both create the illusion of community within their ranks through control and deprivation. Because they both use a bunch of dumb acronyms that will make their internal documents difficult to interpret when they inevitably get turned over in discovery.

JB: Eleanor receives this advice from her therapist: “Kindly but firmly reassert the truth.” This becomes a sort of raison d’etre, the threshold from which she operates, particularly when interacting with Liam. How do you see honesty working within the story? How does Eleanor’s dedication to enforcing “the truth” help and harm her in turn?

AS: I think her explicit focus on telling the truth for Liam’s sake brings to light how many dishonesties, large and small, she uses on a day-to-day basis just to get by: everything from moving her cursor around to keep her dot green, to obscuring the severity of the violence in her world, to convincing herself that she is leading a livable life. Once she gets into the habit of telling the truth in one part of her life, it gets harder to avoid it in others. Whether that ultimately helps or harms her, I think, remains to be seen. Yes, you’ve realized that your job is eating your soul, so maybe it’s good to leave it, but that could be exposing her—and by extension Liam—to even more precarity. No money, no health insurance, no community . . . Maybe the dogs will take care of it. 

JB: This story is so deft at mixing in the speculative and uncanny. The talking dogs, the bean cans, the trick or treating child in the empty street! I’m curious about the seeds of the story and the embedded images. Did the imagery come to you first, or the plot?

AS: Definitely the imagery. I have a possibly-constructed memory of being in a childhood friend’s creaky old house full of rescue greyhounds and being flooded with unlocalized dread. The other things that have made me feel that way are 1) the continual poisoning of the planet and all of stuff that lives on it, and 2) office jobs. Mix in a minor medical emergency and set it on Halloween, and that’s the story.

JB: Who do you consider to be the antagonist in the story, and why? (Personally, I’ve got my money on the house. Ominous mail! There’s gotta be asbestos in the insulation.)

AS: The trick-or-treating child. Just kidding! Yeah, there’s for sure something wrong with the house. Asbestos is a good shout, though I’m hoping the doctors would have been able to figure that one out without so much trouble. My guess is that there’s fracking nearby and it’s contaminating the water supply or something, and the fossil fuel industry is covering it up. Or maybe Worcestershire is the antagonist—he seems a little suspicious.

JB: At Chatterbox!, we believe in whimsy, so we always end on a less self-serious question. Eleanor steals the CutCo knife from her ex. If you were to steal one object from one of your exes, what would it be? 

AS: My actual answer is the tickets to the John Prine concert we were supposed to go see right before we split. I will always regret never seeing him live.

My whimsical answer is this really pretty, really old bluegrass banjo. Maybe I would have actually learned to play on that thing.