“Annie’s House” was written partially in response to a poem by my favorite recluse, Emily Dickinson. It reads:

The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted opon Earth –

The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity –

This poem has always resonated with me, especially coming from a culture that celebrates death. In Mexico, Dia de Los Muertos is an important part of addressing what will happen to us all, and not fearing it. It makes mourning an actionable ritual. The lack of this in American life makes for an uncomfortable relationship with death, one that Annie seems to have had at her husband’s funeral.

I was also thinking on the idea of losing one’s partner when writing this. A year ago, I watched The Normal Heart , a movie about two men in the midst of the AIDS crisis. As the protagonist watches his lover become sicker and eventually die from the disease, I realized I can’t imagine anything worse. To have a partner in life, and then to watch helplessly as they are taken by disease. Annie’s mixture of exhaustion and apathy let her house fall apart around her, as nothing mattered except for keeping her partner comfortable. In the story, her husband dies of ALS, which can completely shut down a body in a manner of months. My own family watched one of ours suffer from this disease, and we all felt the guilty relief of his passing. Sometimes, an illness makes death a mercy.

In the original draft, Annie converses with her neighbor while taking out the trash on night one. The neighbor is a younger woman, a quirky newlywed who teaches language via the internet. In the original ending, Annie knocks on her door and takes her up on a previous offer of a cup of tea. This felt inorganic, and I ended up scrapping it. Not only would it have added another three pages (and my classmates would kill me) but I felt it would diminish the process of healing. Taking the step of cleaning her house, having a productive, actionable goal, doesn’t necessarily mean that Annie is ready to make new friends and dig up old feelings in casual conversation.