“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.

Poetry is the format I struggle with the most. I love prose, I have fun with prose. Poetry, on the other hand, slows me down like no other. I enjoy reading other people’s work, from Rupi Kaur to John Milton. Writing poetry had been difficult for me since I left the seventh grade, and stopped feeling like the only way of expressing my feelings was to agonize over a boy in verse. Rhyming verse. The memory of those days makes me cringe enough to never want to attempt it again.

For “My Grandfather Was a Migrant Picker” I drew on the feeling of separation I have felt since moving to New York. My mother’s side of the family came to the United States and settled in Chicago, where I was raised, and where everyone else remained. The inevitable feeling of homesickness comes in waves, but I didn’t anticipate feeling a real loss when it came to the expression of Mexican culture. Where I was once surrounded by a singular tradition, a dialect, and cuisine, I am now lost in cheesy restaurant decorations, an entirely different Spanish, and the impossible quest for a preservative-free tortilla.

Drifting farther away from my grandfather’s experience of living in Mexico and facing the hardships of beginning a life in the U.S. made me feel more alienated from the culture I had taken for granted my entire life. I sought out Mexican life in any form possible, consuming movies and books alike. I came upon my boyfriend’s copy of And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him, the short novel outlining the life of a young boy as a Mexican migrant picker. The grueling conditions made me think of my own grandfather, who passed when I was an infant. What would he think of his family now, fully Americanized? This brought me to imagining his life before mine, and when I put pen to paper, this is what became of it.

For “Maybe I’ll Move” the picture is a little more clear. Dwelling once more on the concept of home made me consider my living situations, past and present. Now happily stowed away in Fort George, I considered when life wasn’t so friendly.

We’ve all had bad roommates before, but when dirty dishes and high electric bills give way to intimidation and physical violence, the experience shifts. I’ve had my own adventure with Craigslist rooming, and suffice it to say that it is a mistake I will only make once. The change in relationship with friends when you move in together is a different experience was well. Where absence keeps the heart fond, intimacy can sour any love. It’s a different story when the person who makes you endlessly anxious once made you feel loved and happy. “Maybe I’ll Move” isn’t just a reflection on moving apartments, but the importance of moving on and letting go of relationships that don’t serve us.

My own Catholic education instilled in me a fear of, well, everything. From ghosts to the devil himself, I was surrounded by scary stories. Catholic school can be a terrifying place, even without the fanged, sightless monsters attacking from every corner.

Room G42 began as a short story idea I had last winter. I found myself twitching every time the radiator in my classroom made a noise. When I gazed outside, I saw that heavy snowflakes– the slippery kind that make the MTA slow to a crawl– had begun to fall. I thought to myself, What might happen if I got trapped here? And then I wondered something else. What would happen if I got trapped here, and the noises I heard were more than just the heaters going?  The idea of some sort of creatures in the walls has always chilled me, from the tiny fey in Guillermo del Toro’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark to the cave-dwelling bipedal nightmares of The Descent. Add bloodlust, sonar, and a craving for human flesh, and you’ve got a worthy monster.

Ava’s monologue comes as the shaken students of her school gather in a classroom and try to concoct a plan. With no teachers in sight, she gathers herself to rally the troops. This is a common scene in horror; one where the characters conveniently recap what the monsters are capable of, who’s dead and gone, and what their plan is. The latter is important so that when one part of said plan goes awry, the audience understands the stakes. I have personally always loved horror movies where the characters have to get creative about their weapon choices (see: the blender in You’re Next and the knitting needles in Halloween). The idea of some sheltered, Catholic teens working together and being creative in fighting back against potentially demonic wall-crawlers is incredibly fun to write.

A little on the monsters. The description in the monologue should provide enough chilling details; if they hate the sun and can smell your blood, they’re probably not great with kids. However, I omitted the visual descriptions, as they didn’t raise the stakes or move the story along. I envisioned something like the Texas Blind Salamander, but larger, more clawed, and fanged. I love how eerie these eyeless little guys are, especially with the ghostly color of their skin.

This is not the first script I’ve written by a long shot, as this is a medium I’ve explored as early as high school. However, this is the first time I have had to present a stand-alone monologue, and hope if sufficed in telling a story. I scrapped two earlier versions, where there was more planning or description, and tried to focus on the chaos that would be planning this, and the fearful tone that hovers over everything.