They always knock with questions and promises. They assure me that checking these boxes will only take a few. forward. minutes. But time winds serpentine when so many voices crescendo with each box that asks me to fit inside.…
Content Warnings—ableism, audism We corner our resident assistant right outside her dorm room. Her back presses flat against the door. Her hands come up. She is ready to escape, but she is also ready to give a reason. I…
How “The Ghost Birds” Spreads Its Wings after Taking the Leap By Albert Liau • How does a story begin to enchant us? When speaking with First Draft host Mitzi Rapkin, Richard Powers seems to suggest an answer: “You…
My Favorite Elvis The boy and the dog were both named Elvis. Whenever Daddy hollered “Elvis” they both came to him. Even when it was one of them he wanted: the boy for a chore, the dog for a…
CRAFT is thrilled to welcome Alan Heathcock as guest judge for our 2022 Short Fiction Prize. Heathcock is the author of Volt, a collection of short stories from 2011, and 40, a debut novel that publishes on August 2,…
Each year we are privileged to be able to nominate work for anthologies and awards including Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers (Best Debut Short Stories), and…
By Katy Scarlett • In 1979, Rosalind Krauss published her now-famous essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” which explored how new forms of three-dimensional art-making borrowed from sculpture, monument, architecture, interior and landscape design. She writes, “as the 1960s began…
Content Warnings—cesarean section, traumatic birth I could not milk. Was it due to upset levels of oxytocin, prolactin, beta-endorphin? May have been the morphine pump I kept firing like a trigger from my hospital bed in the postlabor/delivery room.…
Elvia Wilk’s nonfiction debut, Death by Landscape (out July 19, 2022, via Soft Skull Press), investigates how we might displace human-centered narratives. Through literary immersion, research into spectral encounters and virtual reality, reflections on her own physicality, and first-person…
In The Witch Hare, a witch’s familiar—a curious young hare—goes on a globe-hopping journey to help her sad companion learn to live life to the fullest again. As the hare ventures out to seek adventure, she shows the witch…
In graduate school, one of our wisest teachers, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, said that when she constructs characters, she always asks herself: how is this person ruining their own life?
I have found the directness of this question to be shrewd and revealing when it comes to determining what choices my characters will make in the course of a story. It’s also an extremely depressing line of inquiry to apply to any character who is a parent. Because, of course, it’s not just their own life they’re ruining.
In 2021, I wrote “The Witch Hare” to explore the intractable, interdependent bond between parents and children and the often-fraught role of the surrogate or stepparent. I tried to write the narrator and Sheila as opposite poles, both of whom are loving and harming Macky: one through inaction, and the other through actions she believes are righteous. I love writing paranoid characters, because sometimes they’re—kind of right to be worried? The idea that it’s possible to prepare so thoroughly for catastrophe that you earn the right to survive is comforting, but isolating and dangerous in practice. I think I’ve written Sheila somewhat uncharitably, but I really do feel for her. What an awful thing: to terrify and fail the people you love in your desperation to save them.
The mythology embedded in “The Witch Hare” was largely invented but also informed by a variety of sources, beginning with the poem “The Hare,” by Walter de la Mare. I also looked to regional versions of other witch stories and visual art, including the sculptures of Beth Cavener and paintings by Alex Kuno and Henri Rousseau. I have always been intrigued by “The Hare,” which is in the public domain and which I’ve used in its entirety in the story. The dichotomy in how the titular hare is written delights me: literal, corporeal details (her lissome ear, her eyes on the moon, her nibbling teeth) are paired with descriptions of her spectral, mystical presence (leaving the moonlight and fleeing into darkness like a “ghostie”). I love that her behavior in the field feels both alien and utterly natural, and that she is distinctly feminine, but also menacing in her activeness and poise. I wanted the interwoven tale of the witch hare to express a similar tension.
Just as the witch and the witch hare have a codependent but ultimately inequitable power dynamic, Sheila and the narrator both pose a threat to Macky that she does not pose to them. In the internal logic of the story, each iteration of the witch hare exists as a lens, and an implicit question. The narrator is transfiguring her memories into myths, so she can better understand them. I’m drawn to art, in all disciplines, that articulates something about our messy human psyches through explorations of animal consciousness, and I wanted to make a small contribution to that body of work with “The Witch Hare.” Animals in fiction can be an ideal blank canvas: like parents, they always seem to know too much and too little, all at once.
AJ STROSAHL is a writer and small business owner who lives and works in Oakland, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming from Ruminate, Cleaver Magazine, Blue Earth Review, Coal Hill Review, and other outlets. Her short story “Dayton” was longlisted for the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction in 2020 and her essay “Dogs I’ve Read” was a finalist for the 2021 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize. Her writing has received recent support from the Vashon Artist Residency and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. AJ holds an MFA from St. Mary’s College of California and is working on a novel, Only in Pure Air, loosely inspired by the Huanghe Shilin ultramarathon disaster. Find AJ on Instagram @ajs1025.
