The idea for the strange encounter, the story’s central event, came to me very quickly, in the course of a night when I had trouble sleeping. I wrote a complete draft of the story that morning. It’s very unusual for me to produce anything so quickly. But then crafting the story, as you say, took much longer. Thinking about the characters, trying to understand their situations—that was more of a rational process, requiring deliberation, trial and error.
Should we take this as a sign of an even rockier marital road ahead? I suppose that’s subject to interpretation. Personally, I tend to imagine that their marriage will be more or less adequate—that they’ll stay together, raise the kids, all of that. But it also seems to me that the deeper form of intimacy they had imagined will remain out of reach. In your previous story in the magazine, “Wood Sorrel House,” the characters were transported to a kind of alternate reality.