I am a real dork for Hayao Miyazaki, but especially Spirited Away. The movie follows a young Japanese girl named Sen as she wanders out of contemporary Japan into an old carnival village. She is with her parents and in the midst of moving to a new town, and Sen doesn't know she has crossed a threshold into the spirit realm until it's too late. Her parents are turned into pigs, and a boy who is really a rivier spirit tries to escort her back across the divide in time to escape, but Sen doesn't make it. Our hero spends the remainder of the movie on a Japanese folk underworld quest. It's fun to look at through the Joseph Campbell lens and animated in a way that's hard to describe as pretty—it's quiet, and pays attention to subtlety, and uses silence to create an affect that is uniquely Studio Ghibli. Sen has to remember her real name, and free her friends of various kinds of suffering, but the goal of my story was to recreate that initial feeling of stumbling over a threshold. Once you're there, it's too late to turn back—sort of like a trap that slowly reveals itself when you're fully trapped inside it. That's a feeling I associate with the death of a loved one. I worried that the gravitas of the Spirited Away world wouldn't mix with someone I knew who lost their father to alcoholism in St. Louis, Missouri, but this is the weird blend that resulted, and I kind of like it. Hopefully it earns its place on the page with a low word count—this was a story with a length goal in mind during the writing. Word count is something I've tried to ignore since they told me to do so in graduate school, but since then, I've come to appreciate stories that get closer to flash fiction than a small novella. Plus, they're easier to get published.