Just One Thing with Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey

Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey’s flash “Jellyfish” searches for a change of heart in the very darkest part of the ocean. Here, they share just one thing about the piece: 

This story was initially inspired by my friend telling me about his grandfather's heart transplant, one of several organs he'd acquired from other bodies over the course of his life. This got me thinking about the composite nature of the human body, how in the modern age any person exists as a kind of biotechnological collaboration. There is something both cyberpunk and fantastical about that, and I connected this idea to the kinds of "magic" that are possessed by nonhuman creatures (the flight of birds, for example, or in this case the immortality of the jellyfish). Isn't our relationship to technology in many ways a desire to attain superhuman power? And where do we first witness those powers? Not in ourselves, but in the natural world, and in our own stories.