The summer in Minnesota has been mostly mild so far. But last week got really, really hot. So, naturally, I started thinking about winter. I think that’s where this piece came from. At first, I was thinking about a ship stuck in the ice. But slowly, it morphed into a more sci-fi-style setting.

And, if you crash on an ice planet, you’re definitely going to want to salvage what you can. So the focus of the piece, then, became the salvage operation–and the two characters involved in that–rather than the crashed spaceship.