my short story about past life & gender is out!!!! you can read it here!!!!!
In your last life, you were a tiger princess. You lived by the water and you adorned yourself in gold circlets; you chimed when you walked, like birdsong, like blessing, lotus flowers threaded in your long, raven-down hair. A snarl-handed oma who loved you better than she did your sister taught you to paint your face and to strike first. You were cruel, beautiful—when you tipped your face up to the sun, it shone brighter, just for you.
Some of you will die in the road. Some-not-all. Our folks’ve been around since before roads the pavement crunch burnt rubber big wet eyeshin
realized that i ought to post the other thing i wrote recently, a short piece commissioned by an event about what the cities of the future might/could/should look like. story below the cut as well; the link above is to my website page where you can download this as a(n EXTREMELY CUTE) printable zine!
Some of you will die in the road. Some-not-all. Our folks’ve been around since before roads
the pavement crunch
burnt rubber
big wet eyeshine in the dark
leg lock
stutterbreath
freeze
and freeze
and freeze
And get up, if you’re lucky.
Some of you will die in the road. I know that like I know the wind through the night trees clacking branches together like bones. I know it ‘cause it’s just a numbers game. But some of you won’t. Some of you will get smart. Get fed. Get big the way the roads got big, city-sound sprawl. Get mean. Get fat. Get into trash cans. Get good at knowing when to drop and roll.
There’s a lot of you now. There won’t be next spring. A year’s a funny thing. The beavers off the creek trail say the cicadas come singing every seventeen. But that’s the beavers for you. They get old. Our folks don’t get seventeen. We get cicada crunch between our teeth. We get all the screaming days of summer. The world’s louder these days. Smaller. Tighter. Dusk light hurts. Edges clatter. Hard to hide. Sometimes you go reaching for the dirt and hit concrete
dead
cold
nowhere to burrow nowhere to cling
all the roads roaring up to the sky
but we move different, our folks. We move in the dark. We have prowl time
moon high lone time
mouth slivered open showing teeth
even in the city it gets quiet at night if you know where to hide from the streetlights, and God, ain’t it pretty when you sneak sight of a star. We keep moving, our folks. Slow swaying steady. We don’t walk a straight line but we get where we need.
Listen close, yeah? I won’t have you long. I like quiet, lonesome. So will you, when you grow up. First I saw you, you were all writhing pink. None of you bigger than the caterpillars I licked off the honeysuckle last spring. I held you in the burrow of my body where the fur and skin and warm make a home and now I hold you on my shoulders along my back down to the tail. Hold close. Grip tight. Go solo soon. Get big enough to walk. Get it, then, why we like nights alone. The hawks whose babies beg-cry in the spring say they can see the whole big city from up there, all sprawling out and eating land like kudzu does. Down here we get the leaf litter and dirt. What I know’s underbrush, the cracks of things, the rich dirt smell, the edges and the seams. What I know’s down low, belly brushing pavement. You splay your paw and you can count to five. You count your springtimes and you won’t get to five. Our folks live short and we live hard and the end comes fast and bright. When the raccoons clattering in the cans ask why we spend so much time faking dead, you tell them it’s called a goddamn rehearsal.
Some of you will make it. I know that. You’re not my first litter and you won’t be my last. It’s a numbers game, but if you sniff around enough dumpsters you’re bound to hit the cat-food jackpot. I’m no catechist, but here’s my best: Stay low. Hold close. Flash teeth when you get cornered. When something bigger than your bite comes running, you don’t flee. You freeze, drop, sleep like the dead. If you’re lucky you’re not. Dogs don’t like deadsleep meals. Cars don’t care. If you open your eyes, you say, well, there’s dying down once. Get up. Get ready to do it again.
Hold close. Dig nails. Cling on tight. My momma said people don’t think about us. People move in straight lines
bright lights
hard stone turns
not like how we ramble and sway. My momma said people don’t think about us and she chewed up dead rats off a garage floor and died twitching with her belly full. It’s only half true, they don’t think about us. I’ve dropped down dead in front of half a dozen dogs. Woke up with their spittle ringing collars round my neck where their teeth couldn’t get through. Once they bayed me up a scabby old-field pine and I curled my tail ‘round the closest branch, looked down, and you know, I’ll be damned if people’s hands don’t look like ours. No fur, five fingers, five nails. Splay toes. Climb trees. Grip tight. When you get something you hold it hard. When it noses back to life you let it go. I let all my litters go and I don’t miss you, ‘cause I trust you know to prowl as good as me
mouth open
teeth shine
ducking from the light.
Most of our folks see just two springtimes. I want three. I want to hear the hawk chicks sing again. When I get scared I freeze, drop, sleep it off. I find small places. I find quiet. I find stars. In the dusk time, prick your nose for coyotes, for hounds off the leash. Don’t talk to nobody slobbering foam. Sometimes the death comes on you from the inside, curls you up and hurts like hell and no one smells it coming. For me, I know what’s coming, more than like. I know the cling of pavement under claws, the gravel ditches
apple cores
sweet rotten in the road glare
they throw feasts through rolled-down windows never knowing. I’ll show you how to shuck life from the crinkling foil, grease-wet bag
how to peel away the layers down to crusts and bun and burger rinds
The guillotine was conceived as swifter, painless, more humane. You touch your throat. You wonder.
new story dropped specifically in time for bastille day, because the strange horizons editors are the funniest people alive
She has you practically backed against the wall. Her knuckles are cool against your throat. If she pressed down she would choke you, which is a thought you think with your cunt. Later you will find out she carries a switchblade.
“I do light time travel,” you manage. “Not on purpose.”
It’s a necessary non-answer; you can’t say you sewed it yourself, based on your memories from Revolutionary France. It’s also a dodge that makes you sound like an asshole. But Mary-Caine Adair snorts, which makes your heart squeeze double-time. Then her eyebrows draw together, sharp. “What happened to your neck?”
You realize too late your cravat has slipped down. Her finger presses against your pulse-point, against the scar necklacing your throat.
“Oh,” you say, a touch breathless (she is so very close). “You know. Nothing yet.”
in a time when we need bold and dangerous queer stories now more than ever, "guillotine" asks the very important question: what if you kinned a dickens character so hard you died multiple times?
read it here for dimension-hopping, martyrdom fantasies in high school english class, undernegotiated and unsexy dyke bdsm, footnotes, historical reenactment clothing, and my personal thesis on how A Tale of Two Cities is about letting your undiagnosed adhd ruin your life <3
and behold my main character, courtesy of the wonderful @blackcatarts whose commissions are criminally cheap!
my short story about past life & gender is out!!!! you can read it here!!!!!
In your last life, you were a tiger princess. You lived by the water and you adorned yourself in gold circlets; you chimed when you walked, like birdsong, like blessing, lotus flowers threaded in your long, raven-down hair. A snarl-handed oma who loved you better than she did your sister taught you to paint your face and to strike first. You were cruel, beautiful—when you tipped your face up to the sun, it shone brighter, just for you.
my short story about past life & gender is out!!!! you can read it here!!!!!
In your last life, you were a tiger princess. You lived by the water and you adorned yourself in gold circlets; you chimed when you walked, like birdsong, like blessing, lotus flowers threaded in your long, raven-down hair. A snarl-handed oma who loved you better than she did your sister taught you to paint your face and to strike first. You were cruel, beautiful—when you tipped your face up to the sun, it shone brighter, just for you.
my short story about past life & gender is out!!!! you can read it here!!!!!
In your last life, you were a tiger princess. You lived by the water and you adorned yourself in gold circlets; you chimed when you walked, like birdsong, like blessing, lotus flowers threaded in your long, raven-down hair. A snarl-handed oma who loved you better than she did your sister taught you to paint your face and to strike first. You were cruel, beautiful—when you tipped your face up to the sun, it shone brighter, just for you.
6. How comfortable is your OC in their skin? Do they like who they are? What would they want to change about themself?
LOOORDD this IS evil!! For the uninitiated, Sol is the result of me asking myself “what if I made the king of Ovenna Prince Hal/King Henry V (tone tag Shakespeare) and he was turbo gaytrans and his kingification was an explicit re-closeting and he’s been the saddest most miserable man* alive for ten years by the time we see him. And also he was too lame to conquer France”
Sol is extremely uncomfortable in his own skin :( Obviously there’s the physical aspect to this - he went Man Mode when his mom died and he Locked TF In and has been presenting exclusively as a man for a decade at this point. He doesn’t have an issue with looking masc, but the dysphoria he experiences comes from feeling trapped in that one presentation and being unable to explore anything else out of fear. However, there’s also a psychological aspect to it. Even when he was transmaxxing with his lowlife besties who used any pronouns for him he would only use he/him in his own narration. It’s not that he doesn’t know he’s genderweird, he was just too wary to commit with the knowledge in the back of his mind that he would have to king it up one day. So even when he was outwardly allowing himself the kind of self-expression he craved, he was still kind of in mental chains about it and has never fully been able to accept and explore that part of himself.
This also kind of applies to his lack of attraction to women and asexuality, however that one is a little more self-accepted. It’s in a bit of a fatalist way where he understands it’s pointless to try to force attraction but he also will NOT allow himself to have any crushes because that’s gay :/ With the power of his mind he can stop the gay thoughts before anyone realizes and calls him gay again. Surely this repression ability will not start to crumble after ten years and shape geopolitics in any way,
As for the last two questions, those are a bit more complicated. He does not like who he is but moreso because he sees himself as failing in his role as king rather than because he has some inherent issue with his own gay or transness. He thinks being gaytrans is chill and awesome and he is even pushing to legalize gay marriage for everyone else! He just does not think he personally is allowed to do it because he has to be Thee King. He isn’t even a bad administrator, but he has been told pretty much his entire life that he lacks the inherent qualities of a monarch and he’s internalized that to an insane degree so I don’t think he’s ever really been able to like himself. There’s also The Guilt™️ from the heinous shit he does as an adaptation of the end of Henry IV Part 2 but I will be keeping some of that under wraps >:) and that’s complicated because he does truly think he needed to do it and it was the move of a good king but not a good person.
In terms of what he would change about himself… honestly I will have to rotate that one a little further because the precise answer is evading me. He does have a lot of regrets, but barring one large thing he also does believe that everything he did was necessary for The Kingening even if he hated doing it. He feels too duty-bound to the nation and to his mother’s memory to throw that into jeopardy, but he also does truly value the time he spent goofing off with his peasants #hispeasants and wouldn’t want to do away with that either. I think in the end, he would probably just wish the transition to King Mode was easier and came more naturally to him. And also possibly that he didn’t have turbo PTSD from his one (1) experience in combat so he didn’t have to avoid war like the plague
