Plagued Company

By Aigner Loren Wilson

Hopeful, strange, and, at times, funny, the speculative stories in Plagued Company cover themes of home and the pain it can sometimes bring and the dire situations our desires can get us into. Readers can find queer relationships and queer people throughout the entire collection—both good and bad and some that exist in the in-between. Inside this debut short story collection, there's a science fiction short story that deals with the ways of love and self in the future; a fantasy about a woman who must return home to take over her family's magical hair salon; a fairy tale about a person who slowly turns into stone before their abusive and unsupportive family; and a fantasy about a child of the road finding home in an unlikely place.

 

Featuring a wide cast of characters, themes, and genres, Plagued Company & Other Stories is a great way to see Aigner Loren Wilson's range as a writer and a great starter pack to her less dark and horror-bent stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus of Three Crows LLC
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201719197

Book preview

PLAGUED COMPANY:

SPECULATIVE FICTION

SHORT STORIES

Aigner Loren Wilson

Copyright © 2021 Aigner Loren Wilson

All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed Attention: Permissions at [e-mail].

Haus of Three Crows LLC

www.hausofcrows.com

Ordering Information:

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First Edition

To the dreams, nightmares, and delusions that feed the stories eternally.

THE STORIES WE TELL: AN INTRODUCTION

IN MY EMAIL writing group, I dare to say what story is, to define it. I have the same bravery in writing or creative circles. Ask me what story is, I’ll give you a detailed and emotional response that’s mostly satisfying. But here, now? I’m not going to tie myself to such a definition. My story—these stories are wholly themselves. They express their own meanings of what story they are telling and what categories they exist in.

That’s how story works for me as a writer. That’s what I hold to, and it helps the words flow. Each story is its own beast and being. They all take their own forms and move in their own ways.

I think that I can only safely say that because I’ve been writing for long enough to understand that, to see it in my own stories. I hope that as you read through this book, you see that, too. Yeah, these stories may be flash or short or of whatever length, but what are they saying to you? How are they resonating with your current life?

If I can touch on that, shit, I’m succeeding as a writer.

That’s all I want to do. Resonate with you. Connect my stories and characters with the moments and memories in your own life. There’s a thin bridge between fiction and fact; I want to meet you there.

To that end, here’s a glimpse inside each of the stories featured in this book and a bit about my intention, process, and themes behind the work. Hopefully, this will allow you to see where fact meets spec in my work.

Forever Yung Hair Salon

Most of these stories came from my yearly writing exercise of writing a story a day for August. I’ll get into more of that later because I think it’s been a massive factor in my improvement as a writer. But for now, I’ll focus on what led to the story of Morrow and her moms’ saloon.

I want to say that my partner and I were on our way back from Mount Tahoma one day—it could easily have been around the time of my birthday—I was in one of those moods where everything was sparking me. There was a story in every car and shining through every window. During times like these, I often just rattle off random story ideas with or to my partner because I know most of them, I don’t have time to write, or they aren’t worth the attention.

Then we passed by this hair saloon off the side of the road. It was this tiny island down a slope, and it grabbed me. The name of it was Forever Young Beauty Salon. Seeing it, saying the name, it all felt like magic, kismet. There’s a particular feeling I get when I know a story is more than just fun. I have this feeling of stretching out and becoming a bit ethereal, like I vanish in the moments it takes for me to weave the story in my head.

The idea that came to me was simple: a young woman comes home after the disappearance of her mothers to claim the family business, a hair salon. Except the hair salon isn’t a normal one. It’s magic. Morrow’s parents are magic. She is reluctantly magic and has been running from it ever since she was a young girl.

A part of what I wanted to showcase in the story was the feeling of not wanting to become your parents but having it be inevitable no matter how much distance you put between yourself and them. More importantly, I decided that it wasn’t going to be a bad thing. Becoming your parents wasn’t the negative emotional effect at play in the story; instead, I made it the urge to flee from what we don’t understand.

Around the time I originally wrote the story, I was trying to bring more of my personal life and history into my work to help paint my worlds and make the stories more grounded and personal. I grew up in a hair salon and remember those moments very clearly, particularly the smell—burnt hair and chemicals—and the sounds come through clear too, those of R’n’B hits from the local radio station over top of the chatter of women—their laughter often rising above the music.

What stands out most in my memory, though, is how I thought it had this air of mysticism and alchemy—lots of mixing chemicals with weird names etched on them. There was also an air of danger to it. If the hairdressers weren’t careful, they could catch someone’s hair on fire or, worse yet, give them chemical burns and scars.

I tried to bring that to the story.

For the character and theme, I pulled from my past, too. There was this girl that I had a crush on freshman year of college. Or at least, I thought I had a crush on her. Back then, emotions and the like were hard to decipher. I either liked her or lusted for her attention. Whichever it was, I spent a lot of time with her. One of the things that stood out about her was that she was gay and raised by gay parents, but she had tried to hide it from them for most of her life because she didn’t want them to feel victorious.

Not victorious.

She didn’t want to have something or anything in common with them. She wanted to be her own type of gay, not like her parents, who were ‘Indigo Girl’ gay. Her stories of hiding her girlfriends from her parents were always funny because the threat was never as significant as it is for many. She wasn’t facing the danger of losing her home or her family, but she worked hard at keeping her secret. Even after they found out, she tried to deny and reject it.

Of course, she went to school miles from her parents and had a tumultuous relationship with them. It never made sense to me. This story is a bit of that dialogue, I guess, coming and working its way out and onto the page.

Stone Gone Mad

Another August story, Stone Gone Mad, was a fever rush. I’m not quite sure where it all came from, but it was there when I sat down at the page and came flooding out pretty formed. All I remember is that I was at my old home on the couch in front of the TV, watching my partner play Dishonored, I believe.

Like many of these stories, I wrote it in one sitting without much of a stop or break. I tend to do all first drafts like that. Messy and bloody, they come out fully formed and only needing some spit shine. I didn’t really like this story at first. I couldn’t understand where I was coming from or my intentions behind it.

Because of how fast I wrote it, I didn’t have a moment to think about why I wrote it. So, I thought it was neat but not much more than that. I sat on it for a while before it hit me what the story was about and where I wanted to go with it.

In all my years of writing, including those when