Rising to the Occasion: MälarQueers, #1

By Emma Lindhagen

Sometimes facing old enemies means making new friends.

 

Freelancer Clara isn't exactly feeling like hot stuff: bills are mounting, clients are scarce and her social circle has been steadily shrinking since her high school graduation. She's desperate for a win, so when it turns out her six-year-old niece is supposed to bring saffron buns to school for St. Lucia's Day, Clara wants nothing more than to make them from scratch. That is, until she remembers that the task involves coming face to face with her old nemesis—yeast.

 

Luckily for Clara, her very cool downstairs neighbor happens to be a baking fiend. If she can put her pride and social reserve aside for long enough, she might be able to save the buns along with her self-confidence. She might even make a new friend in the process...

 

 

Rising to the Occasion is a queer, New Adult, contemporary novelette about self-esteem, anxiety and friendship. It is set in Stockholm, Sweden and is about 8,000 words long.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emma Lindhagen
• Release date: Dec 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9789198751307

Emma Lindhagen

Born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden, Emma Lindhagen is a queer speculative fiction writer. They are a linguistics student and run a small business where they deal in translation, proofreading, lore development and ghostwriting.  When they aren’t writing, Emma enjoys making lists and trying to learn a slightly unrealistic number of new languages. Emma has a penchant for tea, whiskey, chocolate, bubble baths, the color purple and the music of Leonard Cohen. They currently live in Stockholm with a long-time partner. To learn more about Emma’s projects and how to support their creative endeavors, sign up for Emma’s newsletter and read a myriad flash fiction stories for free, please visit www.emmalindhagen.com.

Book preview

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my beta readers, and to my editor Al Rosenberg for putting up with my fluctuating release schedule.

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This book is dedicated to all the friends I didn’t quite dare to make.

This story contains references to Swedish culture and society, as well as occasional Swedish terms, place names and the like. You probably don't need to be familiar with these to follow along with the story, but if you want to understand them better, there is a glossary in the back of the book.

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Content note: this book includes a sprinkling of anxiety.

Rising to the Occasion

Shooting star

SO WHEN SHOULD I PICK HER UP? Clara shifted the phone to her other hand so she could click open a few work listings in new tabs. One more gig of about $70 and she’d actually have hit her earning goal for the week. That’d be a nice change. Or seven $10 gigs, I guess... Fourteen $5 jobs was when it started getting a little silly. Every little helped, but some things were so little that all they really helped with was passing the time, as Miina had pointed out in the beginning of the call during Clara’s traditional ‘will people please stop trying to get me to spend two hours translating for five bucks’ rant. Some days she wondered if going freelance had been a mistake.

Well, she’s usually at fritids until about four, four-thirty, Miina responded through a light sprinkling of static, the sound of walking harmonizing with her words. Anytime around then is fine.

All right, sounds good. I thought I’d leave the office at, like, three-thirty, she replied. Calling the café she did a lot of her daytime work in her ‘office’ had started out as irony, but somewhere along the way the irony had dropped off without her really noticing. So I’ll just pop over on my way back. She’ll have all her stuff, right? Toothbrush, pjs...

Gosh yes, she’s already packed her bag. She’s very excited.

Hey, her and me both. Clara grinned into the phone. First auntie sleepovers don’t happen every day! She wasn’t even being facetious. It was a milestone; the six-year-old had never slept away from home before except at her grandparents’. Miina might not be Clara’s blood sister, but Elli was still her niece, and she wore the auntie badge with pride.

So, about the lussebullar, Miina continued. "I think Pressbyrån by the subway has them at a decent price and they should be open early enough that you can just grab some on the way to school and I’ll Swish you for it later. I think there’s 22 kids in