Queer for the New Year: Nine Stories of New Beginnings

By Leo Otherland, Rue Sparks and Alex Tackett

"Now is the time to release the burdens you have been carrying."

The holiday season is traditionally one of reunions, homecomings, and family gatherings, but for the LGBTQIA+ community, it can be a time of anxiety and dread-a time we must hide our true selves in order to feel welcome. Too often, the holidays bring about loneliness and pain

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balance of Seven
• Release date: Dec 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781947012455

Leo Otherland

Leo Otherland is a queer author, literal goblin, member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, and lover of all things strange and unordinary. This elusive scribbler acquired his passion for weaving stories of dark and broken things through a childhood spent huddling in books and dodging the unfriendly spirits that resided in the haunted house he called home.Still in disbelief that his book, Inflicted, was a success, Leo has locked himself away in a very ordinary apartment hidden away somewhere unobtrusive in the arctic north woods of Wisconsin. In seclusion, he continues to doodle out several different novels at once, as well as various "short" pieces of fan fiction. During the few occasions he is not writing, this finicky, unrepentant otaku enjoys reading web comics, watching anime, and playing Japanese role-playing games. And while it's rare to catch this skittish wordsmith out in daylight, he can occasionally be located on his website, leootherland.com, or on Facebook and Twitter @LeoOtherland. For more frequent updates, subscribe to his newsletter: bit.ly/TheGoblinSpeaks.

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Compiled by Leo Otherland

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Balance of Seven

Dallas

Copyright

Queer for the New Year: Nine Stories of New Beginnings

Copyright © 2022 by Balance of Seven

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States.

All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors and used here with their permission.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The stories in this anthology are works of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this book are either the product of the authors’ imaginations or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

For information, contact:

Balance of Seven, www.balanceofseven.com

Publisher: [e-mail]

Managing Editor: [e-mail]

Cover Design by Rue Sparks

www.ruesparks.com

Developmental Editing by Leo Otherland

Copyediting by Kathy Riggs Larsen

Formatting by TNT Editing

www.theodorentinker.com/TNTEditing

Proofreading by Amanda Mills Woodlee

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Otherland, Leo, editor.

Title: Queer for the new year / Leo Otherland, editor.

Description: Dallas, TX : Balance of Seven, 2022. | Contents: Foreword by the Cover Designer / Rue Sparks – Foreword by a Small Bookstore / Alex and Lily Tackett – That Bright and Bitter Dawn / Alex Bauer – A Single Grain of Sand / Theodore Niretac Tinker – All the Time in the World / F. Zoe Blackheart – Hatsumōde: A Confluence Story / Nyri A. Bakkalian – What I Now Know / K. B. Creech – Minutes to Midnight / Emerson Seipel – Racing the Clock / Val Sierakowski – Against Coven Policy / Leo Otherland – Ghosts of Our Past / Lex Night. | Summary: The holiday season is traditionally one of reunions, homecomings, and family gatherings, but for the LGBTQIA+ community, it can be a time of anxiety and dread. Nine fantastical stories welcome the new year without fear and show that acceptance comes in unlikely places and that pain is not forever.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022949892 | ISBN 9781947012448 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781947012455 (ebook) | ISBN 9781947012547 (Itch.io ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Families – Fiction. | Imaginary creatures – Fiction. | New Year – Fiction. | Reconciliation – Fiction. | Social acceptance – Fiction. | Supernatural – Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Collections & Anthologies. | FICTION / LGBTQ+ / General. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Collections & Anthologies.

Classification: LCC PS648.F3 Q44 2022 (print) | PS648.F3 (ebook) | DDC 813 Q44--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022949892

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Dedication

For anyone who has ever

just wanted to go home

and be loved.

Foreword by the

Cover Designer

Grief is a feeling I am well familiar with.

It started in my teenage years, when I was a queer youth coming out to my parents. I got a laugh from my mother—a proclamation of This is a phase. I was informed I was lucky to still be allowed to see my then girlfriend, later wife. I came from a conservative upbringing, with an absent parent and former preacher for a father. I didn’t understand my place in the world yet, not really, but I knew I wanted to stay by my wife’s side.

She had it worse. For a long time, she was unwelcome in her childhood home. Her father was ambivalent, but her mother? Not in the least. This was one of the hardest times for her, I know, as her younger sister was kept distant from her lest my wife indoctrinate the younger girl.

This isn’t an unfamiliar story for queer youth. There are much worse stories, ones that end in tragedy and trauma. But this would be one of my first small deaths.

There is a quote by Charles Feidelson, a Professor of English Literature at Yale University, who’s best known for his work researching symbolism of classic American literature. Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns. We’ve all heard the phrase time heals all wounds, but Feidelson’s rendition feels gentler because it acknowledges the severity of such painful experiences. In our cult-of-positivity world, this is much needed.

I’ve always been a creative person. Even as a kid, I spent my time drawing Lion King fan art and photorealistic renditions of horses, wolves, and tigers. As I grew up, this need to reform the world around me into some semblance of order on the page would make these small deaths easier to bear.

In 2017, I was jarred out of my sleep and into the hardest night of my life. My wife passed away less than an hour later. She never regained consciousness.

There is a little death in not being able to say goodbye. Another in the slowly coalescing guilt for all the times I opted to work instead of spend time with her while I could. More for every time I remember that our future was cut short and I have a lifetime to spend without her. That there are so many things I never asked her and will never know the answers to.

Over the next few years, I’d experience many more little deaths. Our pit bull, Bowser, was diagnosed with stage IV lymphoma a month after my wife passed. A year later, I had to choose to let him go, a decision I should have been able to make with my wife, who loved him dearly. I lost my passion for my job in advertising, as its shallowness and superficiality rent my resolve.

Almost two years after my wife passed, I was diagnosed with several autoimmune disorders, ending my career completely. But more devastating—the pain in my arms and hands wrenched away from me my creative outlet: my art.

I talk a lot about how important creative therapies are for those who have gone through traumatic events. I call it accessing my trauma through a side door. I’m able to work through things that my mind would dissociate from if tackled head-on by approaching them at a different angle. When I lost my creative outlet, I felt stranded. I struggled for a long time.

Salvation would come through my wife’s legacy. She was a long-time writer who wrote web serials and did NaNoWriMo every year, and through osmosis and proximity, I had learned quite a bit about writing. When I realized art was no longer an option for me, I leaned in. At the time, I figured poetry was my safest bet, and I spent some time exploring what I could do.

Poetry led to short stories, which led to novellas and then to novels. Today, I have three self-published books, as well as stories and poetry in several anthologies.

Through several years of treatment, I have regained some of my ability to draw, but I will never be back to where I was. And maybe that’s a small death I can deal with.

I will always live in the margins, now more than when I first came out to my mother. Agender, asexual, disabled, a young widow—those small deaths accumulate like death by a thousand paper cuts at times. But I am defined not only by the labels I don’t choose but by the ones I have worked for: author, artist, teacher, activist. And these labels, the ones that define my actions, make surviving those small deaths all the easier.

Feidelson said it best: life returns. It comes back changed; we come back changed. But it’s through these rebirths that we become closer to the things that matter. I am familiar enough with grief to know that it never goes away, only changes shape. We are all made up of small deaths retrofitted into our rib cages, and it’s through these pieces of ourselves that we find family, community, and solace.

—Rue Sparks

Foreword by a

Small Bookstore

Writing and reading have always been sources of escape and fulfillment for queer folks, myself included. From around age ten, I started writing stories, both by myself and with friends on forums I frequented. Writing provided an opportunity to express myself and imagine myself as characters who felt closer to home than I did. I met so many friends over the years doing this, and as we grew older, many of us found out that we were more alike than we’d first thought. A healthy portion of those childhood friends who wrote together have come out as some flavor of queer, yours truly included.

Coming out was a long and involved process for me, but much of it was only possible because of the sense of community I found in writing stories with others like me. Even while I convinced myself everything was all right, I was able to find solace in writing stories about people I wasn’t and places I couldn’t go. That exploration, especially in collaboration with others, helped me figure out who I was and who I wanted to be. The first folks who knew I wasn’t cis or straight were those writing alongside me, noticing the signs, very obvious in retrospect, that something might have been a little queer about this kid.

For all the trials and tribulations the modern era and the internet have brought for queer folks, I’m forever glad that communities now exist for folks to connect and share their stories, regardless of the distance. I’m still friends with many of these early writing buddies, despite the significant distances between some of us. Some have gone on to be published writers, and I now run a queer bookstore with my wife, in between my own writing adventures. Not that long ago, it would have been nearly impossible for a kid to walk into a store and find some quality queer young adult fiction—or queer fiction at all. A genre once relegated to back catalogs, obscure magazines, and big-city specialty stores now has the opportunity to flourish through independent bookstores and publishers across the nation.

It is a very special thing that stories like those found in this anthology can be published and read by folks so much more easily than they used to be. I’m glad we live in a period of history—as fraught as it is—where this sort of thing is a reality and where safe spaces for spreading queer stories are becoming more and more commonplace. Cultures of all kinds, including queer culture, need folks to keep telling their stories and places for those stories to be heard. Whether through bookstores, websites, or just stories shared with friends and family (found or otherwise), I hope we keep fighting for and protecting the opportunities we have to share our stories.

—Alex Tackett, in conjunction with Lily Tackett

Owners of Sapphic Sweets and Reads ICT

That Bright and

Bitter Dawn

Alex Bauer

Once upon a not-so-distant time, across the ragged peaks of the mountainous Spine, there was a woman. Her hair was harnessed midnight, her eyes the cold blue of the Wildsea. She carried the sun in her smile, and in her hands—blackened, twisted, and scarred—she bore wildness, chaos, discord, and destruction: the end of all things. She did not fear this fact; instead, she wielded the power with pride.

She was but a woman, frail and mortal, but the world did not see her as such. She must be a god, they said, to carry such magic in her. A beautiful monstrosity, something to keep pinned down and managed. And for a long time, this was all right. She could handle the sideways glances and harsh whispers, just so long as they left her to work in peace.

But the world began to look upon her with revulsion. Instead of blessing her for easing the passage of the dying, they reviled her as a murderer. When wildfire ripped through the forests, paving the way for new and glorious growth, they spat at her for destroying the homes and farms she’d warned against building. And when she relented, giving them what they wanted and calling death to heel, they raged at the fact that nothing died at all.

The woman fled to the mountains and hid away in a small village, concealing her hands and the growing swell of a child in her belly for as long as she could. But tales of terror have a way of spreading, and a lone woman with obvious secrets was suspect, even in a town filled with the strays of the North.

To the south, far across the Spine and nestled in the lap of luxury, there was a man. He, too, carried the wild in him, but he did not enjoy it. He did not smile, nor did he offer his help to people who could have used it. Hearing tales of how they treated the god in the North—who was not much of a god at all—scared him, and he withdrew into himself.

Around him in Aethrun, the capital city far to the south, the wild flourished. As his power grew, bleeding into the castle and surrounding lands, so did the forests. Massive hardwoods towered over the capital walls. Inside, the people could barely move past one another and the abundance of animals. But they had no one to blame, no one to foist the burden upon, and they turned on themselves.

The southern fork of the Aether River ran red on Culling Day, and it was in the twilight that he was given the order for the northern god’s execution. But the man—who was himself not a god but as frail and mortal as the woman who carried chaos with her—did not mourn the loss of northern life.

No.

The man mourned for the woman: his twin, his opposite, his only equal.

In the midwinter, days before the turn of the year, the twins clashed amid the shoddy houses of the village that had shunned her. The town of Shadden burned through the day and night, a bitter battleground left to molder as blizzards swept across the ashes.

Under the snows lay the bodies of a man and a woman—neither gods, but neither quite human. As the earth leached their blood, so, too, did it leach their power. But there was no one left to notice the way life and death, darkness and light, melded together beneath the frozen wastes. No one was left to watch their bones seed the land with ruin.

No one except a baby who, though it had no one and nothing to rely on, did not—could not—die.

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Winters in Aethrun are a joke. The sky pisses rain at all hours, flooding the streets and swelling the nearby rivers with the remains of bitter northern storms. It’s never cold—a brisk spring day at the coldest—but the people drone on about how they’ll freeze in their beds come nightfall. They flock to the taverns to console themselves over a few pints, ranting and