Aromantic Narratives and Creativity
If Kit can’t find anything unfair about the contract or the man, why is the ring so heavy?
Kit March is a signature away from marrying the man who loves him. He should be delighted, but for reasons he doesn’t understand and can’t explain, his future with Lauri weighs upon him. What is a magician to do when no script extant has words for the confusion he feels?
Is it so very cowardly to not want to be monstrous?
Esher Hill left his home and kin a crying wreck of a man, too depressed and dysphoric to care what his people make of him. If he’d had his way, that would have been the end of it.
His sister Mara, the village witch, made sure he didn’t.
Two and a half years later, Esher owns two dogs, a blade, a career and a new body—the shape of masculinity he always felt he should be. A miracle Mara refuses to explain. A miracle the Sojourner’s priests reject and fear. A miracle, say the Grey Mages, that cannot exist without something precious sacrificed in exchange: a soul.
Returning home in search of his sister and the truth isn’t just a matter of enduring stares, whispers, explanations and the condescending pity from those he left behind.
Love holds edges sharper than Esher’s sword, for nobody wins but demons in the sale of souls.
Yes, and that’s what scares him: his erasure writ in the words of love.
Hallo, Aro is a series of flash fiction stories about allosexual aromantic characters navigating friendship, sexual attraction, aromanticism and the weight of amatonormative expectation.
Contains: Reflections on the West’s culture of sexualisation and the ways this makes and shapes a world hostile to aromantic allosexuality.
The new rule seared into hir skin: hide the sex that taints the queer fight for straight acceptance.
Continue reading “Hallo, Aro: Pressure, Side One – K. A. Cook”
After a night of revelations to her dead aunt Rosie and her living brother Esher, Mara Hill must dare another with Benjamin Lisbet. If she’s truly the woman Mara hopes, surely Benjamin will be receptive to a conversation of the “I love you and want to be with you, just not romantically” sort? Surely this afternoon won’t stray beyond Mara’s preparations of a picnic basket, chives, rehearsed speeches and less-rumpled clothing?
Yet her months of searching for magic to refresh her fading love means there’s too much she doesn’t know about Benjamin. Too much Mara needs to know to hold this conversation without losing Benjamin’s friendship.
Mara thought speaking of her fading love under cover of dark difficult enough … but speaking of romance in daylight is another challenge entirely.
Does the world understand what upon it sets so great a value?
Continue reading “Fiction: The Mundane Progression of Premortem Colloquy, Part Two”
After a night of revelations to her dead aunt Rosie and her living brother Esher, Mara Hill must dare another with Benjamin Lisbet. If she’s truly the woman Mara hopes, surely Benjamin will be receptive to a conversation of the “I love you and want to be with you, just not romantically” sort? Surely this afternoon won’t stray beyond Mara’s preparations of a picnic basket, chives, rehearsed speeches and less-rumpled clothing?
Yet her months of searching for magic to refresh her fading love means there’s too much she doesn’t know about Benjamin. Too much Mara needs to know to hold this conversation without losing Benjamin’s friendship.
Mara thought speaking of her fading love under cover of dark difficult enough … but speaking of romance in daylight is another challenge entirely.
In so long fearing her inability to stay in love, she has donned fear’s cloaking veil of abstraction and self-obsession.
Continue reading “Fiction: The Mundane Progression of Premortem Colloquy, Part One”
Moll of Sirenne needs prompts in their girdle book to navigate casual conversations, struggles to master facial expressions and feels safest weeding the monastery’s vegetable gardens. Following their call to service, however, means offering wanderers in need a priest’s support and guidance. A life free of social expectation to court, wed and befriend does outweigh their fear of causing harm—until forgetting the date of a holiday provokes a guest’s ire and three cutting words: lifeless and loveless.
A priest must expand a guest’s sense of human worth, but what do they do when their own comes under question? Can an autistic, aromantic priest ever expect to serve outside the garden? And what day is it…?
Will you ignore their need of someone their own to reassure them that they are so wonderfully and deservedly human?
Moll of Sirenne needs prompts in their girdle book to navigate casual conversations, struggles to master facial expressions and feels safest weeding the monastery’s vegetable gardens. Following their call to service, however, means offering wanderers in need a priest’s support and guidance. A life free of social expectation to court, wed and befriend does outweigh their fear of causing harm—until forgetting the date of a holiday provokes a guest’s ire and three cutting words: lifeless and loveless.
A priest must expand a guest’s sense of human worth, but what do they do when their own comes under question? Can an autistic, aromantic priest ever expect to serve outside the garden? And what day is it…?
You think love is what makes us human, if you must choose one quality?
Jessie’s casing an art gallery affords an opportunity to discuss a queerplatonic relationship. The phrase “I don’t love” encompasses more than a prince’s lack of romantic attraction. A gay aromantic makes a game of his alloromantic co-workers’ inability to accept him. Alida finds an accomplice in petty revenge after hir friend sets hir up on a date. An aro-ace wanderer invents their own fairy tales free of weddings as a happily ever after. And a demiromantic witch learns about aromanticism from her allo-aro cousin after an escapade with an unwanted romantic admirer.
When Quiver Meets Quill collects fourteen fantasy and contemporary aromantic stories about amatonormativity, friendship and connection.
Contains: Asexual aros; allosexual aros; aros without reference to sexual attraction identities; transgender and non-binary aros; queer aros; autistic aros; neurodiverse aros; and a genderless aro dragon.
Links: PDF (read in browser) | Patreon
PDF, EPUB and MOBI editions are available for download from Patreon.
Length: 45, 000 words / 148 PDF pages.
Alida Quill is just fine spending hir holidays alone with a book if it means freedom from hir family’s continued expectation to court and wed. When hir co-worker Ede sets hir up with a friend and won’t take no for an answer, Alida plots an extravagant, public refusal scene to show everyone once and for all that ze will not date. Ever.
Ze doesn’t expect to meet Antonius Quiver, a man with his own abrupt, startling declarations on the subject of romance.
It isn’t courting if he schemes with hir to pay back Ede … is it?
I believe that Ede didn’t mention the other’s aromanticism to either of us?
Continue reading “Fiction: When Quiver Meets Quill, Part Two”
Alida Quill is just fine spending hir holidays alone with a book if it means freedom from hir family’s continued expectation to court and wed. When hir co-worker Ede sets hir up with a friend and won’t take no for an answer, Alida plots an extravagant, public refusal scene to show everyone once and for all that ze will not date. Ever.
Ze doesn’t expect to meet Antonius Quiver, a man with his own abrupt, startling declarations on the subject of romance.
It isn’t courting if he schemes with hir to pay back Ede … is it?
I don’t date, court, woo or pay suit to anyone.
Continue reading “Fiction: When Quiver Meets Quill, Part One”
Aro Worlds 