Summary: Lovers’ Day is good trading for a witch who deals in enchantments, ribbons and dyed flowers. For Mara Hill, it’s long been a holiday of tedious assumptions and painful conversations–once best handled by casting petty curses on annoying customers. This year, when a girl asks about love spells, it may be time to instead channel a little Aunt Rosie.
Theme: A sapphic, allosexual, lithromantic trans witch in a sexual queerplatonic relationship enduring the most amatonormative holiday–in a small town still in desperate want of open conversations about aromanticism.
Word length: 2, 991 words.
Content advisory: Much of this piece concerns the amatonormativity surrounding a real-world holiday, because unsubtle allegory is a wonderful thing. Please note that this story also includes a non-specific reference to an off-screen character’s suicide attempt and the ableism of the way people talk around mental illness. A character also uses the phrase “kill me” where we’d would use something like “fuck me” in keeping with the Sojourner’s followers’ regard of death. While I don’t explain it in text, it’s meant to be unholy awkward in keeping with the above. Dead Horse Hill’s religion is terrible at reconciling suicide with the way it frames and refers to death, and Esher talks more about this in the sequel to Love is the Reckoning.
Setting: A year and a half after The Sorcerous Compendium of Postmortem Query and a year before Love is the Reckoning. It is readable if you haven’t read Reckoning, but I do suggest reading Query first. I spend little time rehashing the story of the night that Mara learnt about aromanticism from her great-aunt’s shade. It’s also worth noting, if you haven’t read Reckoning, that Mara did use her sorcery at Sirenne to enable her brother’s medical/physical transition without first asking Esher about it, because that would mean revealing the whole becoming-a-necromancer thing.
Note the first: I had two days to write and attempt to edit this, between the pressures of real life and the want to post something aromantic-themed on Valentine’s Day. So here’s another pre-emptively posted story I mean to come back and polish later.
It’s a terrific exercise in redundancy, but some people find the words “no love spells” to be a bewildering subtlety.
Summary: Even in the best of circumstances, it’s no easy thing to tell the parent who named you that your name no longer fits.