Short Stories:
Mia’s Mama’s Dying
Published in Muleskinner Journal, Volume 16: Sabotage
Love is blind, love is lame, love ain’t getting crushed by that train…
Every relationship is toxic sometimes, right?
Helena Troy Kills People
Published by Blood+Honey!
Helena Troy killed people. She herself did not know how, but it was what people said, and the evidence seemed to support that.
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Novel on Sub:
We Expected More
Optimistic Post-Dystopian, Queer Found Family, Sapphic Romance, Alien Romance, Cli-Fi that’s heavier on the Fi, upmarket speculative
The heir to the Church of Yesteryear, Esther, is barely hanging on. Her pops rules with a devout, iron fist, trying to build a new world after bio-chips caused the Great Death forty years ago. After her husband altered a bio chip and calmly walked off a bridge with their daughter strapped to his chest, Esther’s faith in that world fractures, and so does her will to stay in it. The only thing keeping her going is her desire to protect her queer younger half-siblings from their power-hungry cult leader father.
Thousands of miles above Earth’s orbit, Hannah trained to be a dutiful companion to Students, an alien species who lives off stellar energy. She has never been to Earth, never had autonomy, and has lived under the control of her assigned handler and secret lover, 46, a Student anthropologist whose radical ideas about the value of human individuality often puts them at odds with the rest of their species. When Hannah and 46 are tasked with making contact with the humans left on Earth, Hannah is determined to do whatever it takes to show the Students that she deserves an equal life alongside 46, even if it means condemning the rest of humanity in her place.
But when Hannah travels to earth to meet Esther, she accidentally reactivates a virus-riddled bio-chip, and first contact becomes a fight to prevent the total extinction of humanity. The leader of the Students, known as the Zero, gives Hannah one final chance for redemption: destroy the last Earth Hive Core before the forty-eight hour timer runs out and she’ll be elevated to equal status with 46. Meanwhile, Earth will be destroyed, but the rest of humanity will have their consciousness preserved in the Sol Hive Core alongside all the humans who died with implanted bio-chips.
Left with no better options, Hannah and Esther join forces to secure whatever future they can for humanity. Along the way, they’re forced to confront uncomfortable parallels between the lives they’ve led and the lies they’ve been told. But when an unexpected chance to thwart the Zero’s plan and save the earth emerges, both women are forced to choose between the people they love and the planet that needs them.
But what is the loss of humanity compared to the love that makes us human?
