Tag: asexual characters

In Any Universe

~ annemcsommers ~ 9 Comments

Hello Hello, I realized that I wrote this on Monday and then never scheduled it for release, but here is this week’s response to the six-sentence writing prompt of BRANCH by girlontheedge. I am writing this one for Asexual Awareness week, about a Aiya, who is enduring the most boring/out of touch lecture of her life.

Multi-verse theory stipulates that every time a decision is made, there is a branch made for every possible outcome, and so there are infinite universes, with infinite diversity.

That said, sitting in a classroom, listening to a seventy-year-old white guy lecture her on women’s sexuality, Aiya couldn’t imagine that there was a universe where she didn’t think that this guy was full of shit.

Intellectually she understood that humans, as a species, had evolved in ways that meant that the animal homo sapiens sapiens had certain natural inclinations when it came to sex, but that all ignored the effect of civilization on humans as a whole, and she wasn’t having it.

A few students walked when he droned one about “deviant” sexual behavior, but Aiya always enjoyed a good train wreck, and besides, when she did file her complaint after the end of class, she wanted to make sure she had recorded the entire lecture, lest he later pretend that she missed the critical piece.

It was however illegal to record someone in a conversation you were not a part of, so she spoke up, and asked the question about her own orientation, only to have the man just about self-destruct in his rant on how asexuality does not exist.

It wasn’t even the most offensive response she had gotten to the ace question, doctors, therapists, friends alike, all recoiled when faced with someone that simply did not have interest, and it was then that she was saved from hearing more this day, by a member of the administration showing up to stop the man mid-lecture, but she did wonder, what else he was going to say to cover the second half of what would likely be his final lecture at the university.

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Wreckage

~ annemcsommers ~ Leave a comment

There was recently a rather large storm in my area, which took out a lot of trees, and a few houses, which is what inspired this weeks response to the Friday Picture Prompt Challenge on the Writer’s Mess. That and apparently a preoccupation about getting what you deserve, that will return again later in the week. This is the story of a woman whose life has fallen apart, but in the end things might not be quite so bad as she thought.

She sat in the car, in the pouring rain, looked out at the remains of her house and started to laugh. Wasn’t just the perfect representation of her life right now?

Her husband of 15 years had left her, having knocked up the secretary, and he had the gall to blame her for it.

He had tried to claim infidelity on her part, and that was what had hit her the hardest. She had always thought that he understood what he was signing up for when he married an openly ace woman, but it turned out he was just waiting for her to change her mind.

When she hadn’t, he assumed that she she was seeing someone else, and that it was only fair that he get his own action. He said he wanted kids that were actually his, and not her lover, and the blows kept raining down.

He said he knew that she would want kids eventually, and had completely ignored her warnings that she had no intention of reproducing. She had finished out the day staring across the room at a stranger, and let him win.

She signed away the house, she got her stuff, some money, and her dahlia’s from the front garden. As she sat there staring at the wreckage from the storm, that used to be their house, she couldn’t help but laugh.

The only thing untouched, her front garden, where a single red dahlia bloomed. It seemed she had won after all.

A Work in Progress?

~ annemcsommers ~ 1 Comment

This was so depressing I went back and added the last paragraph when editing. It kind of follows a similar vein to Katherine the Great, in so for as people seem to spend a lot of time trying to do things to make themselves successful to be happy, when sometimes you just gotta take a minute to stop and smell the roses.

Caroline felt that at her core she was a work in progress. She was a person, but not complete. At 40, she still looked around when a child looked for an adult, not yet feeling that she was up to wearing that mantle of responsibility.

She wasn’t where she should be in her career. She didn’t own a car, or house, and she wasn’t close to having the money to do either. She didn’t travel or have luxury goods to explain her lack of the other.

She had no husband, children, or even a prospect of either., not that she wanted them them, and that was the hardest part to explain to other people. Caroline felt as if she was a variant, some small defect had left her just shy of fitting in any of the molds, and so went through life unformed, unfinished, and unfulfilled.

That wasn’t entirely true though, not really, because Caroline was happy. She was happy in her apartment, her dead end job, her hobbies, and her dog. Maybe, what she needed to do was not focus on reaching her finished state, but to redefine what it was she was aiming for. After all, success is what you make of it.

The Nature of Memory

~ annemcsommers ~ Leave a comment

This was written for a writing course I was taking, and we had to start at one time, and then skip forward or back in the life of the same person. I started in the 80’s and then skipped forward to the near present. Again, it seems to have a theme of being happy with what you have, and I guess the theme of 2022 is self acceptance. Please note, that I am not trying to accept being a serial killer, this note will make more sense after some of my later posts.

I coughed as I tried to escape the fumes, hoping that no one lit a match near my sister’s head. “Come on, Jenny, you have enough hairspray that you could use your hair as a helmet. We are going to be late.” I stamped my foot, and then reached down to pull up my neon pink leg warmer.

I couldn’t wait to get to the roller rink, but Jenny was busy trying to get just a little more volume that Amy Pilsner, and so I was stuck. Mom wouldn’t let me take my bike across town alone at night, so I was stuck waiting for Jenny, as usual

Tracey looked down at the photo, that had brought back the memory rushing back like it was yesterday. Jenny had been so proud of her hair, that she begged Mom to take a Polaroid of it. There were three of them. The first one Tracey was sneezing, and the second Jenny’s eyes were closed, but the third was perfect. We were so happy back then.

Tracey’s phone dinged, and she pulled herself out of the chair, wincing a little at the pain in her right knee. She would have to rub some A535 on it later, and take some tylenol. It only took a month for her to heal from that first sprain back at the rink, but she was still feeling last years, even after the physio.

She finally got to the phone, and saw the notification. It Emily, Jenny’s granddaughter, posting a picture of her and her mother Clara on Instagram. Emily looked so much like Jenny had at that age, it made her heart ache. Tracey felt a stab of guilt at how long it had been since she had went to see Jenny, but it wasn’t like Jenny would know. Jenny hadn’t remembered her in a long time.

Every time Tracey left the nursing home, she was paranoid for weeks. Each time she forgot her where she left her keys, she wondered if this was it. Was this was the first step, though she was reaching an age where it wouldn’t be early onset anymore. At least Jenny seemed happy, happier than she was at least.

Tracey looked around her small two bedroom house and frowned at the quiet. She wondered at times if her mother had been right. If Tracey should have settled down, settled that is, and got married and had some kids. There wouldn’t be the linger rumors at family occasions that she was in fact, a lesbian.

It was such a strange concept to others, that she would prefer being alone, that they instead tried to come up with ideas on why she didn’t have someone. The lesbian theory was the best of the bunch, the others leaving her either traumatized, or too pitiful to keep someone. They couldn’t imagine that she might not want someone, that this may be the life she wanted.

They were too busy comparing her to Jenny, who in her illness had her history rewritten. People spoke of how sad it was that Jenny couldn’t remember her children, how happy they had made her, how much she loved them. That this illness had torn apart such a happy family, and that Jenny never got a chance to know her own grandchild , oh it was such a terrible thing.

Some of it was even true. It was tragic that Jenny didn’t know her own grandchild, and it was true that she loved her daughters, but the reality stopped there. People seemed to gloss over Jenny’s teen pregnancy, the alcoholism, the seven weeks her second daughter spent in the NICU for FAS, or the two years the kids lived with Tracey and Jenny’s parents until Jenny got back on her feet.

It was the same way they glossed over thirty years of nursing, the volunteer work, and all the traveling Tracey did in her own life. In the end, all anyone saw when they compared the sisters was Jenny’s two surprisingly well adjusted daughters, four grandchildren and Tracey’s empty house.

Tracey’s phone dinged again, and she saw the reminder: Cards with the Girls. She looked around her empty house again, and smiled. She loved her nieces dearly, but she really wouldn’t trade this life for anything.