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The Stillwater Files: Asylum
The Stillwater Files: Asylum
The Stillwater Files: Asylum
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The Stillwater Files: Asylum

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Book One of the Stillwater Files series.

She is Oscar, the Oscar that would not have been if Amelia did not die.

For the dream of living in a world where love is not a crime, Lord Oscar Stillwater stole her dead brother’s name, clothes and title, pouring his wealth and her sanity into the creation of a sanctuary where the queer convicts of Southport can live in peace—and plot glorious revolution.

Oscar’s lover, Sydney Cliffhall, is forced to watch as the person she adores throws away her life and health in the desperate, maddened pursuit of a dream that cannot be, but what can one whore do to rescue a psychiatrist who refuses to admit her behaviour is anything close to self-harm?

Isabelle Chandler rots in Southport’s jail with no trade, no family and no future beyond enduring predation and degradation, all for the crime of loving another woman. Oscar can offer her a chance at freedom and something even stranger, if Isabelle can learn to trust her. Oscar just has to convince her without arousing the suspicion of two curious prison employees ... or angering Sydney.

The Stillwater Files is an episodic series exploring what it means to be queer and gender non-conforming in a world even bleaker than our own—and what people will risk to change it.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherK. A. Cook
Release dateAug 2, 2014
ISBN9781311917058
The Stillwater Files: Asylum
Author

K. A. Cook

K. A. Cook is a panalterous, aro-ace, genderless, autistic feminist who experiences chronic pain and mental illness. They write creative non-fiction, personal essays and novels about all of the above on the philosophy that if the universe is going to make life interesting, they might as well make interesting art. They are the author of several short fantasy stories combining ridiculous magic, cats, disability, bacon, mental illness, microscopic gnomes, aromanticism, the undead, verbose eldritch entities and as many transgender autistics as any one story can hold.

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    The Stillwater Files - K. A. Cook

    The Stillwater Files: Asylum

    K A Cook

    Imprint

    The Stillwater Files: Asylum © 2014, K. A. Cook.

    Published by K. A. Cook at Smashwords.

    Produced in Melbourne, Australia.

    This publication is under copyright. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced or distributed in print or electronic form without written consent from the copyright holder.

    Contact K. A. Cook at Queer Without Gender.

    Asylum is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, save certain awesome Modernist queers, is unintentional. Any references to persons living or dead do not necessarily espouse the views of the author.

    Layout and cover design: K. A. Cook. Cover set in Theano Didot by Alexey Kryukov. Key graphic sourced from The Graphics Fairy.

    Map: Dylan Marshall of The Writings of a Mad Mental Adventure.

    Table of Contents

    Blurb

    Map

    Author’s Note

    Chapter One: Discontent

    Chapter Two: Family

    Chapter Three: Imprisonment

    Chapter Four: Descent

    Chapter Five: Awakening

    Chapter Six: Reveal

    Chapter Seven: Conversation

    Chapter Eight: Rescue

    Chapter Nine: Surrender

    Epilogue: Revenge

    Acknowledgements

    About the Author

    Blurb

    She is Oscar, the Oscar that would not have been if Amelia did not die.

    For the dream of living in a world where love is not a crime, Lord Oscar Stillwater stole her dead brother’s name, clothes and title, pouring his wealth and her sanity into the creation of a sanctuary where the queer convicts of Southport can live in peace—and plot glorious revolution.

    Oscar’s lover, Sydney Cliffhall, is forced to watch as the person she adores throws away her life and health in the desperate, maddened pursuit of a dream that cannot be, but what can one whore do to rescue a psychiatrist who refuses to admit her behaviour is anything close to self-harm?

    Isabelle Chandler rots in Southport’s jail with no trade, no family and no future beyond enduring predation and degradation, all for the crime of loving another woman. Oscar can offer her a chance at freedom and something even stranger, if Isabelle can learn to trust her. Oscar just has to convince her without arousing the suspicion of two curious prison employees ... or angering Sydney.

    The Stillwater Files is an episodic series exploring what it means to be queer and gender non-conforming in a world even bleaker than our own—and what people will risk to change it.

    Map

    Author’s Note

    Asylum is a novella about many things, but one of the few things it takes as given (aside from the existence of awesome bisexual grandmothers) is the existence of characters of non-binary gender. The thing about being non-binary is that, unlike binary transgender folk, there isn’t always a simple pronoun switch. (For an interesting discussion about her gender, sexuality, presentation and pronouns in short creative non-fiction/memoir pieces, go read The Slow Fix by Ivan E. Coyote.) Pronouns (and names) don’t always match presentation. Pronouns are going to change depending on the point-of-view character and how much that character knows about the non-binary person in question. Sometimes pronouns (go read my Crooked Words collection to see more of them in action) are invented, unusual or archaic. I prefer ‘they’ in the singular as I don’t want a gender imposed on my person and my body, but every non-binary or gender non-conforming person is going have a different relationship with their gender, genders or genderlessness, and the words that feel most right to describe them—which is exactly how it should be.

    Oscar Stillwater, a female assigned at birth bigender character, is not a woman. Because she spends so much of her time presenting and living as a man, because she has come to consider her masculine name more evocative of her true self than her female birth name, she prefers to have her family refer to her with female pronouns. This honours, as best she can, both her genders. Her name, her pronouns and her presentation (given a place safe enough to be her true self) do not match, and she is comfortable with that, but she also prefers to be referred to with gender-neutral words like ‘person’ and ‘spouse’—never ‘woman’ or ‘wife’, although she’s sometimes referred to as a ‘nobleman’ as that’s more a statement of her title and function (in this misogynistic setting) than it is her gender. Outside her family, however, she is seen as a man, and referred to as one.

    This makes writing in terms of point-of-view and dialogue quite interesting. Throughout Asylum, pronouns shift or slip depending on the speaker of the dialogue, the point of view character and the location: Sydney and Oscar think of Oscar with female pronouns (and Sydney with female pronouns, although for different reasons), while Isabelle thinks of Oscar with male pronouns—and Edward Blackwood begins thinking of Oscar with male pronouns and shifts to female. Sydney, Grandmamma and Oscar will refer to Oscar and Sydney with female pronouns in dialogue in private, but male pronouns and titles in public; Blackwood mostly refers to Oscar with male pronouns in dialogue, but shifts to female late in the story; all other characters refer to Oscar with male pronouns and honorifics. Hell, even Oscar refers to her Lord Stillwater persona, at times, with male pronouns and titles, as though he is less a facet of her identity and more a role played on the stage.

    Confused?

    Welcome to the life of a non-binary person. Asylum might be playing fast and loose with the typical, consistent assumptions of gendered grammar, but it is correct point of view. In fact, the usage is not so different from the way people use pronouns to refer to me—shifting, false words based on the idea that we can always correctly assume a person’s gender (and that a person’s perceived sex has anything to do their actual sex or their gender).

    As a non-binary writer, it is past time that I get to read stories with characters’ lives and experiences like mine. Asylum is for every damn non-binary person who just wanted to pick up a book and exist as a literary hero, with all the complications and difficulties that come with it, with all the pronouns and assumptions and pressures to be seen as who we are, and not as a quirky side character. We aren’t quirky side characters: we are fabulous and amazing people with tremendous insight into gender and its function in our lives, and we deserve to be acknowledged.

    Lastly. There seems to be this idea, in society, that someone can look at a non-binary, transgender or crossdressing person and immediately tell from gesture or stride, bodily features or voice, what their assigned sex is—that it is, in fact, a simple matter to pick out a female-assigned person in men’s clothes (or the reverse). I can’t help but believe that this narrative is indicative of transphobia and trans panic, that it ignores the natural and wonderful variation of sexual characteristics present in human bodies for the purpose of letting cisgender society believe it can ‘tell’ a transgender person.

    This doesn’t meet with my lived experience as a non-binary person; even if it did, this idea that assigned sex is obvious and easy to detect is not a narrative that I have any interest in promoting.

    So. You may think it unlikely that Blackwood reaches the end of the story without proof; you may think it unlikely that he doesn’t possess proof even allowing for the shield of Oscar’s nobility (and Grandmamma!). That, however—the tired old story of the girl dressing as a man and being discovered—isn’t the story I want to tell. Rather, I want to tell a story where sex and gender is complicated, where the very idea that one can assume these things is erroneous and disingenuous, where people who challenge these divisions between male and female exist. I want Blackwood to be unsure, to ponder, to have to deal with the increasing reality that the ‘tells’ we take for granted mean so much less than we think they do.

    If this means writing a fantasy over reality—well, this is a fantasy novel. I get to do just that.

    K. A. Cook, Melbourne, 2013.

    Chapter One: Discontent

    The distant coastline of Southport, hidden as usual underneath a veil of early-morning heat-haze and smoke, has never looked so beautiful to Oscar Stillwater. She lets out a deep breath, hanging over the railing to take her weight off her knee as the Eleventh Hour sails through the heads. The swell changes from dark purple-blue tipped with white, slapping against the hull of the ship, to the smooth green-blue of Port Edwin Bay. She can hear gulls now, spiralling over the cliffs, calling to each other on the breeze. Artists and musicians like to make poetry from the encircling white cliffs and sedate water, but to Oscar it means one blessed thing: she’s almost home. An hour at most, and then she’ll be at the dock and, if still a day’s ride from the estate, only a short carriage ride away from her townhouse.

    Almost, she can forget about Sydney beside her, and the strange, awkward silence that has grown between them like a weed through a cracked paving stone.

    Almost.

    Home, she says, turning her head. It’s the most banal of conversation openers, but the word sounds calm and relaxed—appropriate given the public nature of the deck. Home with nothing in hand, of course, but home nevertheless. With any luck Grandmamma and Genevieve haven’t burnt down the asylum in Oscar’s absence, and Oscar can curl up in her study and ponder which other foreign party might be receptive to conversations on financing an Avanari revolution. A letter to Professor Thibault, perhaps. A few days, a week or two, and this horrible expedition will be nothing more than a collection of journal entries and a few new scars. History.

    Thank the Patron for that, she says into the silence, even if He has been rubbish at just about everything else.

    Sydney blinks and looks down at her; it seems to take her a moment to figure out what to say, a moment in which Oscar’s heart pounds with unwarranted enthusiasm. Does she sound too negative? Too bitter? It should be easy, she supposes, to know what she would have said should this whole debacle not have occurred—easy, but for some reason Oscar can’t recall how her brighter self might have acted. No. Bitterness after such a disappointment can’t be irrational—she makes a career out of telling people just that—but the reality doesn’t matter if Sydney thinks Oscar is being excessively bitter, and Sydney is only a layman, after all.

    Yes, she says, the word too hesitant for Oscar’s liking. I don’t suppose either of us have room to doubt that, my lord.

    Oscar straightens up, stares down at the deck until she’s sure she’s suppressed her scowl. With any number of sailors within earshot, Sydney is correct to adopt the servile behaviour to go with her manservant dress, but those polite, impassive words are anything but the person she loves. True. She stares up at Sydney. How long do you think it’ll take before we dock?

    Patron’s tits, she might as well have asked her lover about the fucking weather!

    Sydney shakes her head, her lips curving upwards in something not-quite a smile. She’s always the perfect image of a nobleman’s favoured manservant, her polished shoes, grey linen waistcoat and black suit looking ridiculously out-of-place on the deck of a ship, but they suit her far better than women’s dresses and blouses. Only a little careful tailoring fit her coat to her body, concealed her hips, padded her shoulders, until Sydney looks as much a man as those born to the notion—she even shaves dark hairs from her chin every morning, to Oscar’s continuing envy. The tells are there, of course, and Oscar knows them all, from her long, thick eyelashes to the soft curves at her throat and neck hidden by her collar, but to Oscar Sydney is all the more attractive for not being wholly masculine—a wondrous, captivating combination of male and female. Absurd, of course, even nonsensical: not even the most modern of scientists knows what to make of the idea save that anyone between male and female is some kind of aberration, but it makes her heart warm regardless. A woman in a suit might appeal to Grandmamma, but the fact that Sydney is rather more than that drew Oscar’s eye the first day they met—and every day thereafter.

    Sydney raises her eyebrows, now smiling in truth under Oscar’s stare. Oscar tilts her head back and tries to look as though this is nothing more than an ordinary conversation. The problem with a lover whose very life is a series of masks, Oscar decides, is that one can never be sure which face lies beneath. The gentleman manservant? The lover? The actor teaching others how to strut the stage? The whore? All? None?

    Does Sydney hide love and sexuality or a justified anxiety?

    Patron wept, it is madness to doubt her, madness to wonder what strain lies beneath the servility, but madness… Oscar stops, sighs, looks back at the waves. Madness. No, she could not have chosen a more appropriate word, but that is the very problem.

    She can ask. Sydney, are you concerned about what I did? Sydney, do you plan on telling Grandmamma? Sydney, do you think I am insane?

    If she were that brave, she knows, she’d have asked already.

    Sydney frowns and clears her throat. I don’t know how you think I would know such a thing, my lord. Her voice only sounds polite if one doesn’t see her lips twisting into their more-usual smirk. Perhaps you should inquire of Captain Greene?

    The surprise barb has Oscar grinning in brilliant, blessed relief.

    She feared Sydney would be too cautious to mention his name, that she would continue the unnatural wariness that had slowed her tongue ever since the incident at Port Vives—the caution that made Sydney more of a manservant and less of a friend. Oscar can’t help the feeling that she has become a patient herself, one in need of careful supervision because her judgement cannot be trusted—because her reason has been so twisted and damaged by trauma and pain she cannot tell between the irrational and the appropriate.

    Would that thought be so uncomfortable, she wonders, if it were not true?

    No. Not that. Oscar indulges in a theatrical shudder, more than keen to keep the discussion on a light footing. I should have you fired for that. Demoted to the scullery—no, I’ll have you assigned to Grandmamma!

    The wind, strong behind the sails, tugs Oscar’s hair out of its queue and into curled wisps hanging about her face. Sydney raises a hand, as if to brush it back behind Oscar’s ears, and then stops and

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