Today on the site, I’m delighted to welcome contributors to the speculative aromantic anthology Common Bonds 2 to take us inside the collection and get a glimpse of their stories! Before we get to that, I’ll take this opportunity to mention that the editors are hard at work on Common Bonds 3 (the cover of which was recently revealed on the site), and you can still support their Kickstarter here!
Now, let’s get to the collection:
Common Bonds returns in this second volume of speculative short stories and poetry featuring aromantic characters.
Housed within this anthology are a scientist who makes a terrifying discovery at the bottom of the ocean, a baker who must fulfill a prophecy, a priest and a witch who must form a family to escape a war, and a woman whose survival might just unravel time itself.
Through nineteen stories and poems, Common Bonds 2 explores the bonds that impact our lives from beginning to end: platonic relationships. From friends with benefits to mentors to life partners, this collection explores platonic relationships strong enough to overcome barriers of species, alien invasions, and the power of the gods themselves.
“Will Lamplight Illuminate Your Face?” – M.A. Acosta
As someone who loves all things science fiction, I thoroughly enjoyed writing this poem. The idea for “Will Lamplight Illuminate Your Face?” started with a lamp and a character composing a message late at night in a tiny spaceship cabin. The image I had in mind felt both very futuristic and nineteenth century, a nod to late night oil-lit Victorian letter writing and the sapphic letters exchanged by modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. How might two people who are neither blood relatives nor partners stay in touch during their many journeys through space? What does home look like for quasiplatonic partners? The two characters in this narrative poem, Calypso and Virginia, are bilingual “familiar souls,” who meet and become something other than friends or lovers. They don’t play by heteronormative rules, and they create a world of their own within their letters. Being Latine and queer means learning to welcome the in-betweenness of identities and experiences, even if they are not always legible to others. This is not a tiny, envelope-sized gap, but a capacious space of being and becoming where we don’t have to exist alone. Though I could have written the whole poem in English, it felt right to have Calypso write in Spanish and for the pair to refer to themselves as “almas familiares” (familiar souls) and “viajeros siderales” (stellar voyagers). Words carry different meanings depending on the language and cultural context, and I find I need both languages to express myself fully. Las estrellas y sus millones de mundos nos esperan a todes. The stars and their millions of worlds await us all.
“Screw Everybody” – Anna Stein
“Screw Everybody” was a product of anger. I wrote the first draft in one sitting after watching an episode of Eureka that left me so furious that I let all my frustration spill out onto the page. If you’ve read the story, you can guess the broad strokes of the episode’s plot: a science duo who are romantically entangled, a tragic death (the woman’s, of course), a time travel fix-it, a sacrifice of the One True Love in the name of preserving the timeline. In addition to being a slap in the face to the character, the trope itself, this sacrifice of a loved one without their say so or the self-sacrifice of someone who accepts their chains to the trolley tracks readily and with a noble smile, put a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted a character who refuses to be noble. A character who isn’t the guy who’ll solve cancer but is still worthy of their life. A boring life with a boring job and an enjoyment of bad movies that is still a life. I wanted someone who’s a bit of an asshole, a bit of a Meursault type (the very allo-aro protagonist of Camus’s The Stranger), whose niceness should have no bearing on their right to life. While some flinch at the character’s selfishness, I find myself rooting for their spiteful and self-assured determination to live.
“Sap and Marrow” – Cyrus Amelia Fisher
One night in September of 2020, when the world already felt like it was coming apart at the seams in every imaginable way, I was awakened by my building’s fire alarm. There was no fire. The problem was that the wildfire smoke outside, swept across the Pacific Northwest by unseasonable winds and blanketing the area in an apocalyptic haze, had gotten so dense that it was quite literally setting off the indoor smoke detectors. After a couple of hours I had to round up my cat and find somewhere else to sleep, because the building managers couldn’t seem to turn off the screaming.
The panic and exhaustion of that night planted the seed for Sap and Marrow. I envisioned a world like ours, where the only way to prevent an ongoing man-made catastrophe was by destroying beautiful things before they too could burn; where the people tasked with that destruction wounded themselves with every swing of the axe. But in the end, I didn’t want to write a story about pain. I wanted to write about the complexity of healing in a broken world, and the connections with others that make us whole again.
“venante umbras” – JD Rivers
The statement “exploration of non-romantic sexual partners” in the submission call, wouldn’t leave me be. I’ve never written a non-romantic story; any intimacy I put on paper has always included feelings, so not walking down the romantic path called out to me. Writing the story challenged me deeply, in how I word and perceive interactions between characters (shaped through my own asexuality lens), how intimacy can work in absence of romantic feelings, and how far characters would still allow others to possess them, even if they are not in love. I’m very happy how it turned out.
“Well-Worn Pockets” – K.J. Isley
I recall a conversation with a friend, in which I learned he had zero interest in getting to know anyone who wore white tennis shoes. He honestly believed that what people put on their feet told him everything he needed to know about them. Those who wore white tennis shoes just were not his chosen clan. I was 12. I definitely never thought about my shoes. I walked in terror of being socially ostracized through a thoughtless ensemble decision for at least a week afterward.
While writing Well-Worn Pockets, I was delighted to discover that my discomfort over packaging dovetails nicely with my larger attitudes around relationships. Don’t ask me how. It’s a textural thing. Hence, a coming-of-age story was born, involving a magic system built around second-hand clothing, where truth can only be discovered from the inside out. I think maybe a theme at the heart of Well-Worn Pockets is that the truth of white tennis shoes uniquely belongs to the individual who wears them.
“Wish, Wish” – Lisobel Tang
“Wish, Wish” came out of a period I spent with Octavia Butler’s short fiction. I wanted to write a story told from a collective “we,” a community so alien its assumptions about relationships should carry no human preconceptions. And yet, even when every other aspect of this insect-like species differs radically from ours—biology, language, reproduction—they still default to romantic love as the most legible bond between two people. What moved me most, though, was the simple truth that both Felix and Pul had to travel to the far end of the galaxy to find someone who truly understood them.
“The Woman in the Snow” – Nico Martinez Nocito
I adore fairytale retellings, especially queer fairytale retellings. When writing them myself, I tend to consider how a queer angle would subvert the expectations at the story’s heart. “The Snow Queen” fairytale has always fascinated me, and I found myself contemplating its inherently amatonormative central plot point—a cursed inability to feel romantic love.
This collided with my introduction to form poetry. I started out writing free verse, but I’d recently begun investigating other forms and how their structures can connect to a piece’s deeper meaning. Sapphic verse is a poetic form structured around societal expectations of romance, and I wanted to use it to express the deep emotional connection that comes with friendship. This idea met my fairytale ruminations to produce “The Woman in the Snow,” which reimagines “The Snow Queen” as a sapphic verse poem with an aroace narrator.
“The Husband Stitch” – R.F. Daniels
I’ve spent more time than I’d like following other people’s paths. The ones they said I should follow, or the ones they themselves followed and just implied I should as well. The weight of social, familial, and cultural expectations is a heavy one. And when it comes to romance, the push to follow the expected scripts is particularly strong. In “The Husband Stitch,” I wanted to look at the different ties that can bind people to each other, and specifically the regret someone might feel when they realize the path they’ve been following no longer serves them as well as they thought it did. This story uses the magical closeness of a coven as a mirror for the main character, who has spent years silently struggling with her own aromantic nature and the heaviness of old habits, of leaving the familiar behind and setting off for something new. Luckily, as she discovers, it’s never too late for self-discovery or for changing course.
“The Hunger Who Wears His Skin” – Ren Oliveira
One thing that keeps coming up in my writing is the parallel and contrast between romantic and platonic relationships, as well as soft magic systems (or just magic that isn’t a system at all!). “The Hunger Who Wears His Skin” is very much about that: Lore and Sage’s queerplatonic relationship is compared, by Sage themselves, to that of the God of the River and the God of Growing Things a few times – a relationship some say was romantic, others say was platonic, and one that maybe didn’t even exist at all. The first version of the story – a 12k-word behemoth that had been sitting in my Google Docs for five years at that point – was more forthcoming about the nature of this relationship, but in the complete rewrite/reimagining I did for Common Bonds 2, I chose to keep it vague. That first version also never had proto-Sage (then called Sian) worry about what, exactly, they had with proto-Lore. About how others saw it? Yes. But about how they themselves saw it? Nope. Proto-Lore never estranged himself from his sister either, while Lore could never get over Larkspur being more loved by their parents.
“The Hunger Who Wears His Skin” has some elements that are very much self-indulgent: rival witch families, dead gods, a mysterious swamp, magical entities that simply are, no explanations necessary But platonic relationships that can get a bit ugly, uncomfortable, or complicated are certainly the main reason I wrote the story.
“Sowing Constellations” – S.H. Marr
When I started “Sowing Constellations,” I knew Soren had a platonic soulmate. The entire story is built around Soren trying to show his care for Aethon. But what I actually love most about “Sowing Constellations” is Soren’s relationship with Nikolai. I’m a total sucker for platonic soulmates, but writing a good mentor/mentee relationship is a lot harder for me, and something I’ve been thinking about more and more as I get older. Soren learning how to guide someone singularly important to him through learning how someone had done the same for him feels to me like the soul of mentorship: one torch lights another, and everyone is better for it.
“Flurries and Flames” – Sophie A. Katz
“Flurries and Flames” began with a picture in my head of a baby dragon playing in the snow. How did it get there? Who was watching it play? The rest of the story quickly grew to fill in the blanks around those thoughts. One of my favorite internet bits is when delightfully nerdy people attempt to apply Jewish law to fantasy or sci-fi scenarios. For example, “If you’re in outer space, which direction do you pray?” or, “Which Pokémon are kosher?” or, most relevant to this story, “Are dragons allowed to light a fire on Shabbat?”. For me, it’s natural and wonderful to combine these two traditions – Judaism and fandom – which encourage questioning the world around us, digging into the details of rules, and exploring all potential possibilities. The older I get, the less patience I have for imaginary worlds that do not imagine a place for people like me – worlds where there are no aromantic people, worlds where there are no Jews, worlds where the things that make me happy and fulfilled are unheard of or even detrimental. I hope that this story will help people like me believe that we deserve to be a part of wondrous stories, and that it will help people unlike me learn that there are other ways to be that are also good, valid, and important.
“Anise, Lozenge, Sugarplum” – Tunvey Mou
I wrote the story when I was stuck in a potential conflict zone during my semester-end examinations. All transportations to and from the aforementioned area had been stopped, and there were talks of curfew being imposed as well as other restrictions if the situation escalated. The media too, were fabricating stories and misquoting people in positions of power to construct a certain narrative, laying the foundations for mass hysteria. I was fortunate enough that the situation de-escalated soon after and the worst never came to pass; but that seed of darkness stayed within me long after, those prickling fears and terrible what-ifs; as well as the power of words in general which gain a certain explosive weight in such situations.
In my story, words are powerful too; as powerful as bullets and cannons, and can take lives just the same. But this is a story about the aftermath; and we see the power of words turned to other, protective directions; affirmations of care, confessions of vulnerability, setting up hard boundaries, rebuilding trust, and in confronting biases. I suppose in many ways, it is not an easy story to either read or write. But I want everyone to think about how much harder it is to live through, a fate I was privileged enough to escape but which is not true for a lot of people around the globe.
