Where Shadows Meet Light

Fantasy Magazine has posted a new story by Mandolin, “Where Shadows Meet Light.”

Mandolin commented to me in IM that this story “relates a bit” to my nelly screamer post (although the story was written well before that post). “Since the main gay character is feminine, and I decided to go with that because feminine gay men need depicting and celebrating; it’s a valid gender presentation; and avoiding them can smack of anti-femininity.”

Here’s how the story begins:

Princess Diana’s ghost emerges at night. There are other ghosts, presumably, but she doesn’t see them. She only sees the living.

At first she haunted Charles and Harry and William, but eventually it grew too painful to think about her life. She even grew tired of the longtime pleasure she’d taken from blowing into Elizabeth’s ear while she slept, making the old woman’s dreams as disturbed and uncomfortable as she had made Diana’s life.

She went overseas to America where she’d once visited the White House and danced with John Travolta in a midnight blue velvet gown that sold at auction for a hundred thousand pounds. This time, she traveled between ordinary houses, some white and others beige and mint and yellow. It was easy to find people she could haunt there, people who owned memorabilia with her face on it, but whose distance from the British Isles meant they didn’t know every detail of her reported life, giving her enough room to dwell and still keep her secrets.

That’s the first three paragraphs — for the rest, you’ll have to click through.