Circe - Madeline Miller
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The Folk of the Air series - Holly Black
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The Telltale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe
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The Lost Plot - Genevieve Cogman
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The Magnolia Sword - Sherry Thomas
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Clocks - Agatha Christie
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Skullduggery Pleasant - Derek Landy
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The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas - Ursula K. Le Guin
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Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
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The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California - Gerard Way and Shaun Simon
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The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: National Anthem - Gerard Way and Shaun Simon
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The Umbrella Academy: volumes 1-3 - Gerard Way
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King Lear - William Shakespeare
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Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
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Antigone - Sophocles
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Antigone - Jean Anouilh
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1984 - George Orwell
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Stolen - Jane Harrison
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Neighbourhood Watch - Lally Katz
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The Narrow Road Between Desires - Patrick Rothfuss
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Good Omens - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
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Wonderland - Juno Dawson
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Fin & Rye & Fireflies - Harry Cook
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This was wrong.
James sat in a hard plastic chair, watching the slow and subtle rise and fall of Billy’s chest, tracing the movement behind his eyelids. The doctor with a steel face on told him that he had acquired immune deficiency syndrome - AIDS. He wasn’t stupid. He knew what it was. What it meant.
James let the doctor see how much a man could hate another man.
Every tick of the clock felt as if it was burrowing under his skin - weaving between the threads that held the two of them together and picking them apart one by one. He grabbed Billy’s hand, rubbing circles over the back with his thumb - the same way he did in the cinema, as they sat in the back of a screening of ‘The Thing’, reaching to each other through the dark.
The smell of home and comfort was torn away, antiseptic sinking deep into the fabric of the hospital gown and burrowing into James’ clothes. He gripped his hand tighter.
Billy’s eyes fluttered open. He flicked his gaze up to James, and the room melted away.
“Hey Jim”
- - - -
Transcript of an exchange between Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes and journalist Lester Kinsolving during a Whitehouse briefing in October, 1982.
Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement—the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
LARRY SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?
LARRY SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)
- - - -
Louise stood in the kitchen, soap suds clinging to the walls of the sink and a lump clinging to her throat, as she violently scrubbed a ceramic plate; she looked at her three boys in the living room and her vision blurred, her stomach tightened.
Her sons were going to die. They were wrestling over the gameboy, laughter bouncing off the walls. She felt sick thinking of the silence to come - when their community would refuse to mourn the loss.
She felt fire beneath her skin. Felt it spread from her fingertips to the counter, and watched the tea towel smoulder. Flames curled around the walls of their house, smoke choking the sky and she could see the fabric of the curtains turning to ash, embers rising from a patchwork quilt. In the crackling of the fire she heard the photos of her sons that would one day be all that was left of them, burning.
Most people with haemophilia could live long and normal lives with treatments made from donated blood.
Most people with AIDS died within months, maybe years.
It wasn’t fair.Tears carved tracks down her cheeks, as she set the plate to the side and stifled a sob.
- - - -
Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
LARRY SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.
Q: Does the President, does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?
LARRY SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any—
Q: Nobody knows?
- - - -
The chatter of students floated in the humid air, as they sat scattered across the tarmac, waiting for their buses. 4 boys sat at the base of a staircase - Will pressed the dial button on his phone, and stifled snickering as a voice crackled through the speaker. The others circled him, egging the prank on over a half-finished bag of pretzels.
Will spoke in a crude, Southern American accent.
“Hi, I have a coupon that says I get 50% off a blowjob if I’m dyin’ of AIDS?”
He couldn’t continue. They were too busy laughing.
- - - -
DECEMBER, 1984
Q: No, but, I mean, is he going to do anything, Larry?
LARRY SPEAKES: Lester, I have not heard him express anything on it. Sorry.
Q: You mean he has no—expressed no opinion about this epidemic?
LARRY SPEAKES: No, but I must confess I haven’t asked him about it. (Laughter.)
Q: Would you ask him Larry?
LARRY SPEAKES: Have you been checked?
(Laughter.)
