Plural Stories

"In every strong woman
there are three tongues
all in contradiction,"

Blurb: a poem of the three voices in strong women.

Why is it worth your time?: It's short, meditative, and free to read online!

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse low focus, closeting, voices

Content Warnings: None

Accessibility Notes: This poem has been anthologized in the 1990 collection Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. It is also in Sinister Wisdom #34, which has been digitized and is screenreadable online, and is backed-up on the Wayback Machine!

"This would be the first time since I was a kid that I haven't bought a new console on day one..."

"STOP! You don't need to succumb to consumerism! You can always buy one in a year or two!"

"Psh, Nintendo? That shit's for babies. Go buy cigarettes."

Blurb: A man ponders buying a new Nintendo, only for his inner angel and demon to discover new feelings for each other.

Why is it worth your time?: It's cute, short, and free!

Plural Tags:abuse not mentioned, nonswitching, nonhumans (an angel and a devil), romantic relationships

Content Warnings: Beefcake. That's presumably what you're here for.

Access Notes: available on tumblr! Page 1, and page 2. Also backed-up on the Wayback Machine, but not screenreadable.

"A woman who hears voices is a lot more dangerous than a woman with an army. Keep that in mind."

Blurb: Radical feminist play about a smartass butch lesbian named Jeanne Romee (AKA Joan of Arc) who recounts her story as the hero of France, heretic burned at the stake, and redeemed saint against her will.

Why is it worth your time?: This play is award-winning for a reason. Jeanne is incisive and insightful, witty and angry, and Gage has a rare ability to cut to the heart of dissociation as a tool of control. This play is very much of its time and culture, but if that's not a problem for you, check it out! It's good!

Plural/1+ Tags: Abuse intermediate-focus, the dead (saints), spiritual, voices, nonswitching

Content Warnings: It is not a spoiler to say that Jeanne suffers the fate of the historical Joan of Arc. Others DO involve spoilers; see comments

Accessibility Notes: This play is shockingly easy to get, aside from an actual performance! It's available in audio form as MP3 download or CD, in script form, and in the collections The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and other plays (printed in 2004 from HerBooks) and The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays (self-published and A DIFFERENT COLLECTION), the latter of which is available both on paper and ebook. It was also published (and now freely available online) in Sinister Wisdom #35, Summer/Fall 1988, pg. 95-116. Archive.org has audio recordings of various performances. Available in French, Bulgarian, Chinese (Mandarin), Portuguese, Italian, German, and Spanish.

"Whenever you meet people who think they are reincarnated, they were always Somebody in a past life, like Ruth--THE Ruth in the Bible--or Mary Magdalene's mother, or one of Napoleon Bonaparte's generals. No one is ever a third world villager who died of malnutrition at age seven. [...] A friend of mine said I was probably Alexander the Great, because of my near-fanatic interest in him. I said no way in hell."

Blurb: An American female reincarnation of Hephaistion gets to see Alexander the Great, the love of her lives, again, and recounts the experience to the Loch Ness monster afterward.

Why is it worth your time?: Queer genderfucking reincarnation short story.

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, the dead, romantic relationship, spiritual, visions

Content Warnings: death, drinking alchohol

Access Notes: This story is in an out-of-print small press anthology, Memories and Visions: Women's Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Susanna J. Sturgis. Used copies can still be scraped up; it is also available in bootleg screenreadable digital form on archive.org. The whole anthology contains many spirited, many-selved stories and is worth checking out!

Misc: Notes: I think this author might be dead, seeing as her website has been taken over by a sketchy lawyer company for some reason. So I feel pretty okay saying that she speaks from experience; she mentions having a Navajo "spirit guide" who was deeply disappointed in her rugmaking skills.

"You're more yourself than usual, Nadine. [...] Sometimes you will wake in a different bed than the one you fell asleep in. Sometimes you will feel like somebody else entirely. But all the time, while you are there, the people you become will always be you."

Blurb: A Jewish lesbian musician flees into the woods... and starts dipping in and out of time and bodies.

Why is it worth your time?: Unusual story of a singular nature, and it's short, free, and online.

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, bodyhopping, identityblending, otherworld (the past), children, realitymashing, setting-specific

Content Warnings: pogroms

Access Notes: This story is in an out-of-print small press anthology, Memories and Visions: Women's Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Susanna J. Sturgis. Used copies can still be scraped up; it is also available in bootleg screenreadable digital form on archive.org. The whole anthology contains many spirited, many-selved stories and is worth checking out! It's also legitimately available for free online (and screenreadable) in Sinister Wisdom #34!

Misc. Notes: This story was eventually expanded into a complete novel entitled Running Towards a High Thin Sound in 1996.

Submitted by packbat. Thank you, packbat!

There wasn’t much to do now, so Syrus jumped off the bed to do some simple exercises.

Syrus asked, [So what are we supposed to do besides that plan?]

[The best we can do is not cause any trouble and have the ceremony pass without any issues.] (Luna)

[Fair enough.] Replied Syrus, in the middle of her first push-up. At the peak of the second, she asked, [Want me to accidentally burn the priest?]

[...] (Luna)

[Hello, Earth to the Moon?]

Lilly sighed, [She needs to say no, but wants to say yes…]

“Hehe, I know.” Laughed Syrus.

Blurb: It began with an accident, or maybe a miracle is a better term.
Three souls dying by different strokes. One died in glory and blood; One died, betrayed but glad it was over; One died poor and alone.

Then on the child’s fifth birthday, the three sleeping souls awakened. Three souls, one body, two desires, and containing all the powers each had in their last life.

Were they destined for greatness? No. But when the past comes to haunt them, their home taken away, they have to make a decision… May it be as simple as a majority vote.

“Let’s squash them!”

“...can we just run away?

“Were you never taught to aim for the eyes?”

Why is it worth your time?: Okay, so you know the fantasy stories where someone gets reincarnated and ends up powerful because they still have the knowledge and abilities from their past life? It's one of those, except three people get reincarnated in the same body and they have the power of all three working together. It's not, like, a deep exploration of plurality, just a cool body-sharing fantasy adventure story.

And also the protagonists' new parents figure out that their kid is a plural system and are super supportive and loving. Which is really sweet and heartwarming.

Plural/1+ Tags: closeting, cofronting, otherworld, the dead, teamwork, spiritual, setting-specific.

Content Warnings: violence, injury, poisoning, and death; murder, kidnapping, arson, child endangerment, and animal death; grief and trauma.

Accessibility Notes: online, screenreadable, free. Scribblehub link.

Misc. Notes (if any): The way dialogue is formatted for completed sentences, with both periods inside the quote and commas outside, is unusual, if pretty clear and comprehensible. The first part of the story goes up to Chapter 63, but it's ongoing and it sounds like there's a lot of plot still to go. (Cataloger note: Holy crap there are well over a hundred chapters, I don't think I want to manually back all that up.)

submitted by quailfence!

"he's kind of stuck around since then, mostly as an inside joke, a little bit not. I like having him around. there's something really poignant about looking at the world through the eyes of a gay person from the past"

Blurb: A piece about how ND Stevenson pretended to show Oscar Wilde around Vegas as a way of coping with overstimulation on his trip there, which then turns into a reflection on Wilde's legacy and how the world has changed for gay people since his time

Why is it worth your time?: It's a short, sweet piece about queer history and seeing things through the eyes of other people

Plural/1+ Tags: creator speaks from experience, people: copies, people: imaginary friends, people: the dead, type: nonswitching(?), type: on purpose

Content Warnings: References to historical homophobia. Passing reference to sexual harassment. A few suggestive poses/mild nudity.

Accessibility Notes: online/digital, free, not screen-readable

Read it here!

Submitted by acorn_squash! Thank you, acorn_squash!

“Jay wants there to have been consequences, he thinks. It nags at him: the senselessness of it. That Poor Kid, he keeps thinking; he's thought it so often it needs capitals. A proper title. Twenty-something years and a grave so shallow he imagines Barnes can feel it when the wind comes through the cherry trees in Arlington. Or around that rock in the mountains, under that frozen river—or spread thinly between one and the other, a stretched-out restless haunting five thousand miles long. He doesn't know which is worse to contemplate. That Poor Kid. And then there's Jay, turning his back when it's convenient and plumbing memories when he feels like it, pawing over the corpse and checking its pockets for spare change. They'd wrestled, somehow, and he'd won.

“He knows it wasn't like that, not really. Wilson'd implied as much, when he'd suggested that Jay had been born from the remnants of Barnes's healing brain, like the muck in a chrysalis reforming into another creature. But one time Jakob told Jay the story of Ya'akov, his namesake, wrestling the angel in the desert and coming out with a different name, a different identity; as a people—and Jay hasn't been able to stop thinking of it as a battle ever since. Jay wonders what Ya'akov's family thought, when he came limping back and said: my name is Yisrael. Whether he'd felt new. Whether he'd felt that he'd left something, back there in the sands, in the place where his hip had been twisted.”

Blurb: A series of Captain America and the Winter Soldier fanfics exploring the Soldier’s time in HYDRA, his escape, and his recovery, as he slowly decides who he is and who he wants to be. Only the second CatWS fic ever to be nominated to this comm!

Why is it worth your time?: This is really, really good fanfiction. (I think the excerpt above speaks for itself.)

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse: high-focus, cofronting (very rarely), memory work, people: the dead, type: setting-specific, type: switching (exactly once and never again)

I chose the setting-specific tag because Jay was born (as far as we know) because of brain damage that was only survivable at all because of sci-fi tech.

Content Warnings: Extremely graphic torture and murder, including of children and animals. (You can safely assume that everything in these content warnings is extremely graphic, unless noted otherwise.) Auto-amputation. Abusive medical experimentation that borders on body horror. Suicide attempts and self-harm. Vomit. Starvation. Memory erasure. Drug addiction. Forced chemical castration (off-page, but it’s a plot point; Jay isn’t especially upset about it, but he didn’t choose it either). Mentions of death in childbirth. Mentions of rape, including rape of children.

There’s also consensual sex in some of the sequels. (You can skip them if that isn’t your thing.) “I know the afterglow” has rimming and penetrative anal sex. “open your houses and let in the night” has outdoor blowjobs and anal fingering.

Accessibility Notes: Free, online, screenreadable. The main fic has been translated into Russian; the sequels are only available in English. Whole thing has been backed up on Wayback Machine.

Submitted by erinptah! Thank you, erinptah!

"As B, I felt very grateful to you for treating me as if I were a "real" person and allowing me to express my own personality. With every one else I had to pretend to be A, and my feeling of gratitude and the fact that you asked for my co-operation -- put me on my honor as it were -- was the underlying motive in telling you so much."

Blurb: An account of the various phases of dissociated personality, written by the patient, after recovery and restoration of memory for all the different phases. Such an account could only be given by a person who has had the experience, and who has the introspective and literary capacity to describe them.

Why is it worth your time?: Possibly the earliest medical-multi memoir! Clear and engaging writing, it makes for a quick, fun read. A reader from the 2020s can regularly recognize "hey, if they were around today they'd call that [term that hadn't been coined in 1909]." The first half is written by an integrated "C" who can remember the experiences of both "A" and "B", though those two struggled with severe amnesia barriers for a long time. The second half is by B, who recounts her own experiences, including co-consciousness (in that word!) with both A and C.

The first half is formatted as a series of letters to their psychiatrist, who requested that they write it all up for a scientific journal. The psychiatrist contributes some prefaces and footnotes, but he largely gets out of the way and lets the system tell their story. When he brings in his own perspective, it's usually to say "this is how my observations corroborate the experience my patient has described."

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse not mentioned, cofronting, creator speaks from experience, fusion/integration, relationships: teamwork, type: median, type: medical

Content Warnings: none. The authors talk about difficult experiences in very general terms (e.g. a "shock" of "an intensely emotional nature"), but say plainly that they aren't interested in going into detail.

Accessibility Notes: Digitized on archive.org. Text version was auto-generated from the scanned pages, so it has some errors, but is overall readable/searchable.

Misc. Notes (if any): Fusion/integration was a therapeutic goal for this system, and they were relieved and satisfied with the results. The "median" tag seems appropriate for both their early experiences (where they describe a "B complex", which was identifiably separate, but hadn't yet "flowered" into "a distinct personality"), and their post-integration ones (where B experiences herself as still existing, just fully co-conscious with C).

Full title: Searching for Catherine Auger: The Forgotten Wife of the Wîhtikôw (Windigo)

"Whatever else happened during the course of her life, Catherine Auger was a woman who witnessed the foretold arrival of 'flesh eaters'; literally, in the form of her own husband, who proclaimed himself a cannibal, and metaphorically, in the form of people who symbolically consumed of the blood and body of a Jewish prophet each Sunday. She had beheld the arrival of cannibals."

Blurb: A scholarly history of the life story of Catherine Auger, a Métis woman in Alberta, Canada who in 1896 watched her husband lose himself to a wîhtikôw, which compelled him to devour his own children. She protected both them and herself, and witnessed his murder by the local medicine man.

Why is it worth your time?: This is possibly the most negative possible form of spirit possession, covered in scholarly detail by Carlson, who is an academic and a distant relation of Auger, but also a solid writer. The story is riveting and tragic. He uses sources ranging from oral history, witness journal entries, and government records about how an apocalyptic wîhtikôw prophecy, the Augers, and religious and racial tensions between Europeans, Métis, the Cree, and Salteaux, led to tragedy. Give it a shot; it's academic but very readable.

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, nonhumans (wîhtikôw, more commonly known as witiko/wendigo), enmity, spiritual

Content Warnings: Violence, threats of cannibalism of children and loved ones, murder, racism, apocalyptic religious prophecies and religious tension. Also a tragic ending for Felix Auger, AKA Napanin. Due to the academic style of writing, though, it's not as horrifying as you might think with those warnings.

Access Notes: This is a 20-page chapter in the anthology Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands, edited by Sarah Carter and Patricia A. McCormack. The anthology is available on archive.org (well, if/when archive.org recovers from the mass attack on it), and also as a paperback and ebook.

Misc Notes: Nathan D. Carlson has previously written "Reviving Witiko (Windigo): An Ethnohistory of 'Cannibal Monsters' in the Athabasca District of Northern Alberta, 1878–1910" in Ethnohistory (2009) 56 (3): 355–394, which is available at https://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article/56/3/355/8822/Reviving-Witiko-Windigo-An-Ethnohistory-of It is not a story, so does not qualify for this catalog, but if you want to learn more about the wîhtikôw, check that out too!