by Otter Lieffe
“We're leaving!” she shouted, her powerful voice echoing off the high walls ahead. “You will not stop us—and you never have. We will fight you to the death if you get in our way.”
She turned to the mass of people behind her.
“Now!” she shouted, and the crowd surged towards her, heels and crutches raised to fight.
* * *
The horses attacked as a single, terrifying being. Desensitised to screams and fear, their masters drove them forward to crush and kill as many of the people in front of them as they could.
The resistance, with nothing left to lose, threw their own bodies forward toward the flooded tunnel, towards the forest and towards freedom.
Ash was enveloped by the crowd as it pulsed forward. To the left, she saw the first people running, older and less able folk were carried into the tunnel and disappeared. To the right, she heard the first screams as the horses and soldiers attacked her family.
Amongst the hundreds of bodies, Ash found Pinar's hand and grabbed it. This is it, she knew. And they ran.
About the author:
Kes Otter Lieffe is a working class, chronically ill, femme, trans woman and the author of two other trans feminist novels in this series—Conserve and Control (2018) and Dignity (2020).
In 2019 her short story Synergy was published in Our Entangled Future, an anthology on social change and the climate crisis. In 2020 she released a colouring zine called Queer Animals published by Microcosm Publishing and illustrated by Anja Van Geert. Otter’s short story, Soft, can be found in the publication Glitter and Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die.
A grassroots community organiser for over two decades, Otter has worked and organised in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America with a particular focus on the intersection of gender, queerness and environmental struggles.
Since publishing her first novel in 2017, Otter has been building networks to counter the systemic oppressions faced by working-class trans women. In 2018, she helped establish Books Beyond Bars UK, an LGBTQIA prisoner support group in the UK and is now a community organiser with aequa in Berlin.
www.otterlieffe.com