When a gas explosion at a garage sale sends 31-year-old Arlee’s face flying through a shattered coffee mug, she doesn’t just blackout. She finds herself transformed into a fluorescent pink dragon and transported into an apocalyptic world filled with coffee. The city she lands in is seemingly abandoned, except for 20-year-old human Bren, who knows a lot more than he is letting on. Together, the pair must make their way through hostile lands crawling with giant humanoid spiders towards Sea Green Mountain, where legend claims a colony of sorcerous ants has the power to heal the land and bring them home.
“Light-Roasted Spider Fems” is a re-imagining and expansion of a fantasy novella I wrote more than ten years ago about a boy who falls into a coffee mug. Rereading it in 2025, I expected to be embarrassed by the quality of my early writing and the ways it lacked the greater nuance and sensitivity that I now bring to social justice and disability issues (and I was). But I was also confronted with a raw, stream of consciousness snapshot of my 20-year-old self processing my disabled, neurodivergent, and queer identities while grappling with trauma related to the Boston Marathon bombings. Approaching this novella with fresh curiosity, I decided it would be interesting to revisit that same world with a new story that explores internalized ableism, disabled identity development, learning and unlearning, and the emotional aftermath of an explosion. In doing so, I hope to honor the story's original intent (to write disabled characters and use the profits from any sales to advance international projects aligned with disability justice) in a reflexive and thoughtful way.
