A FIX OF LIGHT
By Kel Menton (they/them)
the wet sand. Summers were bright, so painfully wonderfully bright, and full of love and magic. Did I mention magic? Magic was everywhere when I was a kid. Magic was transformation and secret worlds superimposed on this one – again I think about two photos taken on the same film. I just had to look further, look beyond, keep pressing my nose where it didn’t belong, and eventually I would break through. The misery of my adolescence meant I stopped seeking out magic in my surroundings, even though the sun and sea and trees hadn’t gone anywhere. I just started to notice the clouds and concrete and cold. The light drained from the world, the colours grew duller. I was learning things about myself that I wasn’t sure I could ever share. I missed being a kid. I kept stories with me, though. I read and read and read, and sometimes I’d come across a queer character and a jolt would go through me. There I am! There’s my secret!! I wasn’t a teenager that long ago, but it was harder to find queer characters even then. It was also hard to find a story with a queer character that wasn’t just about them coming out. Thank goodness, then, that I wanted to be a writer, and I wasn’t too bad if I said so myself. If I couldn’t find any Irish queer characters, I was gonna write them myself. They were going to have a magical summer romance, and they were going to break through that barrier between the mundane and the fantastic. These boys were going to have everything I wanted for myself. Hanan arrived first, with his powers and his living room. Pax appeared not long after. Where one goes, the other follows, inside the story and out. It felt a little like two friends had strolled into my life. Wherever I went, they trailed behind me; always at the back of my thoughts, or lingering in my peripheral vision. It sounds pretentious and false when writers say how vividly alive their characters become, but it does truly feel like you have been spending time
with real, actual people. Hanan and Pax became my friends, my peers, as well as the (unfortunate?) vehicles of my thoughts and feelings. Being a miserable queer teenager when I started writing A Fix of Light meant that I didn’t know how to give it a hopeful ending until years later. When you feel like crap and you’re figuring out your sexuality and your gender and everything is overwhelming, it is almost impossible to imagine a world where you feel okay, or safe. For a while, I believed ‘happy’ was too much to hope for; ‘okay’ was more achievable, but only just. I didn’t want that for Hanan and Pax. I didn’t want to write that for them. Luckily, tempus fugit . It felt like eons, but I wasn’t a teenager forever. Life happened. I fell in love. I came out. I made friends. I got help. Eventually I achieved ‘okay’, and ‘happy’ started to feel like something even I could attain. That’s what they mean when they say to “write what you know”, I think. Once I’d experienced it, I could imagine it for Hanan and Pax. I could see a hopeful future for them, and it didn’t feel forced or trite. It felt real. That’s what I want to give the reader, too. A Fix of Light is a dark book, there’s no denying that, but in the end I want readers to be left…hopeful. Assured. Like you’ve turned your face to the sun, and can feel the promise of its warmth. BIO Kel Menton (they/them) is a non-binary writer from Cork, Ireland. They enjoy collecting fox paraphernalia, reading tarot, and dying their hair peculiar colours. A Fix of Light is their first novel (Little Island, Feb 2025). Insta: @poetryofkel Bluesky, TikTok, Substack: kelmenton Carrd: kelmenton.carrd.co SOCIALS
“Hanan is supposed to be dead. The forest outside Skenashogue sent him home alive – but changed. A strange new magic makes every emotion a physical force he can’t control. Bright and gentle, fox-like Pax is everything Hanan is not. And when he touches Hanan he mutes his secret power, quiets the curse. To survive their own darkness they’ll need to open up to each other. But Hanan isn’t sure Pax will like what he finds out ... “CAN THEIR LOVE HELP THEM FIND THEIR WAY BACK TO THE LIGHT?” Look, maybe it seems a little uninspired to set your first novel in the county you grew up in. It’s sickening to realise you fit neatly into a stereotype – a Corkonian who loves Cork? How inspired. Would you believe me if I told you it wasn’t on purpose? It’s not my fault that Cork happens to be, like, full of magic. As a kid it felt like an impossibly big place; we’d swim in the sea and go into the city and get lost in forests and stop for sweets in Gaeltachts all in the same county. Sometimes I still feel like Cork is stupid big. And I go to all of these same places, now, as an adult, and the memories of my childhood bleed through like two photos taken on the same roll of film. My mom would point at plants that were more likely to have fairies hidden inside; my grandmother would tell me about a ghost that haunted a local bridge; my aunt helped me and my cousins write messages to mermaids in
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