Larque on the Wing

James Tiptree, Jr. Award winner 1994.

Guitar-shaped, forty-year-old wife, mother and successful crafter of home decoration products Larque Harootunian is going through a very messy mid-life crisis.

Larque's loved ones accept her uncanny, unconscious, often embarrassing habit of producing temporary doubles – "doppelgangers" – of people and their inner aspects from out of thin air. But now her latest creation, herself at age ten, refuses to fade away quietly – leaving Larque no choice but to bear the taunts and accusations of the scabby-kneed golliwog girl she once was. For the child, Sky, will not accept the compromises Larque has made in her life – and, ultimately, leads her older self out into the vast, adult and mysterious night in search of lost dreams.

Larque's nocturnal wanderings take her farther from home and hearth than she ever imagined possible – to the neon pinks and Day-Glo yellows of Popular Street, where life is exciting and gay. Here in this secret place, she meets the beautiful, tormented cowboy Shadow – and Argent, the handsome stud-lover Shadow has molded from the pliable clay of middle-aged angst. And it is here, beneath Shadow's talented fingers, that Larque herself is remade – becoming a new "Lark," younger, stronger, more courageous... and male.

But freedom is a pricey commodity – and there are those who would gladly clip Larque's newly formed wings. Her loving, gentle, bearlike husband Hoot desperately wants her back – steadfastly refusing to accept his wife as a muscular, teenaged boy. And her disapproving mother is especially dangerous – since she has the power to "blink" her errant daughter into some maternally approved, no-warts ideal.

But the most fearsome adversary of all lurks deep within an already splintered Larque/Lark – a doppelganger in sensible shoes who, if released, could swallow up the Harootunian family whole and leave Popular Street in ruins: the dreaded Virtuous Woman.