Dearest Plague Rats,

If you've ever turned the last page of The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls and thought, "You know what I need right now? More buzzing fluorescent lights and medically sanctioned humiliation", then I bear good news:

My ever-so-creepy short story "The Gown" is now available to listen to on Audible!

The cover of the short story The Gown by Emilie Autumn.

Fun fact: I have virtually no recollection of writing this story at all. What I do remember is the sequence of thoughts that preceded its mysterious appearance in my notebook.

I was bed-bound, recovering from major surgery on my jaw, unable to speak with my mouth wired shut. Yet my brain's activity was increasing dramatically, having slipped into bipolar hypomania—the kind that still happens when I'm sleep-deprived, as I was then, utterly immune to any painkilling properties of the prescribed opioids.

And, behind my eyes, the flashes began—the disparate fragments of image, sound, and memory that instantly seem not merely connected but like one single truth henceforth indivisible.

Flash: an adult voice instructing that cold water must always be used to wash blood out of fabric.
Flash: my first remembered doctor’s appointment as a small child, being told to remove my underwear—the recollection of which still brings heat to my face.
Flash: my 7-year-old fingers tying the strings of a hospital gown in the front instead of the back, being laughed at and corrected.
Flash: the realization that this first gown was nearly identical to the one I would be forced to wear exactly 20 years later in a high-security psych ward.

The next thing I remember: sunlight, digging out my striped notebook from under the stack of antibiotics on my nightstand, and finding the entire story written there, start to finish.

What was published is exactly what I found in that notebook—I never changed a word.

I hope it gives you the chills it still gives me.

But even more than that, I hope it gives you permission to revisit that moment from your own childhood that has caused you to feel shame to this very day—yes, that moment—and to truly and completely let it go. You deserve it. We all do.