Sorry, I’ve Got No Head!
In my latest book, More Asexual Myths & Tales, I retell a story from Latin America that I call “The Wife With the Flying Head”. Support More Asexual Fairy Tales on Kickstarter . I first came across this story in Jen Campbell’s The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers (2021). As soon as I read it, I knew I wanted to retell it. It’s about a wife who - whenever she is in bed with her husband - finds her head detaches from her body and goes flying about without her body. The symbolism really related to my experience of being a married ace. I traced a source tale in The Journal of American Folklore (1907). That version is taken from El Salvador, but there are versions of the “flying head” myth across Southeast Asia and Latin America, including Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand, Bali, Chile and Argentina. Readers from those cultures may recognise it as a vampiric creature, and probably know a lot more about it than I ...