The Spirit Reports
Billie Knight and Randall Delphine, queer BFFs and artists, are reunited after decades apart and must heal their personal and shared trauma in order to move forward into a future together.
Light Reclaimed: Billie Knight
by Teja Rhae Watson
It’s June 2020, and on top of the Covid shutdowns and racial justice revolution, Billie Knight’s dad just died. She soon realizes he wasn’t the one who hurt her when she was a kid—but then who the hell was?
Billie, a fifty-year-old muralist and art teacher, sets out to solve the mystery of her trauma—from the off-grid queer community she built on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, through Seattle’s autonomous zones and underground theaters, to her wild childhood home of Humboldt County—with her long-lost bestie, Randall, as her partner. Between stakeouts, suspect-snatchings, witness interviews, and flashbacks, Billie and Randall must confront the conflicts that kept them apart for so many years.
The truth is like a feral animal—the closer they get, the more it claws and hisses. Will Billie and her spirit army find the answers she needs to bring the perpetrators to justice and reclaim her place in the universe?
“Teja Rhae Watson writes with the emotional depth and beauty of someone who has seen what the characters in Light Reclaimed: Billie Knight have seen: trauma and darkness, but also powerful friendships and glorious, spiritual redemption.”
