Short fiction recs! September-October 2022

 

 

As I write this, snow is piled thick outside my window, a gift from the first real snowstorm of the season. Winter is here early.  It’s time for blankets and hot tea. For curling up on the couch with a good read. Perhaps a story of humor and hope, something bright and warm against the chill? Or perhaps you’d like to lean into the dark with something unsettling and strange. Here are thirteen to consider.

 

“Girl, Cat, Wolf, Moon” by Rati Mehrotra in Uncanny

Lila found the cat market when she was seven. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say the cat market found her.

Lila is the youngest of three daughters, growing up in a rural village in India in a family that does not value girls. She is alternately ignored and berated by her family, seen as the least of her sisters. But when still a child, she makes a wonderful discovery: a night market staffed by cats selling magical wares, a market visited only by cats. And there she meets a cat prince. . . This is an exquisite story of magic, one that balances darkness and desperation with whimsy and light.

 

“Timecop Mojitos” by Sara Pauling in Diabolical Plots

So what happened was, I’m back from clicker training Ms. Jordan’s dogs over on Dexter, sitting on the porch with a mojito, thinking how fucked up it is that the Old West Side Association stealth-planted tulips in our garden (because the yard looked so shitty without them, I guess—sorry for having a rental in your high-value neighborhood, Evie) when the Viking or whatever comes down Eighth.

An older story from this year, but oh, am I glad that found it (thanks to the Electric Sheep short story discussion group that I'm in!)  An absolutely marvelous story of a Viking(?) timecop, a pet-sitter who is much more than she appears, her history professor roommate, the “Bird of Something-Fuck” and the mystical “Cave of blah blah.”  This story is just such riotous fun, with such a wonderful, distinctive voice. I laughed aloud more than once. Personal bonus: the story is set in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with details that brought me right back to my time there.

 

“D.I.Y.” by John Wiswell in Tor

People ask how Noah could possibly turn down the Ozymandias Academy. All they know about him is the headlines, and they think he’s ungrateful. What you don’t get is that attending Ozymandias was Noah’s dream. Noah wanted it worse than anyone.

Noah wants to attend the prestigious Ozymandias Academy for magic more than anything. He idolizes Vamon Kinctuarin, the head of the school, he who defeated angels without even a wand. But when Noah finally gets his invitation to attend, it happens that he can’t afford the tuition and the school is unwilling to help. But with the help of a friend and an entire Internet community of wizards, Noah find his own way into magic and a way to save his world. Over the past few years, I have learned to rely on author John Wiswell for stories of wit, humor, pathos, and hope—and this story ticks all the boxes, and is one of his best yet. In short: two disabled, indie wizards take on the wizarding establishment and fight to save their world. The ending is wonderful—go read!

 

“Michigan Seems Like a Dream to Me Now” by Marissa Lingen at Daily Science Fiction

In Michigan the gravitational pull is nearly ten meters per second squared, and they have water no one filtered--just water, lying around outside with animals in it no one has checked over for genetic defects, which many of them have.

On a generation ship headed away from Earth, a mother tells her daughter goodnight stories about the home the mother left: about Michigan, that land of big water. A world that the daughter has no memory of, and never will.  A flash piece filled with yearning, that beautifully evokes the state I grew up in, and to which I returned.

 

 “Lay My Stomach on Your Scales” by Wen-Yi Lee in Strange Horizons

I become forty eight kilograms lighter when I detach my head from my body. You shed a lot when you leave all the stupid fat and bones behind.

 A story that’s strange and dark but also with cuttingly funny dialogue. A story about a girl who hates her body, who obsesses over her weight—to the point that she thinks about the weight of each of her organs. A story about a type of Southeast Asian monster known as the penananggalan in Malaysia and Singapore, and the mananangal in the Philippines (and by other names in other Southeast Asian countries). This is a story about a penanggalan in high school who discovers that the most popular girl in her class is also a monster. It’s about body issues, about a girl who wants to literally detach from her body and leave it behind. . . until someone takes a part of her body against her will. And it’s also about instant Maggi noodles and a date night at a morgue. A remarkable mix of tones—funny, aching, dark--that all, somehow, works.

 

“The Weight of it All” by Jennifer Hudak at Fantasy

She wants to be able to slip wherever she wants, unnoticed as a puff of air. She wants to feel limitless. She wants to be nothing.

 Stupid girl, she wants to be me.

 Another story about body dysmorphia and weight obsession, about a young woman with an eating disorder, who wishes nothing more than to leave her own body. . . But this is also a story about a ghost who misses having a human body, who delights in sneaking into human bodies to experience again the delights of corporeality—the ability to dance, to eat, to feel sunlight, to have weight, and to take up room. A ghost sneaks into the body of a woman who hates her body, and becomes trapped.there. This is an aching story about conflicting desires. It’s a story that poignantly evokes one woman’s pain and desire to escape her body and the world itself. . . but it’s also a paen to the joys of having a body, of being in the world. Beautifully woven and, in the end, hopeful.

 

“Of the Body” by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

I have thought of a thousand different names for our future children. Ever since our eyes first met. But right now, right at this moment when I should be the most happy, I am terrified.

Terrified of the moment when Osarah and I will hunt down the animal that bears our child and kill it. Will my aim be good enough to wound it without hurting our child? Will my hands shake as I cut its belly open and pry the baby out of its innards, slick with blood?

 In this strange world of interconnected nature, human couples’ children are literally carried and borne by animals. And to claim their human children, humans hunt and kill these animals. It’s a wild premise with more than a touch of body horror.  And yet in Triantafyllou’s telling this world feels fully realized. And this is a story that twists and turns as the main characters find a new way to be in their world. A dazzlingly original story of horrors, and yet one that is also unexpectedly tender, hopeful, and poignant.

 

“Sharp Things, Killing Things” by A.C Wise in Nightmare

We listened, even though we didn’t want to, and somewhere deep down we were all afraid this was a story we already knew. It ticked in the back of our minds, a terrible thing we’d tried to forget. The new guy excavated it and held it up to the light while our breath filled the car, steaming in the dark like ghosts.

 An incredibly unsettling story, with the strange dreamlike feeling of a nightmare. Outside a rural small town, an ominous billboard appears on the road toward the lake. Then more billboards appear. And the first suicides occur. Or are these the first? Wasn’t there a suicide, a death, that occurred earlier? Who is the new boy in the midst of this friend group--attending their parties, riding out to the lake with them, reminding them of something they don’t want to remember? What happened at the old razor blade factory in town? What has happened, what is happening, what keeps happening? A dark dream-spiral of repressed memory and horror, of a town unwilling to face what has happened, and its own complicity in it.

“The Skinless Man Counts to Five” by Paul Jessup in Apex

The first corpse rode the waves to the beach and greeted the librarian on the shore. It was tied to a chair with catch ropes, skinless with eyes popped open and mouth gaping wide. Inside the mouth was a speaker, connected to an old ghostdrive in the corpse’s chest. The speaker said the same thing over and over again, in a rusty metallic voice. Clear and sharp as a bell.

“Five. Five. Five. Five. Five.”

Another dark story. A wonderfully strange piece of mystery and death on a generation ship. A bizarrely inventive, fantastical horror/mystery/science fiction piece, in which dread and wonder are entwined.

“Sweetbaby” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld

You don’t look Sweetbaby in the eye when he pushes out from under the tree throw. We know that now. Instead, the ears, or what’s left of them, are a better place to settle your gaze. They’re close enough to the face that you can tell which way he’s looking and whether or not he’s smiling at you, and, in the end, those are the two things that matter most with him.

Thomas Ha has a gift for writing complex family dynamics, and it’s showcased in this disturbing story. This is far-future science fiction that is also horror and unfurling mystery. It’s a look at the horror at the heart of one family. But there is also sympathy and complexity in the portrayal of those who perpetrate the horror—even as the story never excuses it. A viscerally disturbing, haunting story.

 

“When Swords Had Names” by Stephen Graham Jones in The Dark

Some men can stand up on that battlement night after night, pissing into a warm clay jar, and not feel that their best years are being drained from them. Some men can stand up there and not feel the darkness is going to swallow them whole.

And some men, they fling their halberd out into the river, and then they climb down, walk away from their duty with their hands clenched into fists.

Me, I ran.

This is an older story, from 2014. Yet I stumbled upon it just last month, thanks to a link in writer K.C.Mead-Brewer’s exquisite newsletter, Peacock Mantis Shrimp . This is a tense, gripping story of obsession and horror, of old legends come to life, of terrible deeds—a dark adventure fairy tale in which an entire world is changed at the end.  In this tale, a soldier deserts his post and goes from a bad situation to worse. And then worse, yet again. On the run, starving, lost in the woods, he’s taken in by strangers and fed meat. But the meat he eats has a terrible origin, and anyone who tastes it will never be satisfied by any other food. Under this dark enchantment, the soldier does terrible things to get another taste. . . The soldier is revolted by his own actions, and yet feels helpless to resist, and this dark dynamic fuels the story’s horror.  

 

“Rapunzel House” by K.C. Mead-Brewer in The Rumpus

Rapunzel the House has a snug little kitchen with quartz countertops that glint like wet teeth. She has a library that hints at hidden rooms, windows everywhere standing tall and narrow as soldiers. You could burn incriminating letters in her stately black fireplace. A stranger could do things in her bedroom; she has a spare. We’ll be adding a sofa soon, a desk, books to jewel the shelves. A rug to warm the floor. Rapunzel must think we’re a pair of birds come to nest in her hair, a twittering bother while she keeps her vigil.

 

K.C. Mead-Brewer is one of my favorite writers ever—her strange stories often feel indescribable to me, their power something that can’t be dissected or explained. “Rapunzel House” is one of these. A couple moves into their new house, the house of their dreams. But dreams are mysterious things, and not always pleasant. . .  This isn’t your standard haunted house story. This story is a door into secret passages of the heart. Eerie and unsettling, gripping and haunting.  

 

“Folk Hero Motifs in Tales Told by the Dead” by KT Bryski in Strange Horizons

But Skullbone is the original corpse, the same cadaver who walked to the living lands and returned with his lover; he tunnelled under the mountains and brought darkness to these lands of light perpetual; his metatarsals were the first frigid flesh to tread upon this wind-swept snow. So Skullbone ties a piece of rope around his shrunken waist and gives the other end to his fellow-corpses. “As long as I keep tugging the rope regular,” says Skullbone, “let me be. But if I tug three times, haul me back.”

The dead have their own fairy tales, which they tell one another at a bar that serves only briny seawater. And the great hero of their fairy tales is Skullbone—“hero, trickster, corpse.” This story is delightful. A wonderfully strange, evocative, beautiful weaving of folk tales and hero motifs, refracted through the lens of the dead.