Short fiction recs: February and March 2018
It finally feels like spring
as I write this, a seemingly endless winter finally behind us and the world
moving forward (if late!) into a new season. It’s fitting, then, that so many
of the stories in this roundup speak of movement and change, of seasons on both
cosmic and personal scales. Here are tales of darkness and tales of warmth and
light, of horror and of healing. If it’s still cold where you are, curl up with
these stories and a blanket and cup of hot tea. If it’s warm, read them anyway.
May they offer you a moment of stillness in this changing season and world.
Short
Stories
“Cosmic Spring” by Ken Liu at Lightspeed
The universe is in deep winter. This is my
conclusion after studying the matter for 6.7 trillion years.
The universe is in winter: the
time near the end, as everything winds down toward maximal entropy. During this
winter, one last sentience travels through space, harvesting the energy of
dying stars. As it travels, it tries to assemble from its memory banks a
picture of its own identity, where it came from, and who its human creators
were. This is a gorgeous piece about home and memory, hope and death and cycles
of renewal. Like much of my favorite science fiction, it evokes a sense of vast
time and distance and wonder. . . but Liu beautifully injects a real sense of
human poignancy as well. One of the best things I’ve read so far this year.
“A Priest of Vast and Distant Places” by Cassandra Khaw at Apex
The narrator of this story
(told in the second-person) is a priest of airplanes. Airplanes speaks to the
character, and the character speaks back. Stay,
airplanes tell the priest, asking this human to remain always in flight, always
traveling, always off to see the sights of a new city.
You can fall in love with the sutras of
never-stopping, always-moving, with the mantra of footsteps on clean, white
tiles, the electronic voice reciting departures like prayers for the dead.
Stay, the plane said, wrapping you in its thrum, the way a man might lay his
woolen coat over your shoulders, might kiss your face. Stay with me forever.
But the priest has a human
family that they still love, and this story is about the pull between that
family and the freedom of the skies. Although very different in scale and plot,
Khaw’s story pairs well with Liu’s piece above, for both tales beautifully
evoke the longing for home as well as a sense of great distances and the rush
of constant travel. A lovely, affecting piece.
“The Mansion of Endless Rooms” by L. Chan at Syntax and Salt
You carry your father to the Mansion of
Endless Rooms. It is the duty of the oldest to do this; not all children are
called and fewer still answer. You feel his weight on your spine, the tightness
of obligation around your neck, the responsibility grinding your knees.
A deeply moving story of loss,
memory, burdens, and healing. This is an example of metaphor that absolutely
works, and the ending—earned through real pain—rings true. One of Chan’s best
stories yet.
“Flow”
by Marissa Lingen at Fireside
All
her life, the narrator has known that she walks like her father. The same
swift, swinging walk. The same flow. That is how the naiads recognize her, how
they know that she is one of theirs. And like her father, her chief task in
life to help the naiads.
But
one day the narrator gets sick; she develops a balance disorder. She loses her
“flow.”
This
is a beautiful, moving story about loss, grief, family, disability, and the
hard forging of a new life. It’s about hydrology, science, erasure, the loss of
an identity and the creation of a new one. In the end, it’s also about
recognizing the support and love that’s been there for you all along.
This is the strange, strange
tale of an orphaned competitive eater who lives on a train. It’s an atmospheric
tale of grief, hunger, and mystery, a surreal tale that put me in mind of Kelly
Link. You might not be sure where this story is going or of what it all means.
But it moves forward with a kind of relentless dream-logic; it hooks claws into
you and doesn’t let go.
“Molting Season” by J.B. Park at The Dark.
With soap and water I'd gotten the grease out of his hair. My fingers running through those locks, noting the familiarity of it, the shape of his head, the bumpiness that is mine too--how I'd woken up--there he'd been--there on the bed, the old me, the hideous thing that it was, nothing but a husk.
The narrator of this story
hates his appearance. And then one day he wakes to find himself handsome, his
complexion flawless—and his old body still in his bed, a separate being with
seemingly little consciousness. This is an incredibly unsettling, surreal story
of body horror unlike any I’ve ever seen. And one disconcerting aspect is this:
the gruesome appearance of the narrator’s double, the pimpled, scarred skin
described in such lavish detail, may well be perfectly ordinary. This is a haunting
piece that addresses body image issues from a male perspective in a way that I
haven’t quite seen before.
“Sabbaths”
by L.S. Johnson at Syntax and Salt
A fierce, dark tale of
witches, women, love, oppression, and betrayal. Dark intensity packed into a
small space.
“Al-Kahf”
by Beesan Odeh at Lightspeed
There once lived a man who was stolen from the
sea. Rare and magnificent, he lived in his cave, rising to the surface every so
often to pluck the strings of his violin for the birds before retreating into
the water to play for his kin.
A beautifully wrought fairy
tale of sea magic, music, desperation, and revenge. Like L.S. Johnson’s story
above, it is also a tale of systemic oppression. Odeh weaves the fairy tale aspects
into a real-world setting and gives us a story that shows how the oppressed,
from sheer desperation, can go on to perpetuate that oppression upon others.
“The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” by Phenderson Djeli Clark at
Fireside
By Cash pd Negroes
for 9 Teeth on Acct of Dr. Lemoire” –Lund Washington, Mount Vernon plantation,
Account Book dated 1784.
The note above, quoted at the
beginning of this story, is from the financial ledgers of George Washington’s
plantations. Yes, a Dr. Lemoire, believed to be the president’s dentist, paid
cash for the teeth of nine humans—presumably for George Washington’s use.
Who did those teeth first
belong to? How did they come to be another person’s property? In nine
vignettes, Clark imagines the stories of these unnamed people. This is a
dazzling mix of fantasy and history, invention and truth. In this story are
enslaved mermen, necromancers, horses that breathe fire, and battles of
sorcery. But these are also stories that search for the truths of American
slavery, based upon real history: the horrific Middle Passage; the slaves that
fought for the British during the American Revolution; a slave who runs away
and seeks to free his sister with him. Stories of defiance, hope, pain, and
love. After eight short scenes that blend fantasy and reality, the ninth is
perhaps the most moving of all: an enslaved woman named Emma who has no special
magic, who is neither conjurer nor necromancer, sorcerer or warrior. But she
carves out her own life in the shadow of America’s first presidential family; she
has her own hopes and desires. And the ordinary, human magic of her dream of
freedom is perhaps the most powerful magic of all. An extraordinary, moving, and
gorgeously-crafted work.
The author’s notes,
illuminating the real-world history behind his story, can be found here.
His caseworker was one of those people who say
the word “escapism” as if it’s a moral failing, a regrettable hobby, a
mental-health diagnosis. As if escape is not, in itself, one of the highest
order of magics they’ll ever see in their miserable mortal lives, right up there
with true love and prophetic dreams and fireflies blinking in synchrony on a
June evening.
This story is for all of us who
know what it means to escape into a book. This story is for all of us who
understand the magic of stories. It’s warm, wonderful, uplifting. . . with just
the tiniest hint of bittersweetness. A lovely tribute to libraries, librarians,
and the power of books.
“More Tomorrow” by Premee Mohammed at Automata
Anyway, it turns out trilobites aren’t very good eating
even if you haven’t eaten in days. I had particularly high hopes for the fat,
humped asaphids, thinking they would taste like shrimp, but everything I’ve
caught so far is strictly armor and attitude, plus they bite.
And for a change of pace,
here’s the rollicking tale of a scientist accidentally stranded in the late Devonian
period. There are no dinosaurs to contend with, but there are dimetrodons and
other scary prehistoric animals. Our resourceful narrator catches fish, fights
off monsters, and does her best to survive while musing on ideas for scientific
papers and pondering whether or not trilobites’ flavor would be improved by
nacho cheese seasoning. This story is by turns hilarious and harrowing,
narrated by a character who shields herself in humor and wisecracks to survive.
Fun, endearing, and utterly winning.
Flash Stories
“knickknack, knick knack” by Holly Lyn Walrath at Fireside
A story about witches that
goes off in an unexpected direction. Spooky, charming, warm-hearted and
delightful.
“Unplaces: An Atlas of Non-existence” by Izzy Wasserstein at Clarkesworld
A startlingly strange, lovely tale
of desperate survival and love in a future fascist America—as recorded in the
marginalia of an atlas of places that never were, that existed once, and which
may yet be.
“Four-Point Affective Calibration” by Bogi Takacs at Lightspeed.
Takacs packs so much into this
piece. It’s about fitting in (or rather, not fitting in); it’s about assimilation,
acceptance, and the yearning for connection, the ability to reach out to others.
Short, yet so sharp and powerful.
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