It's a Jumble

  I find myself finishing this bimonthly round-up of fiction late, slipping it in just hours before September ends. It’s alternately gray and drizzly or bright and crisp here where I write in the Midwest. Both perfect types of weather for curling up with a good story.   “You, Me, Her, You, Her, I” by Isabel J. Kim in Strange Horizons You are wearing Valentine’s clothes. You are wearing her body. You are everything that makes Valentine Manning herself, except for the throbbing electric lump that should sit in her cranial cavity. Her new brain is currently stored in a little closet in the Resurrection Clinic, bathed in goo and bombarded with targeted electrons. It will take two months to rearrange the freshly printed organ into the shape that she left it in before she died, all memories restored.   Valentine Manning is an art student who died. She can be “resurrected”—her memories and mind downloaded into a newly grown brain. Her new body is ready before her brain, h...

  Fëanor was a master of words, and his tongue had great power over hearts when he would use it; and that night he made a speech before the Noldor which they ever remembered. Fierce and few were his words, and filled with anger and pride; and hearing them the Noldor were stirred to madness. --from The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

  "Lizard remained silent, her face still pressed against my chest. Through the quiet, I could hear her heart beating wildly and feel the tension in her body. I was reminded of her separateness, a being with different organs, bundled in a different sheath of skin, who has dreams at night that are nothing like my own." --Banana Yoshimoto, from her short story, "Lizard." Translated by Ann Sherif.