Short fiction recs! March-April 2023

Very late, but here's a roundup of some stellar stories that I read this past spring. Perfect leisure reading for these long summer days, with a cool drink beside you.

“To Kneel at the Altar of Your Bones” by Valo Wing in Haven Speculative

She slices open a vein, and out pours star-matter. Liquid and glittering, the iridescent mess drips from her arm into my cupped palms. And, for a moment, there is only this: breathing in duet (forte, agitato), her brow a slash of determination worthy of sainthood (she’s my religion, yes), and, too, the dumbass acolyte who made a promise they’re no longer sure they can keep (me).

 

A failed opera singer, a girlfriend who has spent years with her consciousness trapped in a fungal network, and a shared promise to save the world. But what does a promise mean, after so much time apart? This is a gorgeously wild flash story, an epic written in just over a thousand words, a story that’s both playful and passionate: about love, devotion, promises, and doubt.

 

“Silver Necklace, Golden Ring” by Marie Brennan in Uncanny

It always began with a young woman alone, working in the fields or carrying water from the well, on the first day of the absent moon—for it used to be that three days out of the month, that silver circle vanished from the sky. “He cannot enter any house other than his own,” the tellers agreed, “but it’s no use running, if Nievre comes for you—he’s fast as thought and twice as cruel. He’ll catch you before you reach safety and take you to his castle of ice, high in the highest mountains. No, there’s only one way to save yourself.

 

An enigmatic fairy tale—one of cruelty, determination, cleverness, and survival. To survive, a young woman must play a riddling game and outwit a cold-hearted devil. There’s a lovely rhythm to this, and a sense of deep mystery and myth. At the heart of most classic fairy tales is a sense of mystery, and this story captures that.

 

“The Prince of Salt and the Ocean’s Bargain” by Natalia Theodoridou in Uncanny

For a long time, salt did not know itself to exist. But then, beneath a wave, under a dark and bitter brew of the sea, it stirred. Why, it hardly knew; yet, for the first time, salt found itself wanting. It had no body, this watery want, no arms and legs, no spine nor skull, no eyes or mouth, but it knew it wanted, and what it wanted was to live.

 

This is an older story from 2022, one that has been nominated for a Nebula award, but one that I only got around to recently. In this fantasy novelette, Theodoridou spins a rapturous fairy tale of love and yearning. Salt wishes to live, to take on human form. And so Salt makes a bargain with the ocean, and does so. Salt becomes a man named Thelo, who falls in love with a woman, and together they seek out every pleasure, every experience, that they can. In order to afford more luxury, more pleasure, Thelo sets out to earn money, and eventually power. Thelo becomes a Prince and falls in love with a man. Thelo has everything. And yet the limited time that he has on land, the bargain that he made with the ocean, haunts him. A beautifully woven tale of love and bargains, of yearning and loss and stories.

 

“Always and Forever, Only You” by Iona Datt Sharma in Strange Horizons

It was a video. Edie squinted at a young man on a big stage, standing in a rainbow-coloured spotlight. The caption said he was from Korea. He looked up the camera and started to sing, and something inside Edie’s heart turned over and grew wings.

 

This story is so achingly tender and perfect and kind. Edie is an elderly widow living in the Sunshine Care Home, a facility staffed mostly by holographic workers. Her days are uneventful, until one day she hears a new song on the radio. A song that takes her back to her youth, to her days as a teenager swaying at concerts with her friends, sighing over the Beatles and Elvis. And it’s a song that takes her someplace new, even as it also helps her reconcile with grief. A lovely, generous tale about K-pop, music, grief, and kindness.

 

“The Dark House” by A.C. Wise at Tor

Sometimes he can go months without her appearing. There’s never any way to tell, not until he’s in the darkroom, feeling the held-breath sensation of her presence, watching over his shoulder, waiting to know she is seen.

 

Years ago, a little boy played in a house where terrible things happened. That boy grew into a photographer whose photographs kept showing a little girl—a girl who wasn’t in the photos when he initially took them, who appeared only afterward, when he developed the photos in the same house where they met. And years after that, two friends happen upon the photographer’s posthumous art exhibit, and are taken by his work and story. They decide to take a road trip to what’s now known as the Dark House. . . A. C. Wise gives us an eerie tale that spirals into an increasing sense of unreality as past and present merge, as the narrator of the present can’t tell what’s real and what’s not, as the horror of the past seems to repeat itself, endlessly.  Or as one of the characters in the story puts it, “There are places where time is circular. There’s no beginning or end, events just happen like the turn of a wheel. Something bad happens, then it happens again.”

 

“Oni in the Box” by M.M. Schill at Pseudopod

Even still, knowing what I know now, I would not doubt my Sobo’s wickedness after seeing the long, hideous shadow she casts even now in death; maybe from the shadowy belly of Yomi itself. Perhaps even down in The Realm of Bloody Murder where wayward spirits are eaten, excreted, and eaten again by the Oni King himself.

 

Two impoverished siblings have been long estranged from their Sobo, their father’s mother. Gossip runs wild in the family about her—that she was a witch, that she was a beggar, that she was associated with a great lord. When she passes away, the siblings are surprised to receive an invitation to come to her house to hear the reading of her will. They’re also surprised to find that she had much more wealth than they’d ever guessed. But there is a price to inheriting that wealth. . .  I love the ominous feel of this story, the escalating tension of the final scenes, and the seeming inescapability of the final, terrible outcome.

 

“Laura Lau Will Drain You Dry” by Wen Yi-Lee in Nightmare

You grip the edge of the broken sink and try to girlboss yourself into stopping the tears. You don’t fucking cry in school. You are the It Girl. Captain of the netball team, valedictorian-to-be, one half of the hottest couple in school. Or at least you were. Until you yelled at Del too long and he dumped you. You forgot about sending him that picture, or at least you never thought he’d do anything like this.

Laura Lau never expected her ex to share an intimate photo of her with the entire school. But then a mosquito bursts in her mouth, and she tastes the first hint of revenge. . . This is a horrific and delightfully nasty little story, a cathartic horror tale of  teenage girls and boys, misogyny, mosquitos, revenge porn, and blood revenge.

 

“Our Exquisite Delights” by Megan Chee in Lightspeed

Almost everyone has, at some point in their lives, encountered a door that was not there before.

A strange, lovely, and lingering little story about the magical rooms behind magical doors. The exquisite delights these rooms offer, and the price for staying.

 

“When the Giants Came Through the Valley” by Derrick Boden in Lightspeed

When the giants came through the valley, they made footprints as long as the Santa Monica Promenade, as wide as Dodgers’ Stadium. They crushed dance studios, keto cafes,a waterpark. They left trails of steep-sided ravines with walls of stratified clay and crumbling asphalt, and this is where we now live. Sunset comes earlier down here, but it could be worse.

Giants come through the San Fernando Valley, leaving deep footprints behind. While some survivors accept airlifts from the footprints, others choose to stay and make a new home for themselves there. The people who never had much going for themselves “topside” anyway, the ones overlooked by giants and other people alike. A vivid, surreal, strange and beautifully written little piece, just over flash-length.  

  

“Re/Union” by L. Chan in Clarkesworld

It was not clear to Sharon when the traditional Lunar New Year dinner expanded to include the dead; character constructs had been wildly popular for years.

 

In a near-future Singapore, Sharon hosts a yearly Lunar New Year dinner party for her dead ancestors who attend in virtual form, as “character constructs” created from algorithms and their social media footprints. Each year Sharon does her best to please all her “ancestors” with renditions of their favorite dishes. She’s a coder whose expertise is in programming virtual approximations of food—she can capture “the minutiae of sensation, the details of mouthfeel.” But every year she fails to satisfactorily replicate her mother’s signature dish. Every year, she feels that she disappoints the mother who is no longer alive. This is a story about family, the tensions and hurt and complexity—and love—that can underlie the parent-child relationship. Like many of Chan’s family-themed stories, the emotion here is quiet and understated, but it hits hard. I admit that this story had me choked up a bit at the end, and still chokes me up upon a re-read. A quiet and poignant science fiction tale with a touch of the supernatural at the end.

 

“The Time Traveler’s Cookbook” by Angela Liu in Cast of Wonders 

Don’t eat dinosaur. Just don’t. Mom marked it as a must-have, saying it looks and tastes “like an exotic giant chicken,” but just getting to the meat has been a nightmare. The skin’s teeth breakingly-tough and the sucker hooked me in the thigh with one of its nasty claws during the hunt. I’ve staunched the bleeding with Happy Time Traveler’s super medical glue, but holy hell it still hurts.

 

Another story about family and food, from a very different angle and with a very different tone. And yet this one also ends on a note of quiet poignancy. A woman has inherited both a time machine and her late mother’s cookbook, and she travels back and forth through time, visiting all her mother’s noted dining spots—from the age of dinosaurs to soba noodles in Edo Japan, from Peking Duck in Ming Dynasty China to a rowdy feast in ancient Rome. As the narrator’s adventures unspool, we get hints of her relationship with her parents and loving descriptions of food—particularly Chinese food. It is through food that the narrator is trying to connect with her parents; food lights up her memories of them, and it is through her mother’s cookbook that the narrator is trying to understand her. A story filled with mouthwatering, sensory details, one that’s fun and delightful, and then ultimately poignant and moving.