Short fiction recs! Feb--March 2024

 

Some wonderful stories that I read in Feb and March. 

 

“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim in Clarkesworld

So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different “they,” these were the “they” in charge, the “they” who lived in the nice houses in Omelas [okay, every house in Omelas was a nice house, but these were Nice Houses]) got another kid and put it in the hole.

 

There have been so many response stories to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” that they practically constitute an entire subgenre in themselves. But Kim’s latest riff stands above the rest: a brilliant, blistering, darkly humorous tale that updates Omelas for our current social media age. And fittingly for this age, the story becomes one that’s not so much about the poor kid (or kids, as they keep getting replaced), as it is about the discourse around the kids--the social media reactions, the performative posturing and flame wars. Both those in Omelas and horrified onlookers outside Omelas post passionate takes. But does anyone actually care about the kids themselves, or only about Being Angry and Right on the Internet? The people who keep murdering the Omelas-hole kids do so in the name of righteous revolution (“I’m an accelerationist,” one of the kid-murderers says, explaining that if they kill enough children eventually Omelas will stop putting children in holes), but none of them—no one, in fact—seems to really care about any suffering child on an individual basis at all. And the Omelas regime shows no sign of abandoning its children-in-the-hole practice.   

 

This is a savagely satirical, bleakly funny and timely piece, uncomfortably resonant with our age. And in the end, Kim brings the story back to the essential ambiguity of Le Guin’s original tale: a premise with no easy solution, a story that offers no answers, a story that widens to implicate us all and gives no comfort.

 

  

“To Carry You Inside Me” by Tia Tashiro in Clarkesworld

 You remember the fear of someone else’s mind in your head. You remember the relief, spreading as welcome as an oasis in a desert, when you inserted your first remnant drive and yourselves knew how to feel again.

 

The narrator of this piece makes her living as a surrogate for “remnants;” she temporarily hosts the recorded digital minds of dead people. Her latest client is a bereaved daughter who pays the narrator to host the remnant of her dead father so that his personality/mind can still interact with his grandchildren a few times a week. It’s a job the narrator is drawn to, for she has trouble feeling her own feelings or living her own life: it’s easier for her to feel someone else’s feelings, to temporarily live another person’s life. As the story unfolds, the reasons for this tendency also unfold. And then what seems like a routine job takes an unexpected turn. . . This is a deeply moving story, beautifully crafted, with twists that I didn’t see coming. It’s cleverly constructed, and generous to its characters. It’s a story about a young woman who grew up without much agency of her own, who doesn’t have much experience with her own mind and feelings. . . but who might just decide to claim them for herself, in the end.

 

“What Becomes of Curious Minds” by Wen-yi Lee in Lightspeed

On the third evening of every week, dozens come to Stalactite Keep to hear the storyteller teach about the place beyond Wonderland. Tonight, with only dewdrops of honeycomb light seeping through the cells of the sky, Creed told them of toys: rubber balls painted like the rainbow, tops that spun only as long as wind touched it, dolls dressed exactly like little children.

 

An utterly delightful, charmingly whimsical take on Wonderland/portal fantasy, that then takes a surprisingly dark and poignant turn. Creed is the only human in Wonderland, the son of a hero from the great Beyond. Years ago, Creed’s mother defeated the tyrannical Jagged Queen and brought peace to the world of the honeycomb sky. Creed now tells stories of his birthplace—the Beyond—to the citizens of Wonderland, keeping alive the stories his mother had told him. But Creed has no personal memories of the Beyond, and he’s started, well, filling in some details when it comes to his stories, telling his audience what he thinks they’d like to hear. Then one day another human falls into Wonderland, a girl with real and personal experiences of the Beyond, and her stories differ from his. . . This story does fresh and wonderful things with old tropes, envisioning the Chosen One/portal fantasy story through a diaspora lens. What happens when Creed isn’t the “only one” anymore? When his status is threatened? When he longs to connect with and hear the truth of the Beyond, but also fears what that would mean? I love the mix of whimsy, humor, darkness, and hard emotional truths in this tale.  

 

“Totality” by Brandi Sperry in The Deadlands

Absame was one of the very first, but the phenomenon spread. People collapsing out of nowhere into a stretch of unconsciousness, and waking up with new memories. Seeing themselves as a soldier in a foreign uniform, a worker at a forge, a hunter on horseback, a mother weeping over a bleeding child.

Past lives.

April 8, 2024. In the world of this story, the total solar eclipse coincides with a strange phenomenon: people collapsing and waking up with memories of past lives. Sperry’s brief tale hauntingly explores the implications. What would it be like to remember a past life or two? What would be like to be an old soul, who suddenly recovers the memories of thousands of lives—to live with all that experience, that knowledge, that pain? How does the world change, if you know that your current life won’t be the last? Sperry spins this tale through the eyes of Hannah, a woman who (like most of Earth’s humanity), is currently on her first life. A lyrical and haunting piece, thought-provoking and tantalizingly strange.  

 

“Threnody in Dark Wood” by Avra Margariti in The Deadlands

This is not the first wake where she’s been called to tear her hair, clothes, and voice to shreds, but it is by far the strangest. Closed casket, empty funeral home. The anonymous letter she received instructed her to slip through the back door like a phantasma herself, and not exchange words with a single soul, nor peek into the dark wood coffin as she sang its dead through the threshold of her being.

 

A moirologistra—a professional mourner—sings the dead into the afterlives that await them. But there’s something strange about her current assignment. . . Margariti’s writing is always gorgeous, and that holds true in this little flash tale as well. A lovely little piece on song and mystery, and the Doorways of death.

 

“Auspicium” by Diana Dima in The Deadlands

There has always been a sparrow inside me. At first it was just an egg, something I felt in my belly before I even had the words for it. I remember asking my mother about it, the way she hugged me and said, it’s nothing, trust me, try to ignore it and it’ll go away, and that was the first time I knew the world was not simple, not to be trusted, and it would never be simple again after that.

 

Another brief, haunting meditation on death. A world where all carry birds within them, different birds for different people. Birds that are not talked about openly, birds that most people don’t like to think about. Until the end. . . A lovely, delicate piece.

 

“Pomegranate Anatomy” by Diana Dima in Heartlines Spec

Every morning the vendors’ shouts would wake us, and we’d go looking for the best, the biggest fruit, fresh off the backs of trucks, flesh still warm with the sun of their homes. Amar would cradle passionfruit in his palms and speak to it, lift the plums close to his ears, run his hands over the cherries. We’d bite into big fuzzy peaches and let their juices run down our chins.

 

Amar never touched the pomegranates.

 

I was so taken with Dima’s story, “Auspicium,” that I immediately looked up her other available work. This little flash piece in Heartlines is exquisite: a gorgeous little tale of love, grief, and pomegranates.  

 

“A Turtle in Love, Singing” by Tara Campbell in Bourbon Penn

Green Lake Police are monitoring the growth of a small number of carnivorous plants, similar in appearance to the fictional plant Audrey in the Broadway musical and movie “Little Shop of Horrors.” There are five plants occupying a ten-foot radius behind the Woodland Park Lawn Bowling Club.

Carnivorous plants are normally not dangerous to humans (see: Venus flytrap, pitcher plants, etc), but these plants have been observed lunging toward dogs that sniff too close. No pets have been harmed thus far, but Scout Troop #4417 has documented an unusually large amount of squirrel bones in the vicinity of the plants.

 

This is an utter delight. A story structured as a series of public announcements from the Green Lake Police. A story that builds in both absurdity and complexity, as the announcements and warnings of surreal events begin to intertwine. There are carnivorous plants in battle with a pelican (or it more than one pelican)? There’s a naked woman and a lion. There’s a shark seen breaching the lake. There’s a playhouse that may or may not be sinking into the lake, and a seven-foot-tall raven who may be guilty of insurance fraud. A demon diva frog sings power ballads as her heart glows red, floating free in her chest. In the end, it all comes together in a tale of marvelous fun and sheer enchantment.

 

“Heathman Ldg” by Brian Evenson in Bourbon Penn

That many days on the road, that many days in a row, and you started to lose track of yourself. Most mornings Erlend woke up unsure what town he was in, disoriented, confused. And whenever he picked up his phone, it seemed like the company’s app told him where he was to go next, not where he was. He was living away from what he thought of as his real life and, in this new false life, was always unsure of where he was at any given moment, always freed to look ahead to the town to come.

 

A story of quietly building unease. Erlend is a salesman of some unspecified product, living life on the road, following his company’s directions to a new town each day. But wait—hasn’t he already been to this town? Or is it a different town that coincidentally has the same name as the last town he visited? Why isn’t the car map loading properly? Where is he and where is he going? There’s a slow sense of nightmare here, of helplessness and confusion. A tale that captures something of modern alienation and dissociation, of a salesman who has nothing but his work to guide him through his days: orders from his company that he follows immediately, directions on a car map that he follows without real thought. . . even as the map becomes strange, and takes him to a place that’s even stranger.

 

“Lidless Eyes That See” by Geneve Flynn in Pseudopod (reprint from the anthology From the Wasteland, stories inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland)

We are silently going mad, the boy and I.

The first sign was when he brought me the red silk handkerchief. It was folded and tied like the most perfect furoshiki-cloth wrapping, as if he meant to give me something precious, something with meaning.

 

Here is what I found instead. Seven pieces of a broken denture, fragments of palate glistening pink as freshly chewed bubble gum, and wire that still shone gold, cradling teeth as jagged and yellow as fossilised popcorn.

 

With a wordless cry, I crushed them under my boot, grinding the molars to ochre pebbles and chalk. He did not seem to mind, and returned to picking his way carefully through the ruins of the supermarket.

 

In a post-apocalyptic Australia, a woman and the silent boy that she’s found scavenge together for food and survival. The boy gifts her a broken denture. She throws it away, but it reappears in strange forms as the tale unfolds. An absolutely eerie, enigmatic, and surreal tale of horror.

  

“Our Very Best Selves!” by Fatima Taqvi in Nightmare

My eyeballs wobble in their sockets but they won’t fall out again tonight. I’ve rammed them all the way in, stuffing the gaps with cotton rounds. I soaked the cotton in jasmine oil first. It’s his favorite scent.

 

The screen goes blank, and I cringe away from my own eyes reflected back at me. One is just about to fall out again. I push it gently back in and try not to swear. It’s important to love oneself even at your lowest. Even if no one else does.

 

I love the voice of this piece so much. Gruesome body horror contrasts with the narrator’s breezy tone—she’s Googling self-improvement articles and sex tips for her marriage even as she literally falls apart. Even as the reader (and eventually, on some level, the narrator) begins to realize what kind of marriage she’s in, why exactly her body has been torn and sewn up in clumsy, slap-dash fashion. The narrator begins to understand why she’s hearing disturbing voices in the night, why her mind doesn’t work quite right. With some help from the Internet, she learns to put herself back together (sans a piece she doesn’t want), and it is at once glorious, horrifying, and savagely funny.  A monstrous and darkly satisfying tale of betrayal, horror, self-empowerment and revenge.

“The Wielder Does Not Know Regret” by Katherine Karch in Metaphorosis

You are walking down a winter road that carves a gentle arc through a forest of hemlock and fir. Somewhere, a brook flows along icy banks, the soft murmur of its waters slipping between wide trunks and snow-bent branches. In your hand, a folded square of paper with the following:

 

A request for the services of a Wielder. Take the western road from the Citadel. Do not look ahead. Do not look behind. Do not lose yourself.

 

A deceptively gentle-seeming story that turns heartbreaking at its end. A Wielder can manipulate the threads of time. A Wielder can use this power to alter a person’s future, to help and to cure. And a Wielder does not feel regret—a Wielder looks neither backward or forward in their own life but exists only in the present. In this story, a Wielder fulfils a request for help by coming to the aid of a father and his sick child. It initially seems a straightforward job. But there’s tragedy in this family’s past, and currents she doesn’t understand in her own relationship to them. There’s a twist that’s beautifully revealed, and an ongoing loss. The viewpoint of this story—of a second-person narrator who doesn’t see what the other characters see, who doesn’t understand what the reader eventually comes to understand—is just so wonderfully done. A story that asks questions about duty, choices, and regret, even as its main character doesn’t. A gorgeous, thought-provoking story, beautifully crafted, and utterly heartbreaking.