Short fiction recs! Stories from Aug-Sept 2024

Some stories I’ve read recently.

 

Tales of Strangeness, Beauty, and Horror

“Cicadas, and Their Skins” by Avra Margariti in Strange Horizons

 I spent my first summer as an orphan watching cicadas fuck, scream, and molt.

Wasn’t long before I plucked one of the cicada skins from the dry village soil. I brushed it clean against my secondhand clothes I was already beginning to outgrow. Dappled by sunlight, the carapace looked hard though I knew it to be brittle. A coat, people called it. To me it looked like a veil I yearned to slip into.

 

A fierce, angry, bloody tale. An orphaned girl has lost her mother and moved from the city to a small, stultifying village. Watching the cicadas, she learns that she can slip into a cicada’s skin. She can find herself in the skins of mice, birds, and more. And she can teach the other children of the village to do the same. An angry tale of wildness, of desperation and freedom, of seeking escape from the judgmental eyes of the village priest and elders and more. A tale of kinship among feral children. A shape-shifter story as I haven’t quite seen it before, gory and fierce and vibrant with potent emotions.

   

“The Angel’s Share” by Marty Cahill in Reactor

“And angels, well.” Jude chuckled as he reached into his coat pocket for a match. “Angels are everything they say and more. Miracles? Done and done. Light? They have that in abundance. Prayers? Oh, they’ll answer you, time and time again. But they are also moths, and they’re drawn to the flame of suffering. The brighter the hurt, the more angels flutter and clutter around it, aching to eat that hurt and make it better by any means necessary.”

  

Mrs. Mead’s house is infested with angels. Eventually, the authorities get fed up and tell her that she must get rid of them. So, she reaches out to Jude, an exorcist, and learns that angels are not quite what she thought: they bless and comfort her, but only because they are attracted to her pain and the pain in her house. And there is quite a lot of pain. This is a story that’s both wrenching and gorgeous, bright with pain and heartache and striking imagery. And, in the end, with hope and resilience.

  

“I’ll Miss Myself” by John Wiswell at Reactor

Shaw couldn’t sleep so he doomscrolled the multiverse. First there was a shaky video of a landslide on his commute to work, from a hill he’d never realized had been that unsound. Next was a wall of text ranting about an ex-girlfriend, who in Shaw’s own universe he’d always wondered about asking out. Then came a picture of himself unboxing his new gaming PC, which in his universe he couldn’t afford.

These Shaws were everything he could have been, all posting from other lives on AllOne. The possibilities of AllOne went on for as long as his thumbs could scroll.

 

Shaw has an addiction to AllOne, a social media app which allows him to scroll the “multiverse,” talking to and checking in on all the other versions of himself. Gradually, he realizes that there don’t seem to be any happy, well versions of Shaw in any universe. Is it AllOne itself making them all unhappy? Is it the algorithm keeping them trapped in a spiral of anger and despair? And how do they escape? A pointed tale for our social media age, sharp but also poignant, humorous, and warm all at once.

  

“The Sort” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld

“Where are you guys from again? One of those cities on the coast?”

I almost answer honestly, but then I catch myself. It’s gentle curiosity, not malice, in his question. But we never know who’s going to get upset when they find out we come from a place where there are still some modified families like us.

  

Thomas Ha has a gift for stories of quietly building unease, and “The Sort” showcases that gift perfectly. A father and son are on a road trip through the desert. They stop at a small town, go to a restaurant and then a park. Nothing much seems to be happening. Yet from the beginning, there’s a sense of disquiet and even danger. The father is always on alert, watching his son and his son’s interactions with others. The son is not entirely “normal”—he doesn’t quite react like other kids, he sometimes gets overwhelmed and shuts down. His reflexes are different. And the father, too, is not quite “normal,” for he and his son can communicate thoughts to each other without spoken words. A quiet, moving story about being different, about trying to keep safe and survive and even try to interact and participate in a world that doesn’t feel like it fits you. A story about fatherhood. A layered tale, beautifully told.

  

“A Theory of Missing Affections” by Renan Bernardo in Clarkesworld

Without the Big Door, a trip between both systems takes ninety-eight years round trip. With the gate, it’s doable in merely twelve days. Later, in an unplanned future, the Big Door will reopen, even if at intervals, once its stupidly high startup cost is significantly lowered. No one doubts that. By then, I will be a bag of bones in an excavation site and Kata’s ashes will have been swooshed away like pollen from Papa Ramiro’s farm.

 

Two sisters, separated by many light-years but also by more—by philosophical, religious, and existential divides. Kata, the younger sister, believes that the long-extinct alien race of the Byrnyan were benevolent gods who even now can help and guide humanity. But Jekya, the older sister, left their home-world to actually travel to the Byrnyan home-world and study the artifacts of this lost civilization. Jekya has concluded that the Byrnyan were not gods at all—in fact, she believes that their artifacts show that they were a punitive culture who engaged in torture. Now the portal gate between star systems is about to close, and the two sisters may never see each other again. As Jekya tries to bridge the divide with her sister, she comes across a new understanding of the Byrnyan which may change everything forever. This story is everything I love about science fiction—it’s a vehicle for exploring big ideas and questions in a way that no other genre can. At the same time, it’s a graceful depiction of the ties and divides that can occur within families.

“Linden Honey, Blackcurrant Wine” by M.R. Robinson in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

When Irena was young and strong and still the third-most beautiful girl in Březina, she could walk from her mother’s cottage to the birch grove in only an hour—even if she stopped to cool her feet in the creek or fill a basket with blackcurrants. But she is not so young and not so strong now, not for all her wishing, and the journey eats up the morning and a slice of afternoon, too.

 

Sixty years ago, when Irena was only seventeen, she met someone in a birch grove. Sixty years, but Irena has never forgotten. And though she is no longer young or as beautiful, she now walks to the grove to find that someone again. A gorgeous fairy tale of love and of aging, of passing time and life. And of love re-found.

 

“Chị Tấm is Tired of Being Dead” by Natasha King in Apex

I crawl out of the persimmon, and it isn’t pretty. A grown woman unfolding from a fruit that could fit into your hand: sinew restringing itself, organs inflating, nails clawing at the floor. My skin glistens wet and gold by the lamplight, smeared as I am with fruit pulp and resurrection. I smell like divinity itself; you’d never know how many times death had me in its jaws.

 

The old woman comes back into the room and starts screaming to high heavens.

 

A retelling of a Vietnamese folk tale which is so beautifully, deliciously dark and twisted. A story of a king and two sisters and a wicked stepmother; a tale of cycles of reincarnation and revenge. And underneath this all, a tale of grief and thwarted, twisted love. I love the voice of the narrator—fierce, sarcastic, and matter-of-fact—so much. A dark, furious, and ultimately moving tale.

 

“Butter” by Erin Brown in Nightmare

The legs of the throne were of smoke-dark wood, intricately carved into thorns and needles and tiny open mouths full of teeth. Those little mouths stretched and shifted in her vision, as if to mimic Kayla’s screams. She braced her bare feet against the legs of the chair to try and push away. The thorns snagged into the skin of her feet. She was hooked against the strange curling tentacle legs, dark as the darkest black and yet not black at all, slick now with blood, unmoved by Kayla’s straining body.

 

An incredible, absolutely brutal piece of visceral body horror and wild cosmic horror. Kayla is baking a cake for her husband’s birthday when she first encounters the black box of butter—a box she doesn’t remember buying. One touch of the stuff catapults her into a fantastic world of horror. It also ruins her life in the real world, as she ends up burning her house down. From then on, the mysterious box of butter haunts her, returning every few years. But though its appearance initially undermines her in the real world, bringing her circumstances lower and lower, eventually that changes. . . There’s an incredible character arc in this story, as Kayla changes and hardens to survive, as she begins to use the butter to her advantage. One of the wildest stories I’ve ever read,  and not for the squeamish.

 

“Another Girl Under the Iron Bell” by Angela Liu in Uncanny

I don’t know when I was born. If I’d replaced another girl, or if I’d simply devoured her waterlogged corpse by the river’s end along with fragments of her memories. I only remember the sound of water. The whisper of voices coming and going like rustling leaves. The gash of light under a closed door. The smell of lilies. The longing for warmth. The overwhelming hunger.

 

Are curses born or simply distilled from collective misery?

 

Kiyo is a cursed spirit with no memory of who she was in life. A spirit who takes on the name given to her by a lost lover. A spirit bound against her will to a ruthless monk who uses her as his slave-assassin, forced to take hit jobs he’s not interested in—“false prophets, village leaders, novice assassins—tedious, messy jobs.” Kiyo dreams of killing her monk-master and breaking free. Finally, with the assignment of her latest job, Kiyo might get her chance. I love the twists and turns this story takes as it glides among Kiyo’s memories, shifting between past and present and slowly revealing the contours of her “life.” A dark, lush, epic fantasy of curses, cursed spirits, revenge, and love.

 

A Trio of Flash Stories in Pseudopod

PseudoPod936: Flash on the Borderlands LXXI: A Gibbet of Flesh

“Every Part of You” by Lyndsey Croal

First, I remove your eyes, then place the spider eggs in your skull, nestled safely in the empty sockets. Your eyes were so beautiful before, but now they’re dark, hollow. It doesn’t take long for the spiders to hatch within, then escape and cluster along the edges of your jaw, creating an ever-moving smile.

 

A story that is both grotesque and strangely lovely in its macabre imagery. A lyrical portrait of someone rebuilding their loved one’s body.

 

“To Be Human” by Hannah Greer

It’s cheaper to keep me awake during the collection, so they do. They say I don’t feel pain, anyway. That the part that connects pain and feeling doesn’t exist in me. Still, I feel when the doctor probes and cuts my pumping, beating parts away. They make a wet sound when he sets them in a metal pan beside my hip.

 

And oh, this piece in  heart-wrenching in such a very small space. A spare little piece that asks us, Who is the one with real humanity here?

 

“Taproot” by S.L. Harris

The root had cut Stan’s hands treacherously. There were gloves in the garage, but some stubborn thing made him continue barehanded. No one at home to tell him different now. He braced his feet against the soil and pulled again.

 

A man is doing some yardwork, struggling to pull up a stubborn root. That’s all. At least, that’s all that seems to be happening at first. A story that takes an unexpected turn, indeed: profoundly unsettling and mysterious.

 

More Flash Stories

“Painted Surfaces” by Guan Un in Nightmare

I dream of a shop full of masks. Porcelain and cloth and skin.

 

A retelling of an old Chinese tale (“The Painted Skin” by Pu Songling), this is an atmospheric tale of unease, of bright surfaces and the darkness beneath.  

 

“The Unexorcist” by Barlow Adams in HAD

He rents an office space on the corner of Martin Luther King Blvd and Peace Avenue where there have been six shootings already this year, above an Asian fusion restaurant with a sign outside celebrating the Year of the Dragon even though it’s the Year of the Cock, but the owners are too lazy to change it and the clientele are too white to know.

 

A mashup of horror and literary noir, where a client walks into an unexorcist’s office, looking to hire him to call a demon back into a person. There are some absolutely delightful lines here, callouts to the noir genre. But then, amidst the fun, this little flash take an unexpected and profoundly moving turn. The ending feels like a punch to the gut.