Short fiction recs! Oct-Nov 2024

 

The winter solstice is past, Christmas and New Year’s are coming. In this brief breath before the major holidays, perhaps you’ll have time to sit with a hot drink and a short story or two. If so, here are some to consider.

 

Stories of Strangeness and Horror, Dark and Light

“Two Motes in the Zuegma Dark” by Sagan Lee in Lightspeed

Jules let go of Scarpe’s hand and walked carefully to one side of the platform. “Ever been up close?”

“Only on TV.”

“You haven’t seen it ‘til you’ve seen it,” Jules said, giddy with the cheesiness of the line. Without looking, he reached for the lever that was right where he knew it would be. It gave way with a satisfying thunk. They were blinded a second time as the hangar bay flooded with light.

 

A hot-shot pilot impresses his dates by taking them to see Big Blue, the giant battle-mech that he pilots. But things go unexpectedly awry on this particular date. Giant battle-mechs. Jellyfish in outer space! A first date that goes in unexpected directions. This story is just so cool. But beneath the gee-whiz surface of this adventure romp are haunting glimpses of loss and darkness—of things that Jules, the hot-shot pilot, can’t quite bring himself to face.

 

“Faith Butterfly Resting on a Rotting Eye (or The Art of Faith)” by Gabrielle Emem Harry in Strange Horizons

“Belief in a god is a roundabout belief in yourself. That a cry, a plea, a word from you, is enough to move someone who can move something. Who can shift the ground on your behalf, make it smoother for the sake of your own two mortal feet. It is the belief that for the sake of your tears, rain will fall. A conviction that for the reason of your anger alone, lightning will drop down from the sky on a clear day and strike the heart of one who has hurt you.

 

A story that lives up to its marvelous title. A story of faith and doubt, of gods and the cruelties done in their name. Udo is a man who lost faith in his village’s god after the god’s believers did a terrible thing. Udo goes to the city to look for a better god to believe in. But is there such a thing? Are there gods at all? A wonderful story that reads like a fable, but which is also penetrating study of faith, of truth and lies, and of what humans need to believe. The last line is brilliant.

 

 “A Relationship in Four Haircuts” by Ai Jiang at Pseudopod

Originally published in the 2024 anthology Welcome to Your Body: Lessons in Evisceration.

And his smile wanes.

Oh, is all he says. You looked better with the long hair. I like women with long hair. I mean, I guess shorter hair is okay too, but if it’s short, much shorter is better, you know? Like a cute pixie cut or something. I think that might suit you.

 

On their very first date, a man tells a woman that she would look better with a different haircut—and she takes his advice to heart. This is the story of a woman who would do anything for someone else’s approval, without ever questioning why or whether that other person is worthy. It’s a horror story with no overt supernatural element at all (although it’s possible to read one into it if you wish). Jiang shows that the supernatural isn’t needed for horror—mundane life and mundane cruelty is horror enough. Dark, compelling, and yes, cutting. I also heartily recommend reading (or listening) to podcast host Kat Day’s insightful commentary on this piece.

 

"Halogen Sky" by Wendy Wagner in Apex

“. . . and I saw the little town ahead, or at least one of those clusters of commerce that sometimes spring up alongside highways. An array of thirty-foot-tall signs bristled along the edges of this one narrow road: Popeye’s, McDonald’s, LaQuinta Inn, Chik-fil-A. A Chevron boasted a Subway and a DQ under one roof. Everything looked freshly painted and clean, all the promise of America with none of the litter.”

 

The narrator is on a desert road trip with her wife that goes wrong from the start: a freak landslide closes the interstate, forcing them to travel on back highways. Their dog gets carsick and throws up. Then the couple stops for the night at a seemingly nondescript town, and things get really weird. . . Wagner expertly catches the placelessness of standardized places—the commercial strips of Starbucks and gas stations and fast food restaurants that could be anywhere, in any city. The motel chains that all look alike, with similar lobbies and layouts. The uncanniness of such liminal spaces. The way time and reality itself sometimes seem to dissolve in them. The narrator and her wife seemingly get trapped in such a place, in an eerie tale that plays with time and reality and captures “the true language of hotels and roadside places.”

 

“The Fairgrounds” by Thomas Ha, Metaphorosis

Under the walkway lights in the distance, Henry watched men made of stained glass performing for a small crowd. They banged against one another in mock battle. Again, again, again, until one of them shattered and the people clapped.

 

Henry is twelve-and-a-half, and finally old enough to go the fairgrounds on his own. He's on a mission: to bring back a gift for Grete, the girl on whom he has a crush. The fair is a wondrous place, but there’s darkness there, too, and people who would take advantage of a young boy’s naivete. This is a marvelous tale of a magical fairgrounds that evokes Bradbury’s carnival stories, but with an overlay of modern cyberpunk and also a peek into something much older and stranger and more primal. A story about the loss of innocence, and the first steps into a wider world of complexity which the protagonist has yet to understand. A story that’s strange and dark and mysterious, like so much of Ha’s work.

 

“Everybody is in the Place” by Emma J. Gibbon in Reactor Magazine (formerly Tor)

The mirrors are a blur now; I’m running, running, faster than it seems possible. The music is nonsense, too fast to make sense. We are trails of light chasing around each other. Is Maybelle in front or behind me? She’s everywhere, all around me, we’re the same in the Labyrinth, and everything is bleeding into everything else.

Another story about a magical fairgrounds, also mysterious and strange, but with a very different rhythm. High on drugs, Enid has gone to the fair with her friends. Clara wants to go on the rides that spin and make you puke, but Enid and Maybelle are far more interested in the Labyrinth, an attraction rumored to be returning after many years of absence. Enid lives in what she thinks of as a rat maze—a neighborhood of alleys and dead ends, where the small houses and flats are all crammed in. But a labyrinth, Enid keeps reminding her friends, is not a maze. As she says, “A labyrinth goes one way in and then you follow one way out. It doesn’t have dead ends like a maze.” And what will Enid and Maybelle find in the fair’s Labyrinth? Will it be everything Enid wants? A weird and wild tale, bursting with frenetic energy and longing, but also with a quietly beating heart of sadness.

 

Flash Fiction Online: special weird horror issue guest edited by  Avra Margariti and Eugenia Triantafyllou

 Margariti and Triantafyllou, two superb writers of weird horror, teamed up to guest edit this special Flash Fiction Online issue of weird horror. Below are some of my favorite pieces, but the entire issue is well worth reading.

 

“Within the Dead Whale” by Spencer Nitkey

The dead whale washed ashore with a hole in its stomach so wide you could drive a truck through it. Clarence came with other parents to stare at its size and smell its briny rot and wonder how something so large could have ever been alive in the first place. He shivered when he saw the skin worble like a guitar string. Something was moving, formicating, inside.

Sometime the fantastical can capture something real, and this story does so beautifully. It’s a story about a whale that washes up on a beach, it’s about the children that play in the whale’s innards, and it’s about the strangeness of little children, about the deep gulf of mystery that can exist between the adult world and a child’s world and mind. It’s about the gulf between parents and their own children, and it’s about a man who desperately wishes to be a good father. A wonderfully strange and enigmatic piece, which (as a parent) I also found deeply relatable.

“The Clockwork Sisters” by L.M. Guay

"The humbler the setting, the more beautiful the jewel,” Father often says of me and Sister. Like all children, we are made to gratify our parents’ desires, only more perfectly: Father’s wish that his work may outlive him; Mother’s hidden longing for a sibling; their joint preference for platinum skin and fine copperwork hair. Even our flaws are artist’s signatures, deliberately placed, from the gold-limned crack in Sister’s tongue to the diamond in my left iris.

 

The exquisitely told story of two clockwork sisters, created of metal and artifice to their parents’ specifications. The younger one, “Little,” was created to love and keep watch over the older. But what happens when one sister wants something different from what their parents planned? A story of artifice and control, beautifully crafted of jewel-like prose.

 

“Vinegar-Gurgle” by Andrew K. Hoe

After we burned her with acid, I started sketching.

 

This is an amazing piece. A story that starts with a violent act of racism, then continues to twist and spiral in horror. A story that pulls you in with its distinctive voice and never lets go.

 

More Stories of Horror, Light, and Hope

“We Shall Drink Wine” by Andrew K Hoe story in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

He rises, nonplussed, as if three decades have been nothing but a long summer’s night watching stars. His gown is black silk, a bronze-and-copper pattern, amber flowers blooming across the fabric. Luxuriant yet muted. Unlike the splashy colors he once favored. His eyes flick to his sheathed jian—the one minstrels call Snake Tongue—leaning against the low table, laid like a prop in the street operas we watched as boys; as much an actor’s stagecraft for this unfolding play as the wind-rustled trees. The rising moon makes the figure beneath the maple a man-shaped window into all I’ve lost.

“I know why you’ve come,” he says.

We draw jian and circle each other.

 

Guang-Ping and Ai-Lian were once brothers-in-arms, warriors who dreamed of a better world and fought warlords, bandits, and demons together. They were known as the Heroic Pair, celebrated in plays and songs. But after one last, terrible battle against a fearsome demon, they went their separate ways, the repercussions of that fight poisoning their relationship and haunting them both. Thirty years later, Guang-Ping has returned to confront his old friend, suspicious of what his beloved sword-brother might have become. A slippery narrative that loops through time, repeating scenes and phrases in incantatory fashion, a story that constantly questions what’s real and what isn’t. A beautifully atmospheric tale of sword-fights and empire-building, of parasitic demons under a bone-white moon, of poetry and wine and competing visions of the world and how to achieve the good. A tale of demons and possession/infection as I’ve never seen: a startling, dark twist on a famous Chinese legend.

 

“The V*mpire” by PH Lee at Reactor (formerly Tor)

It’s 2013 and Tumblr isn’t just fanfic and pretending to be a girl. You’ve been learning all kinds of new things, things you never really thought about before (your white cis male privilege talking!) and especially viviocentrism, lately. You’ve never really thought about vampires before (I mean, you knew they were around; you’re not living in a hole. But it’s just not something you’ve ever thought about) and now it seems like there are people talking about it everywhere. At least, everywhere on Tumblr.

 

An absolutely blistering tale of how abuse can be couched in the language of social justice; of how the Internet can help people find themselves and meet true friends, but how it can also open the door to terrible exploitation and bullying and worse. A horrific, wrenching story with the feel of a nightmare fairy tale, even as it addresses modern concerns. A story that’s set in 2013-era Tumblr, but that involves social media dynamics that are still, terribly, very much present in late 2024. A story that is also, in the end, about hope and understanding and love. The last line will absolutely make you cheer.

 

“Toronto Isn’t Real and Other Metropolitan Anomalies” by A.D. Sui in Augur Magazine

       look for things that are always there

        look for inconsistencies that never go away
        look for rules that are too rigid 
        too unchanging 
        the one NPC that keeps walking after they hit a wall
        you know where to look

 

The narrator of this piece was best friends with a brilliant physicist named Sandra, a physicist working on the Simulation Hypothesis—the idea that the universe as we know it is a Matrix-style simulation. And then Sandra died, jumping off a high bridge.

 

Or did she?

 

Because it’s a year later, and the narrator is receiving text messages from her supposedly dead friend. Text messages that say that Toronto isn’t real. That nothing in the world as she knows it is real. That there are cracks in reality, if you know how and where to look. And simulations stacked upon simulations. This is a gorgeously dreamy,  surreal story that expertly taps into those odd coincidences and anomalies we’ve all seen, into those odd moments of unreality that we’ve all felt. A story that’s also marked by glorious imagery, especially at the end. Lyrical, lovely, and mind-bending.