Short Fiction recs! Feb-March 2025

 

Some stories I've read and loved.

 Stories from Flash Fiction Online’s  Winter Folklore Issue

 “The Ice Cutter’s Daughter and Her Looking Glass” by Nadia Born in Flash Fiction Online

The ice cutter’s daughter dreams that her world is melting. She knows the theory of thawing from common things: how candle wax weeps or sugar hisses in a skillet. But she’s not prepared for the severity of the sun.

 

She can’t hide her glee. After all, what young woman doesn’t secretly delight in the destruction of everything she knows?

 

The ice cutter’s daughter dreams of a summer land where “all things are melted and wild.” She leaves everything behind to find this distant country, to follow her dream. But what is the price she’ll play? A gorgeous, aching tale of both loss and gain, of dreams fulfilled—of a new home found—but also of what’s irretrievably lost.

 

“The Heartbreaker’s Apprentice" by Catherine George

A job ad, posted online. The only qualification: You must have a heart of ice.

For months, no-one answered—we clicked away, shivering—but one day a woman, lost in a snowstorm, pushed through drifts to knock on the nearest door. 

 

Come in, the heartbreaker said. I’ve been expecting you.

 

In an unnamed city, a  heartbreaker plies her trade—breaking hearts and destroying men for pay, for the women who hire her to get revenge on the men who’ve harmed them. When she puts an ad in a paper for an apprentice, a woman named “Kay” shows up. As Kay undergoes her apprenticeship training, a beautifully spare, melancholy tale unspools, a unique riff on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” Lovely and quietly haunting.

 

“The Hag of  Beinn Nibheis” by M.R. Robinson

In the Dead Month, Brigid goes to the mountain to speak with the hag. She does not know what else to do.

 

It is the coldest winter that Brigid has known in all her seventy years, and it is unending.  And so, she risks death to climb to the top of Beinn Nibheis, to treat with the hag who lives there and ask her to lift the unending winter from her village. A wintry little fairy tale about sorrow and loss, and unexpected warmth.

 

More Tales of Hope, Horror, Resilience, and Love

“Echo Syndrome” by Jennifer Hudak in Small Wonders

When my daughter climbs in the car, there’s three of her. They shouldn’t all fit in the passenger seat, but they overlap each other to save space. Together they reach for the seatbelt, their movements almost in unison but not quite; their asynchrony makes me slightly nauseous, and I swallow hard before putting the car into gear and inching out of the school parking lot.

 

A tiny tale that echoes with unease, that somehow encompasses so much of our current moment. Is everything just an echo these days?

 

“Written on the Subway Walls” by Jennifer Hudak in Sunday Morning Transport

When machinery cleaved rock and stone, I was born. When steel scraped against soil, creating open space where there had been only darkness, the earth whispered, Look!

I came into being then: a furrow in the ground. A trench. A pathway opened to the chill blue sky. The earth shifted and sighed around me, and named all that I was seeing, which had not existed in the darkness before my birth. Air, it whispered. And birds, and clouds. And then, soon after, water.

 

A canal bed that became a subway. A subway that was then abandoned. An abandoned subway that’s forgotten, dreaming alone in the dark. Until a young runaway creeps into the dark tunnel, seeking shelter. . . Hudak uses the details of history, of the actual abandoned Rochester subwa (which was once part of the Eerie Canal) to craft an absolutely gorgeous tale of survival and connection, of community and resilience and hope.

 

“10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” by Samantha Mills in Uncanny Magazine

There is a future in which the Old Ones are called down upon our mortal plane, and they wreak horrors unimaginable upon the populace. An elephant-sized spider with mouths for eyes, a vampiric creature made of smoke and blood, a small army of gelatinous masses that cause deadly hallucinations at the barest touch, and more besides.

 

Samantha Mills taps uncannily into the spirit of the moment with this short tale of multiple possible apocalypses, and what the narrator and her friends do to survive. Survival means community, and it also means more than pure survival—it means crocheting cute amigurumi critters for friends; it means learning to bake bread; it means finding ways to laugh and to continue to love and hope.  A story that mixes humor, horror, poignancy and warmth in a tale that resonates.

 

"Butterfly Pavillion" by G. Willow Wilson in Uncanny

Over our heads, beyond the plastic sheeting, hovers the relentless sun. For now, the generators keep the pavilion at a steady seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit, and for the sake of the flowering plants that sustain the butterflies, seventy percent humidity. There is at all times a faint but intrusive smell of rotting fruit. The irony of seeking shelter in a greenhouse is not lost on us, but here we all are: in the last place we could find that still has electricity.

 

Another tale of both apocalypse and comfort (or“soft apocalypse,” as a writer at the website Lady Business has recently termed it). In the midst of some unspecified disaster, a ragtag collection of survivors take refuse in a butterfly pavilion. They know they cannot stay there forever. They know that somewhere outside the glass walls, there should still be doctors, schools, a wider world. But for the moment, to take refuge in a place of beauty; they teach their children, they rest and recoup. The central metaphor could easily come off as cliched, but Wilson makes it work. A lovely little tale of rest and refuge, of transition and eventually daring to break free.

 

“Men With Tails” by Rati Mehrotra in Uncanny

Mid-afternoon tea with Mum in Toronto’s Little India¹ to celebrate the publication of her latest poetry chapbook. In between bites of samosa, she said, “I did away with Harry, you know. My first husband.” Spoken in a casual tone, as if talking about the restaurant menu. She sipped her chai, leaving red lipstick marks on the rim of her cup, and gave me a wink out of one heavily mascaraed eye.

 

When the narrator’s mother lightheartedly confesses the murder of an ex-husband, the narrator is left with a mystery to solve. Two mysteries, actually, as she begins worrying about the behavior of her own  husband, with whom she lives but who she rarely even sees. Unraveling the connections between these mysteries entails a confrontation with darkness. . . as well as reading through her mother’s truly, truly terrible poetry. Structured as a set of diary entries (with plenty of footnotes!), this is a quirky and utterly delightful tale of monsters, family,  and incredibly, epically, hilariously bad, Vogon-quality poems.

 

 “The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead” by E.M. Linden in Podcastle

We cannot cross salt, so we watch from shore. Our loved ones and descendants wade into the sea. The men strain to hold the boats steady against the waves. Everyone’s weighed down by possessions, a village crammed into sacks and lifeboats. Spoons, spindles, fish-hooks, balls of yarn. A clothes-peg doll in a twist of old apron. Seabirds’ eggs wrapped in blankets: habits ingrained by generations of scarcity. They’ve even dug up their potatoes.

 

Katie Zell’s mother is already on the boat. The songbook is tucked inside her jacket.

 

The last people of Tawlish Island are evacuating to the mainland. They are leaving their home for a place with electricity, jobs, schools, and modern medical facilities. The dead of Tawlish Island watch them go. And even after they’ve gone, the dead dream of the living. They remember the music that once played on the island, and the songbook that held all the magic of Tawlish. . . This is an incredibly beautiful piece about migration and memory, of what’s left behind in the move to a new life. It’s about the ties between the living and the dead, the past and the present, ancestors and their descendants. The narrative cuts back and forth between the island and the mainland, between the perspectives of the living and the dead, weaving a gorgeous story about an island community and of how the dead continue to exist through the living.

 

“Necessary Things” by E.M. Linden in The Dark

Lou is something between a conjoined twin and a haunting. He’s the reason we got the job at Maisie Millions’ Fairground Amazements when I–when we–quit school. Lou didn’t want to quit; our teacher, Miss Bell, even offered to find the school fees somehow, but I was impatient to make my own way in the world, and it’s not like I could leave Lou behind.

Not then, anyway.

Since childhood, a boy has carried a kind of conjoined twin, a shadow named “Lou,” on his shoulder. Lou came to him in the wake of tragedy, and has been his constant companion. But the narrator is growing up, and he thinks it’s time to leave Lou behind. What slowly unfolds is an aching, beautifully written tale of loss and grief. It’s about what a person might have to do to survive. And it’s also about surviving, and coming to terms with loss, and resilience.

 

"The Philosophical Quandaries of Meeting Your Doppelganger in Moonshine City" by Angela Liu in The Dark (first published in Escalators to Hell: Shopping Mall Horrors, edited by Jennifer Jeanne McArdle and Michael W. Phillips Jr.)

The elevator doors opened. The floor was lit up with neon emergency lights, an emerald sea of little running stick-men. Mannequins lined the walls with big smiling mouths, an eyeless audience. Aya’s blood ran cold.

 

“I think this is the wrong floor,” she said, tapping on the elevator’s close button.

 

Moonshine City is a brand-new shopping mall in Japan, a fantasia of food courts and shops and lights and arcade games. But when a schoolgirl named Aya visit the mall with her friend, she finds it’s not all fun and games. There’s a girl on the screen in the food court that looks just like her. There’s a floor that maybe shouldn’t exist. There are mannequins and eerie arcade games with creepily personalized prizes. A wonderfully creepy story that captures the uncanniness of modern malls and mannequins, and the angst of being a teenage girl with a crush and all the anxieties of adolescence.

 

 “Before We Were Born” by Angela Liu in Logic(s)

There’s a moment inside the Life Machines, when you wake up to pitch darkness, where you’re not sure if you’re alive or dead. Where all you can hear is the echo of your own breathing. When I was younger, in those few seconds between sleep and consciousness, I used to search for my mother in the dark.

 

I wonder if she did the same.

 

Xiaoyu has never known life outside the Life Machine—the sterile metal box which keeps her alive, which provides her with a virtual environment for learning and more. Her body can’t survive on its own. But a new brain-body exchange technology allows her consciousness to be temporarily overlaid onto another person’s physical brain. For a few brief hours, she can experience the physical world through a physical body. And it's a gift her mother is willing to give her. . . An aching, melancholy stunner of a story about parents and children, family, freedom, and love.