Short fiction recs! July and August 2025

 

It’s the last day of September, and this round-up is way overdue. Some things I read and loved in July and August.

 

Strange Tales of Horror, Darkness, and Beauty

 

“And the Planet Loved Him” by L. Chan in Clarkesworld

I’ve been here a few weeks, and the sunsets never get old. The blue sun scintillates off the spore miasma, glittering into fractal rainbows. The worst part is the waiting. We’re so far off the grid that by the time the distress signal relays back to someone that could authorize the funds requisition for a rescue, there’s a good chance that I’d already run out of air or food or both. We still see the light of stars long gone supernova in the sky. I’m dead already; I just haven’t gotten the memo.

 

And this is all before my deceased husband’s voice crackles on the radio from outside the habitat.

 

L. Chan excels at strange, beautiful hard science-fiction stories with striking ideas and imagery. He gives another one here, in this lovely tale of a grieving man in communion with a grieving planet that’s threaded through with a mycelial intelligence.

 

“If an Algorithm Can Cast a Shadow” by Claire Jia-Wen in Clarkesworld

Maxine first heard about the program in hushed gossip passed through the pews as the pastor droned on about some prophet or another. Connie dipping toward her like a palm tree, muttering, “Kelly bought a copy of her daughter. It’s just a SimBox version right now, but I heard Datalogs is trying to move into physical ones.”

 

The author takes a tragic premise—the death of a high school boy, his mother’s attempt to “resurrect” him through a “Digital Double” that’s been trained on all his online activity—and uses it as a launching pad for a biting satire of social media scraping and algorithms, and of life in a pressure-cooker suburbia where “the local high school boasts SAT scores in the nations’ top 0.2 percent,” and sure, kids crack under the pressure and that one kid who made it to Stanford jumped off a bridge and a bomb threat caused a stampede but “the USC matriculation rate, though.”  Maxine is as caught up in these pressures as any other mother of teenagers in this competitive school district. When her teen son dies in an event that was likely a murder-suicide, she just wants to understand why. But she’s never understood him or her daughter, and slowly she comes to realize that no Digital Double will help. This story is bleakly, blackly funny; the teenage characters’ snarky dialogue made me gasp, laugh, and cringe. And then, in the end, it turns utterly wrenching.  A brilliant story with a wounded tenderness beating beneath its black, savage satire.

 

“The Best Way to Survive a Tiger Attack” by A.W. Prihandita in Uncanny Magazine

Here is the punishment the tiger gives for my lack of appetite: wild chili peppers, the kind that was small but sharp, green and fat. She’d cut them in two until tiny seeds spill out, then she’d smear them on my lips and tongue. Spicy, huh? she’d say as I cry. Then eat. Don’t make my job harder, you crybaby. Eat, chew, swallow. The spiciness will go down.

 

A searing story of child abuse. . . but also a story about the complicated feelings and relationship between an abusive caretaker and a child. The way abuse can coexist with  care and attachment. The way a terrible tiger can also be terribly human—a young woman with her own story—even as she leaves lasting scars.

 

“When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente in Uncanny Magazine

There’s nights in the deep end of summer so hot and thick and wet you can feel the dark wrinkling up your fingers like bathwater—and my last night breathing was one of those.

 

2 a.m. came to ring my bell and found me perfectly awake, swinging back and forth on a hanging sweetheart bench with a faded pink and yellow tulip pattern on the cushion. Every time the bench rocked, the chains groaned on their hooks, the pads of my bare feet made kissing sounds on the floorboards of our big wraparound farmhouse porch, and I hung onto the shotgun across my lap just a little tighter.

 

On a thick summer night, a woman waits on a porch for an encounter with darkness. With a figure who doesn’t actually seem dark at all—a figure, in fact, of entrancing loveliness. The narrator is looking to confront the beautiful woman who stole her husband’s heart, and the narrator will do anything to win him back. Or will she? Valente’s rich, signature prose casts an all-enveloping spell, pulling the reader along with the narrator into a dark enchantment. There’s a twist to this story that I won’t give away, but it’s a twist that made me quietly squeal (along with everyone else I know who’s read this tale), and that made me immediately return to the beginning to seek out the clues I missed on first read.

 

Three Sharp Flash Tales

 

"A Visit From the Sentient Slime Mold Specialist" by Spencer Nitkey in Hex Literary

“So, ok boss, yes, you probably should have attended to the mold beneath your shower head before it got to this point. Shoulda being the operant word here. But shoulds only count in wouldas and couldas and explosions—we’re here now and we have to deal with the reality of the situation. See those tendrils, that’s what you’re hearing scurrying around in the dark at night, the rattling pipe noises like, what did you call it, a lawnmower running out of gas, yeah. That’s what that means. Bad news.”

 

A sentient slime mold has taken over an apartment bathroom, and might do much worse. A specialist offers two methods of dealing with it.  But which method commands the higher price? A short, sharp little piece, both clever and oddly affecting, that takes turns you might not expect.

 

 

“Eight Ball” by Martin Cahill in Nightmare Magazine

There’s an eye in the back of my husband’s head.

 

It opens only after he’s fallen asleep, lid splitting silent as a dream in the night.

 

An eerie little piece, in which the narrator discovers an eye that behaves as an old-fashioned Magic 8 Ball toy in their husband’s head. A piece about the conversations we don’t have in the light of day, but only in the dark and when dreaming.

 

“Swallow Test” by Angela Liu in Nightmare Magazine

Ms. Laurie asks you to drink water from a tiny plastic cup as she studies the bobbing of your throat. You drink and watch her mouth, the way her words form into little insects and crawl out, down her starched white coat, across the hospital floor up onto the table, and into the open cup of applesauce.

 

An elderly man is at a medical appointment, undergoing a test over his ability to swallow. He has swallowed far too much over the years. . . A sharp, vivid little tale about what we swallow down, suppress, and try to hold within until we no longer can.

 

Tales of Death from Deadlands Magazine

 

“Everlasting” by Daniel Oluremi in The Deadlands

In more ways than one, Death looks like my mother. She is clad in a dark buba, with a long wrapper tied tightly over her chest. Her plaited, greying hair is loosely bound in a scarf cut from the same material as her clothes. Like màámi, Death is plump and short, and astonishingly beautiful—age barely bridles her waxy mahogany skin. Her lips are black and full. I could bet that if she parted them, I would see a gap in her teeth.

 

A woman has faced Death and her realm, and come back from it, six times. But now it’s the seventh time, and there may be no coming back. A strange story of mystery and grief, with gorgeously dark imagery.

 

“Miles to Go Before I Sleep” by Beth Goder

As Death sweeps toward her, the woods fall silent, as if Death has caught up all sound. Their face is a blur, their arms and legs like the impression of limbs, like an afterimage burned across an eyelid. As always, Death’s age never settles, or perhaps Death manages to be all ages at once.

 

Zoey clutches the bag of kazoos. She didn’t expect to meet Death today.

 

Zoey has met Death twice before, the first time when she was only a child. Will she escape with her life on this third meeting? Entomology, clinical anxiety and a kazoo battle are all entwined in this darkly lovely and affecting story, with just a touch of whimsy. A story about the push and pull toward death, evoking Robert Frost’s poem.

 

“Plus One” by Olufunmilayo Makinde in The Deadlands

There was a time when the forest of horror was feared and left alone, when the spirits had to travel far to find people to torment, and even then they had to gather their strength and bide their time. They could weave dreams and cook up stories, subtle and overt temptations to bring people into their territory. At that time, people knew of the forest and its inhabitants, they called it an evil place, and to speak of the spirits within was taboo. Because they knew about it, they had rituals and spells to protect them. The spirits knew this, so they had to prepare for every incursion. Otherwise, they were powerless outside their forest and the world was safe from them, but that was a long time ago. It was before the missionaries came with their beliefs and unbelief and cut down the trees. Before the Mamry girls’ school was built.

A wonderfully eerie, creepy tale about a haunted girls’ boarding school, the most outright terrifying story in this issue of The Deadlands, and one of the creepiest things I’ve read ever. The girls at Mamry boarding school know they are in danger. They know not to call the spirits among them by their true name; they know to refer to these spirits euphemistically as “plus one.” A “plus one” is your supposed best friend, and she may lure you to your doom. The girls at Mamry school call their parents over and over again, begging to come home, begging to be safe. But their parents do not bring them home, and they are not safe.

 

An Older Novelette About Dragons, Art, Transformation and Change

“Underdragon” by Diana Dima in GigaNotoSaurus

Jvir was beautiful, but smaller than Gabrielle had imagined. In the months before this, their first holiday in five long years, the city had grown in her mind: a tangle of sun-soaked alleys for her and Margaret to kiss in, a series of sharp turns into unexpected vistas, a jumble of blues and yellows so bright they’d force her to pick up a paintbrush. There was truth to this vision; but at dusk, when shadows crawled along the streets, Gabrielle thought she glimpsed another, darker city.

 

Gabrielle and Margaret have come to the city of Jvir for a romantic holiday. But long-standing tensions between the two women continue, and Jvir has a hidden side rarely shown to tourists. . . A strange, quiet story about uncovering one’s true face, about both the discomfort and joy of transformation and change. It’s a story that slowly unspools, encompassing dragons, art, migratory birds, and more. Quietly lovely.  

 

A Triptych of Poems

“Notes on ‘The Juniper Tree,’” a triptych of poems by Christine Butterworth-McDermott in The Orange and Bee

I don’t often discuss poetry here. But this trio of poems on the theme of the old fairy tale, The Juniper Tree, is so lovely that I can’t help myself. Go read it, now.