Maria's Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup #7 2024

The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of the cover art for FIYAH #31 by Kaitlin Edwards. Find out more about the artist at https://www.instagram.com/kaitlin_june/.

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And to Their Shining Palaces Go by Betsy Aoki in Asimov’s September/October 2024

When my parents heard I was selected to serve in the Alariel’s shining palaces, I think it broke them.

Letters made of actual paper were so expensive that I ran as soon as the drone handed the envelope to me. I banged open the front door of our tiny apartment and rushed into my mother’s study.

Shaking, I broke the filmy seal and read them my acceptance to become a worker-in-residence in the San Francisco Dome. I was to work with the Alariel on the Great Game, the global virtual experience that tied humanity together and kept the peace with our interplanetary overlords.

After an alien invasion (which is followed by a lot of destruction and death), giant glittering domes appear in cities across the world and the brightest minds on Earth are called to work there, including Mayumi. The project, a game, is meant to benefit humanity but is also a scientific investigation and/or experiment by the aliens. It's a virtual reality everyone on Earth plays, and when Mayumi is called, she is thrilled (in spite of her parents' misgivings). Once she arrives, she is awed by the tech the aliens are using, but she eventually encounters the dark side behind the glittering curtain. I especially like how Aoki allows for shades of grey for both the alien overlords and the other characters as Mayumi's compliance and admiration change into confusion and horror, and then into resistance. Aoki gives us such a rich and textured world and a cast of characters, human and alien, that is compelling and complex. It's a story that has stuck with me long after reading.

"And to Their Shining Palaces Go" is a stand-alone story set in the Many Worlds shared multiverse.

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What He Woke by Jess Whitecroft at PseudoPod (narrated by Kat Day)

Everything was woke. Lawyers were woke. The media was woke. Even Strictly was woke now, with same sex couples dancing together and all. Blue hair, almond milk, lattes, tofu, lifeboats, LGBTQ or however many letters they had in it these days – all dreadfully woke. The condemnation of tofu as a malign left-wing influence should have been a tip-off really, especially coming from the lips of the Home Secretary herself, but it was still a shock when Caroline discovered that even her breakfast was woke now.

A savagely hilarious horror story that is both brilliant, funny, and razor-sharp. Present-day politics mingled with horror makes for one heck of a combo here, and the narration adds another layer of awesome to this story. Also: DO NOT miss Alasdair Stuart's outro! I mean it! 

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Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! by TJ Klune in Reactor

He goes to a mirror. Looks at his reflection. He doesn’t look like Jesse or Jenna or Ronnie or Simon. He does not have hair on his head or face. He does not have eyebrows. His lips are thin. Ears small. He pulls at the skin on his face and arms that covers metal and wires. It stretches, stretches, and when he lets go, it snaps back into place.

A thought enters his head, foreign and loud. Run, it tells him. You could run. See how far you can get before the fail-safe triggers. Perhaps it’s farther than you think.

One of my favourite science fiction stories that I've read this year. Klune's story is a beautiful, heartbreaking, and bittersweet story about an android who has known nothing but work, wor, and more work his whole life, and has now come to the end of his lifespan. At the end, the android gets a few days to live his life in the outside world, to meet people, to do something other than work, before he has to report back to be destroyed and recycled. There's a tenderness to this quietly devastating story that broke my heart.

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Rachel Is at a Protest, by Esther Alter in The Deadlands

There’s a new speaker, a Palestinian immigrant. He’s condemning Israel’s use of white phosphorous. He starts to describe how the weapon burns its victims’ clothing and skin before he abruptly stops, overcome by emotion. The crowd, maybe a couple hundred people, is shouting “SHAME! SHAME!” at Israel. Loudest of all are the handful of Jews. Not in our name. Never again.

Any story that deals with the conflict between Israel and Palestinians is going to cut and bruise you, and that is certainly true of Alter's powerful and unflinching tale. This story is excellent but gutting and I highly recommend reading Catherine E. Tobler's Editor's Note for this issue of The Deadlands before reading "Rachel Is at a Protest".

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Way Up In De Middle Of De Air By Jamie Roballo in Fiyah #31

“I musta been thirteen, the night the stars fell.”

Papa Ezekiel sits in the rocking chair, boards creaking as the ancient porch sags beneath his weight. His hand drums on the arm rest, and a flake of the long-faded paint drifts down to the boards below. June watches it fall. She loves to watch things fall.

“Tell me again,” she says. She’s heard the story as long as she’s been alive; hell, like as not she’s heard it longer.

Roballo's story is a quiet and lyrical with a heart-piercing emotional sharpness that gave me goosebumps as I read it. June's grandfather is telling her the story of a starfall he experienced as a child, a story he has told her before, but this time he is telling the story to her in a different way, revealing a secret at the heart of it that changed him and maybe changed the world. 

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The Darkness Between the Stars by Richard Thomas in Lightspeed

Buddy and I were the only kin either of us had left, really, the only ones we could trust. The summer days were dwindling and the final year lay before us. Beyond that, trade schools, and sorted employment, mundane tasks, and a vague promise of marital bliss—an apparent guarantee of soft flesh that we hardly understood.

Thomas's story is a coming-of-age tale woven into a story of time travel that beings on an old, dilapidated fairground, giving me vibes of both Bradbury and Stephen King. One twist I appreciated here is that the starting point for the story is not our present but a near future version of our world. There's a wistful tinge to the horror in Thomas's prose that really resonated with me.

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Our Lady of the Clay by Daniela Tomova in Apex  

No signs protect the backyards in this part of town from the Marl Pits Forest. There’s no treeline either. Of course there isn’t. But even in the dark, you can’t really miss where the forest starts—not if you’ve lived a childhood in the wilderness here like Ansel has. He knows it by the way the ground softens underfoot and becomes springy like the flesh of a mushroom; by the way the dry weeds and runty wild apples start to lean back, as if recoiling; by the stars above.

A harrowing story about a terrible tragedy and a desperate attempt to set things right by appealing to a mysterious power. The real world entwines so tightly with the darkest kind of fairytale and magic here, and at the end, maybe a glimmer of light.

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A Botanist’s Guide to Memory and Forgetting by E. M. Linden in Small Wonders

Plants that wipe memories are illegal, and for good reason. Too much potential for misuse, or just miscalculation. I don’t mean potatoes or hops, fermented into alcohol. I mean the real stuff, the heavy-duty blank-slate memory launders. Cloud-frond, for example. Too strong a dose will scour everything away, from the name of your lover to how to boil an egg. Too weak and it’ll backfire; whatever you try to forget will haunt you forever.

Oh, what a beautifully twisted little tale about memory and forgetting. I love the enigmatic and looping nature of the story. It's sharp, with some barbs and maybe some poison in the mix.

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The Goddess of Loneliness and Misfortune by Anna Bendiy in Khoreo

Bohdana takes a sip. Scrunches up her nose. Then smiles. Baba Dasha hasn’t gotten any better at this over the years. Or maybe it’s the tired, untilled soil—too bitter to make good wine, no sweetness left for the grapes. Bohdana’s mother would say, This land eats everything up. You stay here long enough, myla, it will eat you up, too.

This is a wonderfully quirky and piercing story that includes a grumpy, grouchy goddess who looks nothing like you'd expect from a divine being, but that doesn't mean she doesn't wield some power. For me, this story captures the feeling, good and bad and points in between, of coming home and finding that both the place you returned to, and you, have changed. I love the way Bendiy eschews maudlin sentimentality, and instead goes for the harder, deeper truths of family, memory, grief, and belated homecomings.

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In Tandem by Emilee Prado in Diabolical Plots

Sephina first noticed me when we were partnered for the three-legged race. It was Field Day, the last hurrah of eighth grade. I wasn’t quite as tall as her, wasn’t quite as lithe, but when we set off, it was as if our hips and knees and ankles were pistons that had always fired together. “One, two, one, two, one, two,” we counted, miles ahead of the others. We were surging so full of glee that we stumbled over the finish line and tumbled hard into the grass. But still, we’d won.

I love stories about friendship, and I love twisted stories about friendship. This one is definitely a twisted friendship story, and it's also an absolute delight. It has darkness and tragedy, it has a real edge, but it also captures the warmth and the fun that brought the friends together in the first place, long before the darkness overwhelmed them.

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Operating Within Normal Parameters by Irette Y. Patterson in Translunar Travelers Lounge

Things run out. Everyone knows that. That’s life. But I never knew the last time I said goodnight – her in her cradle, me in my bed, would be the last time we’d talked. There was no warning, none at all.

I’d gotten back from my silver sneakers walk with the gang and she’d already been settled in her cradle. I didn’t think much of it at the time, suspecting it may be because she was older like me. After all, already her manufacturer had started pinging me about possible upgrades.

 I've said it before: I am a sucker for wistful, bittersweet robot stories (really, I'm a sucker for most robot stories), and Patterson's tale is a beautifully told science fiction tale with a robot at its center. It's a a story about loneliness, and about overcoming loneliness, and it's about finding a purpose and companionship even when you thought you couldn't. This is gentle, hopeful scifi, and I love every bit of it.

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Once There Was Water by Katie McIvor in The Dark

In the cold dawn light, they carry the child out of the big house and down to the pond. The water is grey with submerged ice, striated mud frozen hard to its banks, and the reeds are swollen within whitish sheaths. The child is sickly. It shrieks and shrieks as they lower its thin body into the water.

This story winds its way through centuries, through geology, through the water. I love the way this movement through time, and through the landscape, gives the story its texture and presence. There's a darkness there, a strange and mostly hidden magic that stirs or sleeps and can be woken. McIvor gives the story a rich, haunting, gothic vibe and it's the kind of horror that pulls you deeper and deeper into the darkness as the story is told. 

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There’s Always a Dragon by Jac Morris in Kaleidotrope

Maddie straddles the branch of the lilac tree, her skirt bunched up to her waist, but there’s no one to see her knickers and in any case the lime-green leaves hide everything except her scuffed school shoes. Tree bark chafes her thighs. It’s a price she’s willing to pay for riding bareback on a flying horse above the jungles of Africa. The air is heavy with floral scent, a potion created by an Archimage to befuddle and bewitch. Bees buzz in the center of the purple flowers, doing all they can to save Maddie from enchantment.

A brilliant and shattering story about childhood and the power of storytelling and fantasy. I love how this story captures the way a child thinks about stories, about imagination, and how it shows that playing out in the context of a very real and sometimes terrible world.

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I have recently paused my Patreon, but I am still accepting tips on KoFi: https://ko-fi.com/mariahaskins

Maria's Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup #6 2024

The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of Madison Brake's cover art for Lightspeed #170. More about the artist at: https://www.madisonbrake.com/.

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The Ecological Impacts of Resurrection: a Field Study, by Corey Farrenkopf in The Deadlands

My father was a professor of Ethology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, focusing on the study of death rituals and burial behavior in mammals and their intersections with human traditions. He said he was going to write his next paper on the otters, maybe even his next book.

This story about a father, obsessed with the death rites of wild animals, is dark and strange with an undertow of sadness and grief that makes it cut deep and strike true. I love how the landscape, the family's past, and the science, blend with observations that are so off-kilter and profoundly weird that you can sort of feel reality shift under your feet as your reading.

The Rerebirth of Slick, by Stephen Kearse in The Deadlands

They buried us in Detroit. The plywood was thick as Aretha’s bosom, but I felt as free as her glorious voice. Wasn’t my fault their overlords and former owners had plundered their homes and retirement funds. Shit, I was the one who warned them the fix was in. But to my annoyance they fixated on me and set their pageant in motion, calling up Swanson Funeral Homes, filing permits, and setting a date. I should have flaked, but curiosity snared me: Surely, they weren’t serious?

Kearse’s story is, in his own words, about “the life, death, and afterlife of a very special word”, and that word is the N-word. If that sounds sort of out-there for a short story, I can only say: read this story. It is brilliant, sharp, beautifully crafted, with a voice, a rhythm, a flow that is powerful and devastating. Do not miss this story.

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The Museum of Cosmic Retribution by Megan Chee in Nightmare

Not many people wanted to visit the park in this weather, it seemed. He paused to look at the first display: King Qinguang raising his fist in judgment as he presided over souls entering the underworld. The virtuous would be sent across the golden and silver bridges into paradise. The evildoers would descend into the Courts of Hell for punishment.

Set in Haw Par Villa, which is a real place in Singapore where you will find, among other things, the 10 Courts of Hell, this story is a dark, but not grim, story of a boy who gets a guided tour with a very knowledgeable caretaker. That's only the setup, because from that point, Chee weaves stories within stories, with tales of aliens and distant planets, of good deeds and bad, of far-flung space empires, of cruelty and suffering, and also, beneath it all, empathy.

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The Last Lucid Day by Dominique Dickey in Lightspeed

You hear the beeping of your alarm and you know you’re dreaming, but you can’t wake up any more than you can pull yourself free of your father’s hands. He holds you down and tells you to count the seconds, show him how long you can hold your breath, but the only way to make sense of the numbers is to tally them on your fingers. He pushes you down deeper. He walks away.

It always ends with him walking away.

It always ends with you splashing in the deep end, alone.

Well holy cow, this story crushed me and somehow managed to uplift me, all at the same time. It’s about a fraught relationship with a father who is both fragile and frustrating, and it’s about the life his child has made in the wake of a childhood that was nowhere near perfect. Throw in a new kind of technology which makes it possible to know when a person is having their last really good, really lucid day, and you get a story with one heck of an emotional punch.

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Creature, by Kelsea Yu in Kaleidotrope

It wasn’t the blood or the pain that took Esther Chen by surprise; it was the waiting. Two full weeks after her chirpy doctor frowned at the ultrasound screen, a dozen test results finally confirmed what Esther had already known. The baby was gone.

After Esther suffers a miscarriage, a strange (hungry) creature stalks her everywhere. The creature has very sharp teeth, and it wants, needs, something from her. I love the way Yu tells both Esther's and Esther’s mother’s story here, and the way terrible, frightening, and destructive emotions are given both voice and shape.

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The Barricade by Joyce Ch’ng in IZ Digital

Now birds and solar panels didn’t mix. Or, at least, couldn’t co-exist well enough. Birds hit window panes, the wind fans, and solar panels. The local cells were all trying to find ways to deal with the issue. Shorter solar panels? Flatter solar panels? Solar panel fields? The problem was physical space, a problem their island state was always facing. For a long time, they have tried to solve the problem by going vertical. Up, up, and up.

If you need a bit of sunshine, and a bit of sea, and a bit of hope in your science fiction, then this story by Ch’ng is the right medicine. It’s a tale of the future, or at least one possible future, where things have changed, though not easily, and where people are trying to find new ways to live that don’t destroy and ravage the Earth as much as our current way of life.

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Within the Seed Lives the Fruit by Leah Andelsmith in Reckoning

Morning dawns and Lou has exactly nothing left to give. She goes out to the garden anyway because that’s the way she was taught, and she waters as the heavy hose drags behind her and threatens to knock down tomato plants or flatten the sweet potatoes. Between her tee shirt sleeves and leather work gloves are bare brown forearms and dark elbows. Her short Afro is salt and pepper all over, except at the temples, where it has begun to come in white. Her knees creak as she hefts the hose, and she stops for a moment to wipe sweat from her brow. That’s when she notices the mint. The bindweed is wrapped around the stalk.

This story made me cry and it made me smile. It holds within it a whole life, and the life of a farm and the plants grown on that farm, and it also holds life itself, growing and sprouting in weeds and vegetables alike. The prose shimmers and the story weaves itself into magic as Lou finds old buried treasures in the garden, as grief comes, and as Lou herself changes into something new, while still staying connected to the land she loves. A luminous story.

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Joanna’s Bodies by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Psychopomp

The woman whose body Joanna is renting has a nosebleed. Joanna is about to get evicted again and she’s cranky about it. She screams at Eleni in another woman’s voice.

“Hey, this shit’s burning!”

This is an absolutely devastating and thoroughly compelling novelette about two friends, possession, resurrection, guilt, and grief. I have a thing for stories about complicated, twisted friendships, and this most certainly qualifies. Eleni has been bringing her dead friend Joanna back to life into different bodies ever since Joanna died, but life after death isn’t easy and does not get any easier with time. Woven through the fiction is Eleni’s reflections on what used to be her favourite movie: Jennifer’s Body, and I loved the way the story ties all its threads into a weave without forcing the pattern.

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

The girl wore a marvelous gown as pale as winter butter and a wreath of bluebells crowned her golden curls. Her features were sharp and proud; she was as slight as a willow branch. The air around her shimmered like light on the water. She looked like no woman Irena had ever seen, and Irena knew immediately that she was no woman at all.

What a gorgeous, tender love story. Robinson’s prose gleams and shimmers as she tells us the tale of Irena, who is now an old woman, who goes back to see the love of her youth: a woodmaiden living among the birches. It’s a story of love and regret, but also of hope and joy, and every detail is bright and sparkling with life.

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Our Father by K.J. Khan in Clarkesworld

Lila asks questions about the Horizon every time she visits. She plays games about being aboard it, where the food comes in tiny, dehydrated cubes, and the beds are lofted on top each other, so that every night is “like camping.” She doesn’t believe we could ever be bored, in such a paradise.

I love stories that tell a small, intimate tale while also giving you a much bigger, wider story that hovers around the edges of the smaller tale. Khan tells us such a story here. You can feel the presence of that larger world, and you feel its impact and its resonance in the smaller story, a story where we glimpse the bigger tale of space travel, generation ships, and the colonization of new planets through the tender, quiet moments of a family growing up, growing together, in an unusual place and under unusual circumstances.

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The Scientist Does Not Look Back by Kristen Koopman at Escape Pod (narrated by Ant Bacon, Valerie Valdes and Adam Pracht)

The technician at the morgue hesitated when releasing him to me. I’m not surprised, with the tone that took hold of my voice as I corrected her Mr. to Dr. as she took down my details. When I gave her my name, her pen stalled over the paper—a giveaway that his parents had called before I arrived. I should be grateful that she released him to me anyway, honoring my legal right to the body. I should be grateful for so much, I suppose, even if it doesn’t feel like it, to have this opportunity to—to not let his story end in tragedy.

According to the Escape Pod's story notes, Koopman describes this as an “unbury your gays” story and it is most certainly that. It is Frankenstein, but as a queer romance, where a determined/obsessed doctor works to bring back his lost love. There’s so much dark humour here, so much grief and love, as our protagonist deals with all the people, all the forces, who would rather see him give up and let the love of his life die. It’s a wonderful audio adaptation by Escape Pod.

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My bonus pick this time around is a terrific interview:

A Conversation with Sheree Renée Thomas - August 2, 2024

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer and poet, editor of the historic Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and the groundbreaking anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. And she currently lives right here in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. George Larrimore hosts A Conversation with Sheree Renee Thomas.

 Not only do you get to hear Thomas talk about her writing and her work as an editor, but you also get to hear her read from some of her work. 

 

 

My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup - #5 2024

 

The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of Tithi Luadthong's cover art for the April issue of The Dark. You can find out more about the artist at https://tithi-luadthong.pixels.com/.

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The Spindle of Necessity by B. Pladek in Strange Horizons

Andrew was convinced the writer had been trans. By this point his friends were tired of hearing about it, but he had no one else to tell besides the internet, and he was too smart for that. That would be asking for it.

This story quite simply knocks my socks off as it combines a very personal story with a big dollop of surrealism, timey-wimey stuff, and incisive thoughts on art. Andrew is somewhat obsessed with a writer named Samantha Finnes, “a minor historical novelist, unknown outside queer circles. In the mid-50s she’d written three books set during the World Wars.” He can't stop thinking about her and about how he believes she was trans. What happens next in this story is pretty darn mind-bending and I won’t spoil it, except to say that Pladek explores how we as readers interact with the fiction we read and how we might try to fit writers from the past into our own views of identity and self-expression. It’s a brilliant story that is going to be on my mind for a long time.

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Underdragon by Diana Dima in Giganotosaurus

Gabrielle’s face had always needed improvement. In the mornings, she worked face cream into her skin, smoothing over bumps and cracks, over the too-dry and too-moist places. She layered foundation. It shone on her fingers like a beautiful mirror glaze, but crumbled into dry flakes on her cheeks. Still, there were many steps to go. Powder. Bronzer. Highlighter.

GigaNotoSaurus is quite simply knocking it out of the park on a regular basis these days. (For example, "The Rainbow Bank" by Uchechukwu Nwaka won a Locus Award.) "Underdragon" is a subtly woven, deep, and quietly powerful story about daring to be who and what we really want to be, rather than trying to turn ourselves into what others want us to be. After using a new cream, Gabrielle begins a transformation that changes her life, and also changes her relationship with herself and her partner. I love how magic works in this story, and I love every bit of this tale of love, identity, and courage in the face of change.

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We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read by Caroline M. Yoachim in Lightspeed

ITERATION

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.

Science fiction stories about humanity receiving a message from the aliens are a dime a dozen, but Yoachim does something unique and pretty mind-blowing with her story. It’s a visual story in more than one way, one that repeats a pattern, and it’s also the kind of story that makes little sense when you describe it. Just read it and let the message find you.

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“This Week in Clinical Dance: Urgent Care at the Hastings Center” by Lauren Ring in Diabolical Plots

Brigitte Cole presents with lower abdominal pain, nausea, and a long-sleeved black leotard. She has a well-developed appearance and does not seem to be in acute distress. Her accompaniment for the evening is pianist Roy Weiss, a fixture of the local music scene whose minimalist style pairs well with the bold choreography of clinical dance.

Painfully funny and sharp as a scalpel, Ring’s story vividly brings to life what it can feel like to navigate any healthcare system when you’re in desperate need of help but cannot get the help you need. In a comment at Diabolical Plots, Ring says that the story “draws upon my own experiences as a disabled woman navigating the US healthcare system.”

“Six-Month Assessment on Miracle Fresh” by Anne Liberton in Diabolical Plots

Miracle Fresh is a soft drink produced by Spirits & Co. since 2027. The original pitch described a holy club soda blessed with droplets of blood from our devoted Messiah, something the average person could drink on the go, après-exercising, or even at [insert holy building of choice] without requiring long tiresome religious proceedings. 

Another darkly funny and rather unsettling story from Diabolical Plots, this time about a very special kind of soft drink. I love the wicked sense of humour and the way Liberton tells a very big story in a very specific format.

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Imago by Steve Rasnic Tem in The Dark

Sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking others were living in his house. Not intruders. Not burglars. They were full-time residents. They had voices too tiny to hear but put them all together and they suggested the most dreadful noise.

This is a quiet and haunting story, and one that depicts an inner transformation and expresses it through the transformation of a man’s surroundings. I love the way this story captures a sense of loneliness and claustrophobic anxiety. It’s terrible and beautiful all at once. Steve Rasnic Tem has written several stories in recent years that capture the process and subtle (and not so subtle) horrors of aging, including the devastating "Memoria" in The Deadlands.

Water Like Broken Glass by Carina Bissett in The Dark

When does a woman become a witch?

It’s different for all of us. Some come to it naturally. Others struggle for a while.

For me, that contest of arms started in a few inches of water with my lover’s hands firmly pressed down on the back of my neck.

He won.

Bissett’s story about a woman who transforms and finds a new kind of power after her lover drowns her in a river, has the feel of fairytale and folklore, but it’s threaded firmly into our own world. Love finds her, even when she doesn’t think it can find her anymore, but then that love transforms into something else. I really like how Bissett works with the shades of grey for each character here, and how guilt and love and the longing for a different kind of life are all twisted together at the story’s center.

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Mother’s Milk by Annika Barranti Klein in Weird Horror

She was and she was not changing.

August woke up at 4 most mornings. The boys slept through the night now — had for years — but she’d lost the ability to sleep in. This time of night (morning? It didn’t feel like morning yet) was the in-between: no one was demanding anything of her; she was and she was not a mother, a partner, a copywriter. She was and she was not perimenopausal, checking her phone only to find notifications reading “your cycle is due to start soon,” “your cycle is two (four, six) days past due.” She was and she was not pregnant.

I love stories about motherhood and parenthood, especially when they are as sharp and as full of teeth and darkness as this one. August’s body is changing and she tries to hold back the truth of the transformation with lotions and by talking to her mother and by wearing her husband's shoes, but she no longer fits into her old self. The story has a terrific surreal vibe, and I appreciated that the strange transformation doesn't necessarily feel unwelcome. This is a story that feels true to real life in all its strangeness.

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Down the Dust Hatch by Derrick Boden in Apex Magazine

Life is transactional. Give this, get that. It’s the first law of thermodynamics, nothing personal. No sense getting dust-fucked over it.

But you already know that.

A great science fiction story about the harsh rules of survival on “a decrepit mining base that’s clamped to the side of its asteroid like a barnacle.” On social media, Boden describes it as "a story about running out of air (and friends, and morals, and everything else) on an asteroid." After someone blows up several of the mining base's tanks of reserve oxygen, the crew has to be culled occasionally while they’re waiting to be resupplied. Desperate circumstances lead people to do desperate things, but not everyone is as selfish, or as easily suckered, as you might think.

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Katya Vasilievna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka by Christine Hanolsy in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

I knew what I looked like: my hair, long and water-dark, hanging to my knees; my arms, pale and slender. My eyes, too, were dark, like the deep pools by the riverbank where the sun did not reach. Young men had written poems about my eyes, once; women too. My clothing had long since rotted away, but what use had I for shifts and sarafans? I clothed myself in my own hair, in river weeds and trailing flowers.

A stunningly good rusalka story that feels old and new at the same time. Hanolsy’s prose has a gorgeous sing-song melody to it that is exquisitely crafted. As for the story, well, what happens when a rusalka meets a beautiful woman, is smitten by her, and then tainted by a mortal soul? Love is not an easy thing when the world intrudes in the form of arranged marriages and curses and magic that binds. Sometimes you might even need a bit of help, such as it is, from Baba Yaga.

An Uncanny Patch and Uncanny Hole: The Final Account from the Records of Ptaten, Imperial Surveyor by Cara Masten DiGirolamo in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

What is a map?

It is an aspiration, I would say—an attempt to draw the world and thus gain power over it. Some maps use more sympathetic magic than others—those hopeful routes that skirt demarcated dangers, promising riches on the other side. They are exciting, and sometimes they are reasonably accurate. Sometimes. “Danger here” does not mean a lack of danger elsewhere.

A strange area appears in the realm being mapped by our narrator, a surveyor. The strange phenomenon is described by witnesses as “an encroaching plot of death”, and its presence soon has terrifying consequences when a leader tries to make use of it for their own ends. There's a terrific mysterious and deeply enigmatic quality at the heart of the story, and what resonated with me was how people in power would immediately try to use this mystery for their own ends, even when they do not understand what they are dealing with.

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The Dark Devices by Bruce McAllister in Nightmare

At the tiny abbey in the province of Tasselt—the only abbey in the region with both an abbot and his monks and a dozen nuns as well (a temporary matter that had somehow become permanent)—the abbot, whose skin had gotten paler even as the veins beneath it had become more pronounced, and who preferred darkness to light of any kind, had taken over the West section of the abbey, with its many, darker rooms.

A wonderfully shadowy and chilling story. Something terrible is happening at the abbey and Pieter goes to set things right, but it’s not so easy to get away from the darkness once you have entered it, no matter how good your intentions were.

☀

In addition to the short stories, I also want to recommend two non-fiction reads:

Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer (Step One: Write) by Ursula K. Le Guin in Literary Hub

How do you become a writer? Answer: you write.

It’s amazing how much resentment and disgust and evasion this answer can arouse. Even among writers, believe me. It is one of those Horrible Truths one would rather not face.

Le Guin talking about art and writing and how to become a writer? That’s obviously a must-read.

☀

A Woman Who Left Society To Live With Bears Weighs In On “Man Or Bear” by Laura Killingbeck in Bikepacking.com

When I was 23, I packed up my bike and camping gear and caught a one-way flight to Alaska. My relationship with mankind no longer felt tenable. I didn’t want to be female in society; I wanted to be free. I spent the next three and a half months pedaling down North America’s grizzly-filled coast from Anchorage to San Francisco. Out there in that rugged expanse, with my body in motion and my heart unfurled, I found boundless joy. And that joy did make me a little more free. 

This is the best take on the man vs. bear debacle that I’ve seen online.

☺

My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup is an Aurora Award Nominee in the Best Fan Writing and Publication category!

My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup - #4 2024

The art for this roundup includes a detail of Marlenia Mori's cover for The Deadlands #34. Find out more about the artist at https://www.instagram.com/marlenia.mori/ 

This roundup features several stories from 2023. They are stories I missed out on reading, for various reasons, when they first came out, but I figure it's never too late to share the love of short fiction.

〰

doorbell dot mov, by Jennifer R. Donohue in The Deadlands

It’s 3:00 a.m. and the doorbell rings, because that’s always when the doorbell rings, if it’s going to. I don’t have to go to the door; I can pull up the video on my phone, always overexposed, too white and also too dark, Blair Witch found footage, despite how good the camera is supposed to be.

A profoundly unsettling and thoroughly haunting short story that involves a doorbell camera and a tragedy. I love Donohue’s intense and sharp prose, and I love the way this story twists and turns as it is told. And the ending? Hits like a sledgehammer.

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Alabama Circus Punk by Thomas Ha in ergot

I should have known something was strange because the repairman came after dark. He wore a mask out of respect, but beneath the coated plasticine I could sense the softness of his form. To think, a biological in my home. I would have to be sure to book a scrubbing service to remove the detritus after he was gone.

This is likely one of the strangest and mentally stickiest stories I’ve read in a while. It's the kind of story that gets under your skin and is hard to stop thinking about. It’s science fiction. It’s about robots and biologicals and the tension between them. It’s about life and language and communication and it's about communication (and language) breaking down. Beyond that, well, all I can say is: read it.

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Thousand Petal Song by Caroline Hung in Strange Horizons

The Lightning Road cuts far across the Cosmos, a streak of dazzling gold amidst the star-studded void. Paved in otherworldly stone, the road climbs over sleeping giants, past ringed planets and frozen worlds, connecting one unknown to the next. Xiaofei used to like watching it from the hills outside home, the grass soft beneath her bare feet as fireflies sang in the night. This time, she walks along the celestial route herself. Her sneakers crunch over the gravelly path.

A gorgeous tale of magic and faith, and of a goddess who comes down among her worshippers. Hung’s story plays out like a mix of fairytale, legend, and myth. There’s a beautiful flow and warmth to this tale which is part of Strange Horizons’ neurodivergent special issue. You can read the entire issue here: http://strangehorizons.com/issue/29-april-2024/

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Lessons in Virtual Reality for Wayward Women by Veronica G. Henry in Many Worlds

Tasha studies a boundless blotch in the Atlantic Ocean where she thinks Manhattan used to sit. The pier — if one could call the skeletal remains of a walkway on which she stands — is all that separates what is left of New Brooklyn from the encroaching coal-dark sludge. She ignores the protest from her knees and crouches down to spy the place where she’d marked the waterline last year on her fiftieth birthday. The crimson stroke is no longer visible, sacrificed to the swelling ocean. She resists estimating the number of years before this pier vanishes completely.

A near-future science fiction story set in a world ravaged by climate change and where everything - the world and the people in it - feels precarious and fragile. Tasha works for BVI, The Bureau for Virtual Investigations where "the staff goes about the business of monitoring the virtual world’s criminals for those most likely to create real-world crimes", and she ends up in the deep end of a plot that plays out like a darkly twisting noir.

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Calypso’s Guest by Andrew Sean Greer at Amazon Original Stories

His ship had crashed on the South side of the continent, in a sandy portion my workers had never bothered to cultivate. His wreckage was easy to find; it had boiled the sand to glass, and lay in dunes like an ant in amber, and I remember my heart beating quickly when I saw it. The charred jewel beneath the molten silica, its ruined facets revealed as my workers carefully cleared away debris. 

Greek mythology, Homer’s Odyssey, and science fiction come together into a profoundly moving tale: "A man in exile, banished to a planet far from home and cursed with immortality, discovers that a ship has crash-landed near his settlement. After two hundred years, his heart’s desire has come true. A visitor has finally arrived on his lonely little speck in the stars. He’ll have companionship again. Someone he could love forever. As the weary traveler heals, the two men form a tender bond. But all they’ve come to share may not be enough to curb the visitor’s irrepressible wanderlust. Now the exile, who thought nothing in his endless life would ever change, must make a decision that will change everything."

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Those Hitchhiking Kids by Darcie Little Badger in Sunday Morning Transport

They hadn’t died while hitchhiking, and ghosts couldn’t own a car, but Corey and Jimena shared the condition of wanderlust, so something had to be done. In high school, they’d ditch class to bus-hop through Houston, losing themselves in mazes of hot streets. Death hadn’t extinguished the urge to travel without aim, although it made the process trickier, more frustrating.

If you haven’t read Darcie Little Badger’s amazing short story (now nominated for a Locus Award), you should remedy this asap. It’s a ghost story with heart, soul, and spirit. Quoting the writer’s Bluesky post: “I wrote Those Hitchhiking Kids after attending a blessing ceremony for our traditional burial ground in Presidio. And my mind was on ghosts and the passage of time and change and stagnation and the cruel beauty of the desert.”

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The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs by E. Catherine Tobler in Bourbon Penn

In the predawn dark, Annie found herself in a bed, holding onto another hand beneath the cool weight of the pillow. Floral case, it was the trailer—her trailer—and slowly she came back to herself, to her body, and kissed the folded fingers beneath the pillow before claiming the ringing phone, dreadful thing. The voice on the other end was frantic, offering double pay because the cops needed her—needed her boat, a man had gone missing—Ricky had that charter, didn’t she remember—it had to be her, there was no one else. Triple, she said. She lived plain, but there were always bills.

This story is a darkly gleaming masterpiece. It was also picked for Ellen Datlow’s latest Best Horror of the Year, and it’s easy to see why. At the heart of the tale is a lake and a woman who is not really a woman at all. Someone is missing, presumed dead, and the police are searching the lake for a body. Everything about this story is perfectly crafted. What especially struck me is the way Tobler captures places, people, and emotions in such intimate, resonant detail and then looks away at precisely the right moment, allowing the darkness to fill in the emptiness.

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Where the God-Knives Tread – Part 1 / Part 2 by A.L. Goldfuss in Lightspeed

The Narrows was an asteroid field stretched over half of the uninhabited Fatagana solar system, composed of billions, if not trillions of ice-glazed rock shards. Even on Jaks’ research scanners it showed as white static, preventing any sort of deeper visuals. But Jaks was brilliant, one of the best Preservationists the program had ever produced, and she had theorized the existence of a planet hidden within the noise. The perfect crash site for a Teshiarr legend.

A lush and complex tale about the discovery and exploration of the ruined remains of an ancient, and very haunted, spaceship. It’s trippy, it's compelling, it's a space-archeology/treasure hunt that turns into something truly dizzying and terrifying the deeper the explorers go into the ship, and into the past.

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Even If Such Ways Are Bad by Rich Larson at Reactor

The job comes with an implant, punched into the fleshiest part of Chimezie’s thigh. It’s still aching as he walks down the quay to the waiting wormship. Iron-laced snow falls from the dark sky. Fever sweat freezes on his few exposed slices of skin: forehead, eyelids, the back of his neck. His breath is a ghost.

To quote the story's intro: “A two-person crew embark on a mind-bending deep space mission inside a living wormship capable of burrowing through space. What lies on the other end is unknown—as is what they will do once they get there.” Larson’s story is a surreal and almost hallucinogenic space travel story, and it’s also a story about humanity, about being human, about memory and what we hold on to in order to survive. There’s a great darkness and sadness running through it like a powerful undercurrent.

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The Light of Setting Suns by Samuel Chapman in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Though a veteran tale-teller, Cyfris has kept this one back out of fear. But things have changed. Several times in the past year, he has caught Cydovan sneaking down to the docks to watch the airships take off. She stops each night to watch the sunset, broom or charcoal or food frozen in her hand as she stares at the red-lit horizon. If Cyfris waits another year, he will be too late.

Luckily, he has devised a way to tell it safely. Or so he hopes. No ship is unchanged by the voyage, he has thought many times today, and no story is unchanged by the listener.

This is a gently, beautifully told and profoundly moving example of one of my favourite kinds of stories: stories about storytelling. Cyfris is telling a story to Cydovan, and the story is both a weaving and an unraveling of past and present. I love the quiet sense of love and subtle pain captured here.

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To Carry You Inside You by Tia Tashiro in Clarkesworld

In your head, the dead man wakes up crying. He stutters into awareness just as you manage to stanch the tears welling in your eyes, a response to the pressure of his presence on your limbic system. Your fingers brush, irritated, against the port at the back of your neck, catching at the ridges of the drive that carries his consciousness. He’s confused, lashing out to wrest temporary control of your limbs from you in quick staccato bursts before you can yank them back. “Stop that,” you snap, and then, remembering your client, soften the message with a “please.”

In Tashiro’s story, the dead can be brought back to life, sort of, by putting a construct of their consciousness into the body and mind of a living person. The way the technology is used, people can pay to talk to and interact with their dead loved ones, but it’s not easy on either the dead or the living person serving as interface/vessel. I love the way this story makes you feel the intrusive nature of this technology, while you can also understand how seductive it would be. And it also explores what happens when the dead aren’t satisfied with the time they’re given. Dark, sharp science fiction.

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Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200 by R.S.A. Garcia in Uncanny Magazine

Bright and early ah Tuesday morning I hear the whirring outside and when I peak through my living room curtains is because a big box so on my veranda and Ignatius done traipsing over with he leash trailing to see what he could chew. I reach out and take up the box and close the door and then I sit down in my favourite armchair in front the hologram projector Lincoln buy the year before he die and I read the label.

Garcia’s story about Tantie Merle, her very troublesome and stubborn goat, and the rather advanced Farmhand who tries to help Merle is funny, incisive, and absolutely captivating. It’s a riot to read, and I love the way everyone in the story – goat, woman and Farmhand – undergo some sort of change in the process of their (rather fraught) interactions. Heartwarming doesn’t really cover the vibe of this story, but it’s the kind of story that makes you feel good when you’re reading it.

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Kɛrozin Lamp Kurfi by Victor Forna in Apex Magazine

She tells the children to call her Kade Makasi, and if this was one of her stories, she’d describe herself as bent and wrinkled and spider-like for a touch of myth and poetry … but she’s none of these things … she’s tall, thick-browed, with two braided rivers of night on her head, and you’d have never guessed what she was: kurfi, dɛbul, demon, and that she stole my child.

As I’ve already mentioned, I love stories about storytelling, and in Forna’s story, the act of telling a story is a form of magic, and can even be used to trap others, forever, in the realm of a story. However, maybe, just maybe, someone might also turn this magic against the storyteller, finding a way to freedom. It is a twisty, dark, and lustrous story and I love how it depicts the drama and the perils of the duelling storytellers.

〰

In this roundup I also want to highlight some excellent reprints from Escape Artists’ podcasts:

• The Dreadful and Specific Monster of Starosibirsk by Kristina Ten at PseudoPod (narrated by Yaroslav Barsukov) – first published in Weird Horror
• Potemora in the Triad by Sara S. Messenger at Podcastle (narrated by Cherrae L. Stuart) – first published in Fantasy Magazine
• Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu by Grace Chan at Escape Pod (narrated by Isabel J. Kim) – first published in Lightspeed Magazine

 

 

Award news!

 

Some amazing news! My Monthly Short Fiction Roundup, which I have been publishing since 2016 is an Aurora Award Nominee in the Best Fan Writing and Publication category! Thanks so much to all the members of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association who nominated me. I’m absolutely thrilled and honoured to be on the ballot in such fabulous company.

The entire list of nominees is on the CSFFA website: https://www.csffa.ca/awards-information/current-ballot/

All my short fiction roundups are available here on Maria's Reading.

 

My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup - #3/2024

The art for this roundup includes a detail of the cover for Hexagon #16 by Yorgos Cotronis. More about the artist: https://cotronis.com/

☀

The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics by Adam-Troy Castro in Lightspeed

If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human,

that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,”

which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a cruel dislike for it,

the kind of man who will not be coming back,

if the robot understood at once that no one would ever be coming back,

if it also understood that the laws governing its actions prevented it from objecting, or resisting, or even giving its instructions an expiration date,

I'm always a sucker for stories about sad and/or old robots, and Castro tells a beautifully twisted story about robots and laws, and how humans might treat these mechanical servants that have to obey the laws we made for them. There's a poignant, sharp darkness at the (robotic) heart of this story and I love it.

☀

The Let Go by E. Catherine Tobler in Nightmare

I was not born
In this field of grass,
But know what it is
To let everything go.

A gorgeous and piercing poem that carries so much loss and pain in such a small space. There's a quiet fierceness to this that really cuts deep. To quote Tobler's comments on the poem: "We give pieces of ourselves away, we have pieces taken, we cut ourselves down to nothing in the name of love, and it is both a horror and a revelation."

Our Best Selves by Fatima Taqvi in Nightmare

“Muniza,” my husband says, eyes on the road. “Your skin is slipping.”

Clunky keys open our heavy front door. I used to be able to smell forest pine on it. I can’t anymore. I wince at the mud tracked in from outside. I can’t quite bend the right way, so it’ll take ages to clean.

“Muniza.” My name is a complete sentence when my husband says it in that tone. I pull up my skin. Give my shoulders a shake. It doesn’t really do much, but it looks like I’m trying, which is important evidence for the rest of my life.

There is body horror here, yes, in this powerful and deeply unsettling story about body parts slipping off, falling down, eyeballs dropping from sockets... but the real horror here is the emotional pain, the emotional and physical emptiness in a relationship that has turned a woman into nothing but a jumble of pieces. Victim and monster: Muniza is both.

☀

 Matter of Taste by A.D. Sui in Hexagon

Taste blooms at the tip of my tongue, where most of the receptors live. The nexus of sweet and sour, bitter and umami, summons a memory of a sunny afternoon, when the poppy seeds are sweeter than the grapes growing from grandmother’s balcony vines.

A chef that "summons flavour from memory" and, using a technology called Reconstruct™, can "pull forth a deep memory and flood the mouth with succulent reminiscing". Sui pulls together such a heart-tugging, sharp, and bitter-sweet story and I love its light, darkness, and warmth.

☀

Median by Kelly Robson at Reactor

Someone will stop, she thought. Someone will come. Someone has already dialed 911. But nobody stopped. Certainly not the cement truck, which had long since disappeared beyond the highway’s distant curve.

She climbed to her feet and waved at an oncoming car. One of its headlights glinted in the sun. The driver turned his head as he passed, mirrored sunglasses square on her, but he didn’t slow. The other drivers didn’t even look at her. The truck drivers stared straight over her head.

“I’m right here,” Carla said, waving her arms.

To quote the introduction to this story: "A professional caregiver’s commute takes an unsettling detour when car trouble forces her to pull over on the highway, where she begins receiving distressing phone calls from strangers…" Robson gives this story a surreal depth and increasingly nightmarish/dreamlike quality as Carla tries to find her way through a world that doesn't seem to acknowledge her existence anymore. This is quiet, devastating horror that manages to find the warmth of humanity in the middle of a nightmare. (PS! Reactor is the new name for TOR.com after they rebranded their website to separate it from the TOR publishing. Check out the FAQ for more about the name-change: https://reactormag.com/faq/)

☀

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.

Erlend keeps driving for work, keeps going on the jobs he's sent out to do, following the maps and coordinates given to him by his work, even as it seems to him that he keeps going to the same town, or at least a town by the same name, over and over again. Evenson gives the story a quiet, increasingly unsettling horror vibe as Erlend ends up going off the map, into nothing. The emptiness inside mirroring the emptiness of the map, of the town, of the world he Erlend finds himself in.

☀

The Alien in My Bathtub by Tony Dunnell in Escape Pod (narrated by Bryce Dahle)

The alien in my bathtub refused to leave. It was there when I returned to my apartment in Ring B. It ignored me when I asked it to vacate the premises, and when I enquired as to how it had entered my apartment it replied with a dismissive grunt. I had no intention of trying to remove it by physical force, which would have gone against the most basic rules of human-alien etiquette. And, to be honest, I didn’t want to touch it.

This is a straight-up and all-out fun and entertaining science fiction story about an alien visitor, really good soap, and a space-based, diplomatic incident. There’s a great sense of humour here, and I love how the story takes some unexpected turns on the way to its resolution.

☀

In the Museum of Unseen Places by Marsh Hlavka in Kaleidotrope

There is a light in the collection hall. The curator left it burning.

The rest of the staff departed hours ago, leaving the exhibition rooms and preparatory labs shuttered and silent. In the center of the hall, a lone drafting table glows under a dozen lamps. The map on the table depicts a coastline speckled with harbors. A sketched route arches northward across the blank inland expanse. Once there were roads there. They have long since been erased.

The curator sits back from the drafting table, holding a jar to the light.

This story is such a gorgeous, fluid, surreal, and dreamy trip about memory and loss, and about how the past keeps reappearing and disappearing from memory in a society that does not seem to value its people. The story ebbs and flows as the memories ebb and flow, and I love how Hlavka tells us a story about a society and about a life in such a beautifully subtle way.

☀

Rhythms of the Resonant Revolution by Rodrigo Culagovski in khōréō

Market Hexagon is loud, even in the middle of the night. Behind the noise of commerce comes the staccato symphony of the City’s factories working their indentured servants round the clock; the shriek of steel sliced into weapons so the poor may fight and die for aristos’ entertainment; the whine of cement and stone under iron carts pulled by captive magical creatures; the banal melodies piped into working class neighborhoods to quell thoughts of revolt—a perversion of the true sound of my People; their heritage warped into a weapon of bondage. 

Oh gosh, music is described in the most vivid and visceral way in this story, and it is used as an actual tool of revolution and resistance and survival. It’s a masterclass in how to describe sound and music and rhythm in writing, and how to make you feel the force and power of it through text.

☀

Your Sword, Your Trumpet, by Anjali Patel in The Deadlands

The first time I saw you was at the beginning. This world was flat and featureless and newly made, and I its named guardian. With my hammer in hand, I waited for time to spin into motion. When the first sunrise broke its yolk on the horizon, I thought I would never feel anything as glorious as those first rays of light.

You showed up to ruin everything.

A beautifully evocative and thoroughly haunting story of a relationship, a rivalry (and more) that spans the ages. I love the scope of this story, the way it soars and plummets through the years as two beings crash and clash and shape each other and the world. It is an epic in short story format.

☀

What Any Dead Thing Wants by Aimee Ogden in Psychopomp

The third week of a planetary exorcism is the hardest—at least if the planet in question has megafauna to deal with. Enthusiasm wanes even faster on worlds that never evolved past microbes. Hob’s crew always comes in like a team of intrepid explorers, swapping stories with the outgoing terraforming crew as they run down the handover checklist. 

Science fiction with terraforming and human colonization of exo-planets is woven together with honest-to-goodness magic, and the supernatural dynamics of exorcisms (of the lingering spirits of dead alien creatures). Yes, Ogden’s story brings all the speculative fiction elements together in a truly original story that is also, very much, about human beings and humanity, and about caring for the lives of any living thing. To quote Ogden herself on Bluesky, this story is about “human ghosts, alien ghosts, fucked-up terraforming practices, the inherent value of life however strange”.

 ☀

Finally, I want to recommend three short story collections that will all be out later this year. I’ve read advance reading copies of all three and loved them.

- Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda (coming in May, 2024)

A brilliant collection of short fiction that gleams with glints of unsettling, quiet horror. The stories have a surreal quality to them, as if reality is shifting and twisting beneath the surface. You can read Aguda's story "Manifest" from this collection in Granta.

- Pick Your Potion by Ephiny Gale (coming later in 2024) 

Gale’s short fiction has an unsettling beauty, and, in this collection, warmth and closeness mingle with deep, dark, and decidedly uncanny undercurrents. Pick Your Potion is full of stories that will snag your mind and work their way underneath your skin, maybe even into your dreams. You can read Gale's story "Rewind" from this collection in The Dread Machine

- Slow Burn by Mike Allen (coming in July 2024)

This collection of short stories and poetry is a beautiful, dark, and thoroughly unsettling trip. I love the way Allen twists and skews the reality and the everyday, tucking shadows and terrors into the cracks of what we think is real. You can read Allen's story "The Feather Stitch" in Lackington’s.

I have recently paused my Patreon, but I am still accepting tips on KoFi: https://ko-fi.com/mariahaskins

 

 

 

My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup - #2 / 2024

 

The art for this roundup includes a detail of the cover of Nightmare #137, by Anya Juárez Tenorio / Pexels Stock Image. More about the artist: https://www.pexels.com/@anya-juarez-tenorio-227888521/highlights/

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The Cold Inside by Vanessa Fogg in Metaphorosis

When she first met him, they were in their twenties and she thought fifty-two ancient, an unfathomable age, the age of parents and professors and bosses. Old. And now fifty-two is young, far too young. Too goddamn fucking young.

A hauntingly beautiful and chilling (in more ways than one) story about grief and loss, and about Anna, who has lost her husband and is spending time alone in the cottage where they were supposed to spend their retirement years together. One night, Anna is visited by a local ghost, though she doesn't realize it is a ghost at first. It's a young woman, dripping wet and cold, who knocks on Anna's door one night. What follows is a delicate and profound unspooling of emotions, love, regret, and loneliness.

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Preamble to the Death of a Small God by H.B. Menendez in Nightmare

Now, in this house in the trees, with a girl who is dead, the witch thinks of that word: useless. A terrible word to use for a person. A terrible way to say a person doesn’t matter if they aren’t giving you pieces of themselves to chew up and swallow.

The dead girl says, they were quick to cast us out when they no longer needed us to banish their omens.

Yes, says the witch.

 Oh what a great witchy, magical horror tale this is. There's a haunted house, though it's haunted in a somewhat different way than most haunted houses. And there's a story behind it all, of destruction and exile, of witches being hunted and driven out of their homes. I love the voice and melody of the prose, and I love how we see the darkness seep into the cracks of a life, changing it forever.

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Swarm X1048 - Ethological Field Report: Canis Lupus Familiaris, “6”, by F.E. Choe in Clarkesworld

You are born not long after the disaster. The city center has lain evacuated for two days by the time your mother makes her nest. She builds a small burrow from packing blankets, rags, her own sinewy body behind a row of waste containment units, and you are the sixth of your litter to slip out of her. A rubbery cord of pink flesh and matted fur, slick and slippery and new.

I do love dog-stories, and this dog-story cuts very deep. The story is told by the mysterious swarm that is studying life on Earth after a disaster. We see the post-apocalyptic landscape and the dog's life through the "eyes" of the swarm and there is both beauty and tragedy here as they watch life in all its forms, but still retain a special bond with that one doggo. The ending left me sobbing.   

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The Lime Monster by Shelly Jones in Flash Fiction Online

“Don’t go near that stuff. It’ll boil your skin,” my father would warn, turning his attention back to the vinegar-smelling rice hulls, remnants of the cider press.

I did not listen as I ran through the orchards, a journal tucked into the pocket of my overalls, a pen jammed through my ponytail, and sat in a pear tree near the lime pile, waiting for her to rouse. Perched there, I would write, collecting snatchets of stories like flailing butterflies in a net, my eyes on her: a white mound like an iceberg or a bleached Mediterranean cliffside. But I knew what it really was: the scarred, protruding eye of the lime monster, hidden away below.

I love the quiet, wistful tilt of this story and how the monster is not exactly a monster at all, even though it scares of developers and workers and worried parents through the years, ensuring the land stays as-is. Stories and paper, songs and memories, they all go into the lime monster, creating a strange, but enduring bond.

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Fording the Milky Way by Megan Ng at Cast of Wonders (narrated by Amanda Ching)

She tells me a story about a beautiful weaver girl who lives among the stars and falls in love with a human cowherd. She tells me about a vengeful mother goddess who rips the sky in two with a hairpin to keep the lovers apart forevermore.

What a fabulous tale this is, weaving together astronomy, folklore, an old love story, and life on a ranch. A daughter who watches her parents and understands more than they ever tell her about their relationship. And then, a horse, and her mother's determination, changes everything.

The Color of Wings by Riley Tao at Cast of Wonders

Momma says there’s no girl in the barn, that feathers ain’t fingers and caws aren’t words, but the girl gives me gifts and I know that she’s real. A bit of chalk that Momma says got all over my hands. A fork, cold and heavy, that Momma sold off at market. A feather, good for quills or fletching arrows, but best pressed up to my cheek at night.

This is part of a special episode at Cast of Wonders featuring flash fiction by young authors. This is a dark and haunting story about a boy who meets a girl in the barn and she gives him gifts, and more. I love the sadness of this tale, and the way it feels like fairytale and folklore woven into everyday life.

At the Edge of Nowhere by Peter Gooley at Cast of Wonders

It saddens me to look out my window and see the secrets lying sad and broken across the dusty road. The sprays of wind toss them along, scattering the letters among the little, cream-coloured chunks of gravel. I think that sadness was what made me first start collecting them. I gather the tiny, sparkling thoughts from the dew-painted ground each morning as I tend my garden, like manna from heaven.

Another lyrical and quietly piercing tale from Cast of Wonders, this one about a  person who gathers secrets, most of them sad, but some of them, a precious few, joyful. Gooley's prose is wonderfully crafted and I love the sweetness that mingles with the sadness here.

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A Cure For Solastalgia by E.M. Linden in Strange Horizons

When I leave home at seventeen, my mother tells me three things. Not to care too much. To keep my gift a secret. And to get used to being alone.

“You’ll see what it’s like,” she says. “Out there in the real world.”

None of this is good advice.

There is real magic in this story, magic that can change and reshape the world, the soil, the trees, the landscape, the waters... Magic that can be used to twist and drain life from nature as well. I love the way magic and environmentalism are woven together here into a tale that carries a bright, if brittle, hope for change and rebirth. 

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Do Not Waver, My Heart by Shanna Germain in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

My spaceship is not, for all intents and purposes, a living thing. At least not according to the laws of the Witch and her War, which has strict rules for such things. Whether or not I see Akasma as alive (I do) is luckily irrelevant. I find it hard to believe that the Witch regrets any of her choices–one, I suspect, does not become the Witch (capital W) if saddled with complex emotions like regret or fear or love–but I like to imagine she sometimes wishes she’d done things a little differently.

This story is part of a science-fantasy issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies (I love the science-fantasy issues!), and it weaves together strands of fairytales that seem familiar and yet strange. Added to the fairytale strands are spaceships and technology, and a sister weaving suits for her lost brothers, the ones that were taken and cursed by the Witch. It's a beautiful, unsettling, wrenching tale with sadness running deep and dark through it. 

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Level One: Blowtorch by Jared Oliver Adams in Diabolical Plots

Usually Friend gives me three food pouches after sportsgames, but today only one. He spits it out of his chest slot, and I kick off the bulkhead to snatch it before it gets caught in that jumble of wires over by the vents. When I grab the nearest handhold and swivel in the air for the next one to come, Friend just floats there with his slot closed and his metal arms at his sides.

A child and a robot Friend, and the games played to teach the child what they need to know to survive, outside the ship. It's a wonderfully sharp little story, about childhood and the way a child sees the world depending on how they grow up, and that even in a harsh place, there can be space for care and comfort.

The Geist and/in/as the Boltzmann Brain by M. J. Pettit in Diabolical Plots

Lem had existed for all of ten nanoseconds (give or take) when she realized she was a Boltzmann brain pulsing away in the otherwise nothingness of space. She consisted of a conglomeration of particles that had randomly bounced off one another until they spontaneously formed into a structurally-sound and fully functional human brain. Lem came complete with a full inventory of false memories detailing a richly lived life back on a place called Earth.

I found shades of Douglas Adams in this lovely and funny and quite compelling science fiction story about Lem who keeps popping into existence as a Boltzmann brain. What's a Boltzmann brain you ask? Well, to quote Wikipedia: "The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more likely for a single brain to spontaneously form in a void, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did." Lem keeps sort of remembering a life, and a love, and eventually, maybe Brain-Lem can find a way to live again.

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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.

A gorgeous, precious, intricate gem of a story that just about broke my heart. Everyone has a bird inside them, but you don't know when it will take flight. Death and wings go together here, and Dima turns it into an exquisite, delicate tale.

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The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl by Nika Murphy in Apex Magazine

Not all the ghosts of Chornobyl died in 1986. Some died years—decades—later, bodies ravaged by mutated cells. They were a hundred kilometers away, not realizing their favorite mug was doused with irradiated atoms from the destroyed reactor. I died in anger, during the invasion, volunteering to drive a truckload of baby formula and ammo, trying to prove to my father, to the world, that I was a man, only to be blown apart by an enemy mine. After, I wandered around for weeks looking for my legs until Kyryl found me and brought me here.

A ghost story set in Chernobyl, playing out in a landscape devastated by the nuclear disaster and the on-going war in Ukraine. Here, nature is full of ghosts. Ghosts wandering the woods, following the animals, tending plants and fungi, sometimes trying to help the living, too. I love how Murphy stitches together the present with the past, the existence of ghosts and the tribulations of soldiers and civilians. A mournful, quietly piercing story.

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A Voice Calling by Christopher Barzak (release date: March 19, 2024)

"Button House has stood for centuries, digging its roots and its rot deeper and deeper, consuming all who approach: twin brothers, a child bride, an innocent baby, four young factory workers.

And then came Rose Billings, who had an affinity with the house like no other. Rose, who could hear the house and the pleas of its many ghosts. Rose, who would attempt to solve the mysteries of Button House, or die trying."

I am one of the staff-writers at Psychopomp, so I might be biased, but this is my mini-review: A Voice Calling is deep and dark tale of a haunted house (and orchard) that twists its way into the lives of every family that inhabits it through the years. I love how this is also a story of a community, and how the house and the fate of the people touched by the house, becomes a communal tragedy of sorts. Barzak gives this story a mournful, elegiac, and almost choral tone, as if we're listening to a gathering of voices as they bear witness to the menace and unraveling of the darkness in the house. Gorgeously wrought, and profoundly moving, horror.

• Also available in print.

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 The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe at PseudoPod (narrated by Alasdair Stuart)

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitively settled—but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved, precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity.

No, this is not a new story, it's the classic, narrated by the wonderful Alasdair Stuart! It's a must if you love Poe and if you love audio fiction. 

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