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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.
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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.
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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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