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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.
☀
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.
☀
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.
☀
“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.
☀
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.
☀
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.
☀
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.
☀
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.
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.
☺