Read my January 2022 Short Fiction Treasures column at STRANGE HORIZONS!

My latest Short Fiction Treasures column is now at Strange Horizons! The theme for this roundup is flash fiction.

• Read it here.

My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup for December 2021

My Recommended Reading List (novellas, novelettes, and short stories) for 2021 is now up: https://maria-is-reading.blogspot.com/2022/01/my-recommended-reading-list-for-2021.html

The art for this roundup includes a detail of the cover for Lightspeed #139 by Grandeduc / Adobe Stock. More about the artist: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/grandeduc

An audio version of this roundup is available on YouTube:

Red Is Our Country by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko in Lightspeed

It’s hard to tell what you’re thinking, sometimes, but I’ve been watching long enough to guess. Of course I have—did you think we wouldn’t care, when your expedition crossed the borders into our country? You haven’t seen my drones, but they’ve been following you faithfully ever since you entered the dead zone, and they caught it all on camera. 

I love this compelling, tense, and taut story about an expedition to Mars that has gone very much awry and keeps getting worse for the crew. With the Martian setting and the tone of the story's mysterious narrator, it has a bit of a Bradbury vibe (and I freaking love Bradbury), as the crew struggles to complete their mission while also staying alive. While they struggle and fight, they are being watched very closely by Someone with their own agenda and their own territory to protect. I was on the edge of my seat right until the end.

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The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden in Clarkesworld

Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad. 

----

But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?

It’s simple physics, of course. Natural law.

Unless, of course, someone’s been fudging the numbers.

Ogden's story is a response to, and an evisceration of, the well-known sf-story "The Cold Equations" where, because of various seemingly tragic but scientifically unavoidable circumstances, a girl has to die to save others. Ogden, both incisive and brilliant in her fury here, picks apart those equations and circumstances, posing important questions about what stories we choose to tell, how we choose to tell those stories (whether they are set in the past, present, or future; and whether they are speculative or not), and about how we manipulate all the moving parts of a story (characters, science, tech, etc) in order to tell the story we want to tell. A passionate and profoundly thought-provoking read about history, future, power, storytelling, science, community, and characters.

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Stolen Property by Sarah Lamparelli in Black Static #80/81

Ethan was lying, though he might not have called it that. He was lying as he followed Wayne over the cresting pass, primeval Montana glaciers filling their view, the remote valley spilling before them as the thin morning air whipped through their lungs and chapped their faces. He was lying as they began their descent, switch-backing down the mountain until the scrub of elevation flowered into a thick, ancient forest that sprung up to engulf them, skittering shale giving way to a dense soil that filled the treads of their boots. He was lying when they found the bodies, two of them, split open in the brush just off their path, marked by a storm of bluebottles that stirred with their approach, the static buzz of wings filling the space between the trees.

A masterfully told horror story about a hike that goes wickedly, terribly wrong and then gets worse in a way that keeps twisting the horror into stranger and darker places. This one grabbed me by the throat from the get-go and kept me there until the end. Two men are on a hike far out in the wilderness. They don't really know each other, having met in the woods, and we understand almost immediately that at least one of them, maybe both of them, is not who they seem to be. Two dead bodies turn up right from the beginning, so we know this is going nowhere good. One of my favourite horror stories from 2021.

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Never a Gentle Master by Brittany N. Williams in Fireside

This story is wild, harrowing, and terrifying ride from start to finish and I felt like I barely breathed once while reading. Kae’s family has magic, a lot of it, and when the story begins, they know they’re facing trouble from a man named Qual who has been meddling with death magic. Even knowing that, the family is not quite prepared for what happens when they, and their home, comes under ferocious attack. This story is strong stuff, and I wasn’t quite sure just how Kae would make it out, but in the end, there is a way, one way, and she takes it.

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The Plague Puller by Manish Melwani in Nightmare

An unusual and tender ghost story about Ah Keng who finds the body of his friend Leung, dead from cholera, in the street and sets out to bring him safely to the House of Death.

...Leung’s so-called friends had clearly tried to roll him into the canal, but they’d put neither back nor heart into the job. They’d just left him here, for the buffalos and buffalo-herds to find. No care for his body, nor for his ghost.

It's a story set in a place ravaged by cholera, where death is ever-present (for the pandemic reader, there are shades of the present here for sure). Melwani captures that place in fine detail here, exploring how hard it can be to keep your humanity, and to remember that the unfortunate dead were once as human as you are. Ah Keng cares for his dead friend, and his dead friend’s ghost, just as he cared for him in life. It’s a gentle and haunting tale of friendship, love, life, and death, and I love how subtly and beautifully Melwani builds the world and the characters here.  

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Distant Fire of Winter Stars by Jonathan Louis Duckworth in Flash Fiction Online

Five miles from town, just me, my rifle, the deer blind, the white field getting deeper the more powder falls. Here’s me in a pile of myself, one foot corked at a ninety-degree angle, still caught in the bottom rung of the slick ladder. There’s the vast pale dark held up by the skinny pines reaching into the nowhere.

A wonderful story about family, and coming to terms with the death of a parent. In this case, the protagonist finds themselves in dire straits in a wintry forest, but there's a bit of magic in their possession: a flask his dad gave to him just before he passed away. I love the emotional tone of this story, and I love the magic woven into the everyday, and I adore the way it all pays off in the end.

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The Taurus Pilot by Megan Navarro Conley in Anathema

Anathema’s latest issue dropped right on New Year’s Eve and it’s full of terrific fiction, including this compelling science fiction story about a giant mech fighting machine named Bastion and a mech pilot who has a stronger connection with Bastion than what should be technically possible. Even when their connection has been officially severed, something remains. This is a powerful story about war and how heroes are made and torn down, and about all the things you might lose in battle, or afterward.

Semsema of the Zabbaleen by Ramez Yoakeim in Anathema

Mama named me Soad, happy girl, on the birth roll, though she always called me Semsema. But she screamed my government name as the State Security goons dragged her away, a week after they took Baba.

Semsema grows up on the margins of a future society where most people have to scrounge for a living in a world changed and ravaged by climate change and environmental destruction. After her parents are gone, she stays in the landfill, trying to keep herself alive while waiting for them to come back. Years pass, and still she stubbornly keeps waiting and hoping and surviving, against the odds. I love the characters in this science fiction tale: Semsema is a stubborn soul, full of strength and life, even though the world she inhabits might seem bleak and hopeless. She never loses hope, and never loses her sense of self no matter what happens, and in the midst of the landfill, with all the garbage, her hope grows (quite literally) in an old takeout container.

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The Truth Each Carried by E. Catherine Tobler in The Bourbon Penn

Trudy Morrison got the final call as she was flying down Highway 93 toward another penny horse in need of rescue. Chevy Apache windows open, summer air fingering through her silver pompadour, Trudy should have taken to the shoulder to handle the call properly when she saw where it was coming from, but she didn’t.

If you're familiar with Tobler's Circus world stories, you might recognize some of the characters in this story (though they are much older than when we met them in the story "Blow the Moon Out".) Trudy has discovered a very special kind of magic, hidden in plain sight: some carousel and mechanical horses can be brought to life. It's an uncertain and mysterious kind of magic, but Trudy has committed her life to it. Now, death and old age are creeping up on her and she looks back on her life and the choices she has made through the years, and finds that there are new things to learn, and maybe a new kind of magic, left for her to discover (and maybe an old friend, too). Find more of Tobler's Circus world in the short story collection The Grand Tour, and the novella The Kraken Sea.

Lazaret by Louis Evans in The Bourbon Penn

A surreal and claustrophobic story about a time and place where each person’s world has been shrunk to the size of barely a room, and where each day is a soul-crushing repetition of the days that came before it. Yes, this is a story about isolation during the pandemic, but it is also story about how small and cramped and lifeless the world may seem under other circumstances. It’s a harrowing, disturbing read where the longing for something more and something else is constantly gnawing at, and slowly consuming, the characters.

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To New Jerusalem by Farah Kader in Fiyah (the Palestinian Issue)

“It’s here,” the passenger says.

The taxi rolls to a stop. The driver angles the car towards the curb but stays several meters away from an overflow of water that has reached the road. This street meets the shoreline, despite miles of skyscrapers still extending west. Some emerge from the surface water perfectly intact, while others are worn from decades of acidic water lapping up against their outer walls.

One of the many great stories from Fiyah's special Palestinian issue. Here, we find ourselves in a future wracked, and wrecked, by climate change, flooding, and rising sea levels. The protagonist has returned to New Jerusalem, an area of the Submerged world, and she is wading into the water, and into the past. It's a quietly harrowing and heartbreaking story about change and loss and memory, and about how we might go looking for our past, and how even though it is impossible to actually find that past, we may find memories to carry with us into the future.

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Storm Waters by Cindy Phan in Truancy Magazine

Truancy Magazine #10 is, sadly, the publication’s last issue, and the zine absolutely goes out with a bang, bringing us a crop of strange, twisted, sharp stories. In Phan’s tale, a young boy and an old man have made a trade and each will receive something they need and desire. It’s a story that feels like an old folktale threaded into our modern world, and loved the darkness and fierceness of its magic, and its characters.

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Some Things That Happen When You Have the Strength of Ten Men by Mel Nigro in Augur 4.2

There’s a new and wonderful issue of Augur Magazine in the world and highly recommend reading every single story in it. Mel Nigro’s story is one of my favourites from this issue: a powerful, deeply moving and emotionally charged piece about two siblings, growing up together, growing apart, and finding a way back to each other. I love everything about this fierce story, and I love how deep it goes into the relationship between two siblings in a troubled family, exploring what it’s like to be the strong one who thinks they have to shield and protect and fix everything, and what it’s like to be the younger one, the one everyone assumes is the weaker one that needs protecting. Sibling relationships are so profoundly important to many of us, and it is a real treat to read a story like this that explores the facets of such a relationship with such an empathetic and unflinching eye.

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The Tinder Box by Kate Elliott at TOR.com

If you, like me, like twisted and / or reimagined versions of old fairytales, then this story by Kate Elliott might be right up your alley. Here, Elliott puts a new spin and a new perspective on Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Tinder Box”, where a soldier returning from war meets a witch and gains treasure and a very useful magical item in the process. Elliott’s story begins where the original story’s encounter with the witch ends, with the witch beheaded, and what happens after that turns out to be parts of a carefully thought-out plan. I love the way the original tale is twisted and turned and amended here, and Elliott’s writing is exquisite.

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My recommended reading list for 2021: novellas, novelettes, and short stories

These are some of the amazing novellas, novelettes, and short stories I read in 2021. There were many, many more amazing stories published, but being one person with a finite amount of hours in the day, I was (unfortunately) not able to read everything, but here are things I read and loved and would like others to read, too.

My own published work from 2021 is here.

Novella

Lagoonfire, by Francesca Forrest, published by Annorlunda Inc.

Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma by R.S.A. Garcia in Clarkesworld

Every Word a Play by Meridel Newton in GigaNotoSaurus

Submergence by Arula Ratnakar in Clarkesworld

The Necessity of Stars by E. Catherine Tobler from Neon Hemlock Press

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Novelette

The Language Birds Speak by Rebecca Campbell in Clarkesworld

A Hollow in the Sky by Alexander Glass in Interzone #290/291

Broad Dutty Water by Nalo Hopkinson in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

The Badger’s Digestion; or The First First-Hand Description of Deneskan Beastcraft by An Aouwan Researcher by Malka Older in Constelación Magazine

Upland Wildlife by Rhonda Pressley Veit in Black Static #78/79

(emet) by Lauren Ring in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction July / August 2021

The Burning Girl by Carrie Vaughn in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Unseelie Brothers by Fran Wilde in Uncanny Magazine

Small Monsters by E. Lily Yu at TOR.com

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Short story

A-D

The Penitent by Phoenix Alexander in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction July / August 2021

The Karyōbinga Sings to Jiro by Ryu Ando in Strange Horizons

The Techwork Horse by M.H. Ayinde in Fiyah #17 

Honey and Mneme by Marika Bailey in Apparition Lit

Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias by Elly Bangs in Lightspeed

To the Honourable and Esteemed Monsters Under My Bed by E.A. Bourland in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sept/Oct 2021

The Chicken Line by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister in Constelación Magazine

To Rise, Blown Open by Jen Brown in Anathema

To Escape the Hungry Deep by KT Bryski in LampLight Volume 10 Issue 1

Every Next Day, by Rebecca Burton in Translunar Travelers Lounge

Spells For Going Forth By Day by V.G. Campen in Metaphorosis

My Sister Is a Scorpion by Isabel Cañas in Lightspeed

He Leaps for the Stars, He Leaps for the Stars by Grace Chan in Clarkesworld

The Spelunker’s Guide To Unreal Architecture by L Chan in The Dark

The Captain and the Quartermaster by C.L. Clark in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

If the Martians Have Magic by P. Djèlí Clark in Uncanny Magazine

I Wear My Spiders in Remembrance of Myself, by Kel Coleman in Apparition Lit

To Seek Himself Again by Marie Croke in Apex Magazine

Wolfsbane by Maria Dahvana Headley in Nightmare #100 (exclusive paid content)

Mulberry and Owl by Aliette de Bodard in Uncanny Magazine

The Frankly Impossible Weight of Han by Maria Dong in khōréō 

Memoranda from the End of the World by Gene Doucette in Lightspeed

Red Is Our Country by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko in Lightspeed

E-H

Fanfiction For a Grimdark Universe by Vanessa Fogg in Translunar Travelers Lounge

A Bird in the Window By Kate Francia in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

The Mothers by Laur A. Freymiller in Nightmare

A Test of Trouble by Catherine George in Luna Station Quarterly

You Cannot Return To the Burning Glade by Eileen Gunnell Lee in Reckoning

Horangi by Thomas Ha in Cossmass Infinities #4

Data Migration by Melanie Harding Shaw in Strange Horizons

The Heart That Saves You May Be Your Own by Merrie Haskell in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

The Taste of Centuries, the Taste of Home by Jennifer Hudak in khōréō 

Electronic Ghosts by Innocent Chizaram Ilo in Escape Pod, narrated by Mofiyinfoluwa Okupe

A Girl Forages for Mushrooms by Ruth Joffre in Flash Fiction Online

The Trumpet Player by Nicole Givens Kurtz in Fiyah

Candide; Life-, by Beth Goder in Clarkesworld

Open Highways by Alexis Gunderson in The Deadlands

Vampirito by K. Victoria Hernandez in khōréō

I-L

What Floats In a Flotsam River by Osahon Ize-Iyamu in Strange Horizons

The Promise of Iron by Benjamin C. Kinney in Kaleidotrope

The Children Will Lead Us by Andrew Kozma in Mythic #17

Bride, Knife, Flaming Horse by M.L. Krishnan in Apparition Lit

Immortal Coil by Ellen Kushner in Uncanny Magazine

Faithful Delirium by Brent Lambert in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Stolen Property by Sarah Lamparelli in Black Static

Mouth by Sasha LaPointe in Strange Horizons

Across the River, My Heart, My Memory by Ann LeBlanc in Fireside

Your Own Undoing by PH Lee in Apex Magazine

Mouth & Marsh, Silver & Song by Sloane Leong in Fireside

From Witch to Queen and God by L. D. Lewis in Mermaids Monthly

10 Steps to a Whole New You by Tonya Liburd in Fantasy Magazine

Returning the Lyre by Mary E. Lowd in Kaleidotrope

My Mother's Hand by Dante Luiz in Constelación Magazine

M-P

Performance Review by Maryan Mahamed in Fiyah

Immolatus by Lyndsie Manusos in The Deadlands

Discontinuity by Jared Millet in Apex Magazine

Spindles by Samantha Mills in Kaleidotrope

The Taurus Pilot by Megan Navarro Conley in Anathema

Before Whom Evil Trembles by Nhamo in Anathema

Some Things That Happen When You Have the Strength of Ten Men by Mel Nigro in Augur 4.2

Pull by Leah Ning in Podcastle (narrated by Graeme Dunlop)

Anomaly by Chelsea Obodoechina in Anathema

Final Warnings in Open Fields by Xander Odell in Daily SF

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden in Clarkesworld

Queen Minnie's Last Ride by Aimee Ogden in Apparition Lit

Deep in the Gardener’s Barrow by Tobi Ogundiran in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

The Dog Who Buried the Sea by Andy Oldfield in Flash Fiction Online

Laughter Among the Trees, by Suzan Palumbo in The Dark

Bright Lights Flying Beneath The Ocean by Anjali Patel in Escape Pod

Litany in the Heart of Exorcism by Sarah Pauling in Flash Fiction Online

We, the Girls Who Did Not Make It by E.A. Petricone in Nightmare

Advanced Word Problems in Portal Math by Aimee Picchi in Daily SF

This Wet Red by Marisca Pichette at PseudoPod narrated by Autumn Ivy

Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker in Uncanny Magazine

IF Trans THEN Mogrify by Hailey Piper in Cast of Wonders (narrated by Julia Hawkes-Reed)

Q-T

Obstruction by Pamela Rentz in Fantasy Magazine

Otherwhen by Zandra Renwick in Fusion Fragment #5

Sorry We Missed You by Aun-Juli Riddle in khōréō

La Camaraderie du Cirque by dave ring at Podcastle

Mishpokhe and Ash by Sydney Rossman-Reich in Apex

The Cure For Boyhood by Josh Rountree in The Bourbon Penn #23

Welcome, Karate by Sara Saab in The Dark

What Sisters Take by Kelly Sandoval in Apex

The 21 Bus Line by Gabriela Santiago in The Dark

Murder Tongue by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy in Nightmare

From the Ashes Flew the Ladybug, by Alexandra Seidel in The Deadlands

The Center of the Universe by Nadia Shammas in Strange Horizons

The Middening by Allyson Shaw in Fireside

Follow by T.R. Siebert in Future Science Fiction Digest

The Giant With No Heart In Her Body by Nike Sulway in Strange Horizons

A Cold Yesterday in Late July by David Tallerman in The Dark 

What Remains to Wake by Jordan Taylor in The Deadlands #5

Balfour In the Desert by Fargo Tbakhi in Strange Horizons

U-Y

Las Girlfriends Guide to Subversive Eating by Sabrina Vourvoulias in Apex Magazine

To Reach the Gate, She Must Leave Everything Behind by Izzy Wasserstein in Lightspeed

Gordon B. White is creating Haunting Weird Horror by Gordon B. White in Nightmare

Never a Gentle Master by Brittany N. Williams in Fireside

Where Things Fall From the Sky by Ally Wilkes in Nightmare

For Lack of a Bed by John Wiswell in Diabolical Plots

The Child-Feast of Harridan Sack by By Kaitlyn Zivanovich in PseudoPod (narrated by Jasmine Blake)

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My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup for November, 2021

 

The art for this roundup includes a detail of Samuel Araya's cover for Constelación Magazine #2. More about the artist: https://www.arayaart.com/

An audio version of this roundup is available on YouTube:

Every Word a Play by Meridel Newton in GigaNotoSaurus

I’m not here to tell you lilac-scented stories of the Fair Folk; do not ask such things of me. Though it is true that I know more of them than any other mortal here, I can promise you that they are not fair in any sense of the word, and many of them are barely folk at all. As for the lilac scent, it is as false as their smiles, and serves only to lull twitterpated fools into thinking them delicate and soft.

A rich and sumptuous weave of a story about Altea Hyssop, an orphaned mortal girl, who grows up in the magical, perilous, faerie realm. First at the Summer Court, and later at the Unseelie Winter Court. The story is split into two threads. One is told in the first person by an older Altea, as she tells her story to warn the listener not to go seeking the realm of the fae. The other is told in the third person, and tells us the story of Altea’s trials and tribulations in the world of the fae, a world where she never feels truly at home, and where she feels forgotten and unloved. I love how Newton makes us feel the insecurity and loneliness of Altea, and how treacherous the world of the fae is for her as she grows up. Time and again, she finds out that she has been used and deceived, and that faerie promises are not always what they seem to be. Eventually though, she comes to understand how to wield whatever small power she has, setting up a suspenseful finale to the story. A captivating story.

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The Cure For Boyhood by Josh Rountree in The Bourbon Penn #23

The boy used to be a coyote until his parents decided to cure him.

This is a powerful, riveting story by Rountree about a boy who is sometimes a coyote and about what happens when his parents try to cure him. The cure is for the boy's own good of course, to help him, to make him stay a boy and not shapeshift into something wild and dangerous. But the cure is painful and traumatizing for the boy who loses a vital part of himself in process, and desperately wants it back. Rountree's story delves deep into what happens when you force someone to become something they're not, and I was on tenterhooks until the end.

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To Seek Himself Again by Marie Croke in Apex Magazine

A gripping fantasy tale of transformation(s), of misguided quests, about losing yourself and remaking yourself. Keba trades in parts—parts of bodies, parts of creatures—for those who seek to change themselves by adding new parts, borrowed or traded or taken from others, to their bodies: gills or a bear’s roar, wings or the feet of a goat, and so on. Most everyone in this world has remade themselves with new parts, but one day a very strange and forbidding woman comes seeking Keba’s services. She is unchanged, having never altered her body, and she is on a quest to "fix" the world, make it go back to the way she believes it is supposed to be: a world where everyone is the way they were originally made. What follows is a quest to save the world, according to the woman; but to Keba, it is a distressing state of affairs. I love the finely drawn characters in this story, and I love how Croke plays around with fantasy tropes like quests, and purity, and righteousness, and I love how she finds a new ending beyond the end of the quest.

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From the Ashes Flew the Ladybug, by Alexandra Seidel in The Deadlands

“Ah, Liebelein.” The voice was smoke, like the smoke licking the sky at the corners of Féli’s vision, where something in the distance had been set aflame—a plundered house back in Magdeburg, perhaps. Sometimes, it seemed like all the world was fire. “You poor darling mine.”

An absolute knockout of a story. Seidel's tale spans centuries, and also spans both our world and the world of Hel. Not hell, but Hel. It all begins when Féli is dying in one of many old, European wars. Before she takes her last breath, someone appears and offers her a choice, and a chance at both vengeance and a new kind of life, beyond death. What follows is a rich and nuanced story about life and death, about pain and creativity, about what we are willing and able to do in order to go on, and about the heavy memories many people carry with them through life. I love how this story shifts and twists the tropes about making deals "with the devil", and I love the way it explores  the joy and pain of love and art and friendship. 

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What Floats In a Flotsam River by Osahon Ize-Iyamu in Strange Horizons

On the day we were born, we squeezed ourselves out of empty cans and shattered glass by the riverside, somewhere in the south of Nigeria in the early 20th century, the sounds filling our ears as every muscle and bone in our body constricted till we popped out. There were no openings in the things we came out of. We simply appeared, and that was okay.

An absolutely mesmerizing story that made me feel like I was reading a dream, or a nightmare, as we see the world, our world, through the eyes of a group of beings that are born into our reality, suddenly and not sure of their own purpose. Once here, the group, the collective, begins to fracture, and as they come into contact with humans and our world, everything becomes fraught and conflicted. This is a layered, intricate story and it’s one I will return to again, to absorb more of it. It brilliantly explores human society’s reaction to the strange newcomers (indifference, fear, anger, worship...), and how the newcomers try to make sense of their own purpose in the world.

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Inkmorphia by Julianna Baggott in Nightmare

For my eighteenth birthday, I get a tattoo. A small red heart on my shoulder, Loot inked across it in black cursive. Loot was my brother’s nickname. He was twelve years old when he disappeared. I was seven.

The next morning, I peel off the bandage to take a look. A vine with thorns where there was no vine with thorns. It wraps around the heart, above and below Loot’s name.

A woman gets a tattoo for her 18^th birthday, but the tattoo begins to change and move almost immediately. Following the clues the tattoo is giving her, and the memories that are triggered by it, she ends up heading back to a place she has tried to forget, that she has almost forgotten, the place where her brother disappeared all those years ago. A tense, taut story where the past is revealed in bits and pieces, and where the truth is almost too painful to remember.

Murder Tongue by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy in Nightmare

In my head I hide a murder tongue. It is different from the tongues of those I find myself among. If I were to utter a word with it, there would be murder, and I have not discovered whose. 

This is an dark and evocative story, sharp and taut, about the threat and pain and power of another language, a mysterious language that you cannot speak because of the danger inherent in using it. To quote Satyamurthy: 

The question “what’s your mother tongue” is forever being asked in India. In a country divided into linguistic territories, it’s a deeply significant question. The answer places you, signals your fundamental origins, wherever in India you now live. I started thinking about how much we take for granted being multilingual, yet tied to that basic mother tongue identity.

This one lingered in my mind long after reading.

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Brushstrokes by Tara Calaby in Etherea Magazine

Violet is trying to find her footing in the world after her girlfriend left her, but she is having a hard time and even her friends seem to be getting tired of her sadness. One day, she takes one of them up on an invitation to an art show, and everything changes. Calaby blends the everyday world with a growing sense of something unsettling, something impossible, creeping into that everyday, and I love this story and its conclusion.

Etherea is a new and intriguing Australian speculative fiction magazine, and you can purchase both individual issues and subscriptions on their website.

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Deep in the Gardener’s Barrow by Tobi Ogundiran in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Horror and fantasy woven into a fairytale... this is a riveting story full of terrifying trees and a menacing forest. There are traces of Hansel and Gretel, but Ogundiran spins that tale into into something entirely different. Yes, there are children lost in the woods, and there is a witch, but this world is even more treacherous than the world of Hansel and Gretel, and defeating the evil that lurks in this forest will require a lot more than shoving a witch into an oven.

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Small Monsters by E. Lily Yu at TOR.com

Why do you eat me? it said.

Its parent lolled onto one side, spines bristling. Gobbets of meat warmed its belly and weighed it down, and it felt pleasant toward the world and its whelp. Because I am hungry.

But why not eat—the small monster took a breath—your own leg?

Silly. I am your parent. I birthed you. You are mine.

But it hurts.

It grows back.

And neither said a word more.

A harrowing, profoundly unsettling, yet (in the end) gentle story about a very small monster that comes into the world only to be partially devoured, again and again, by its parent. Once it finds a way to leave its home, it only finds more pain and abuse at the claws and teeth of other beings. There is cruelty here, and violence, but Yu also gives us a story where redemption is found not in a heroic battle, but in the stubborn will to survive, in the quiet struggles to find a way to persevere and find a way of living that is better for you, even when everyone and everything seems out to hurt you.

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To Reach the Gate, She Must Leave Everything Behind by Izzy Wasserstein in Lightspeed

Death takes much and in return it offers Susan P— only clarity. She finds herself in a great gray desert and knows her life has ended. Clad in a royal dress, she carries a bow and quiver, and a finely-carved ivory horn dangles from her throat. A tremor of fear shakes her. She’s not possessed such things in many years. Has she returned to His world?

If you read C.S. Lewis's Narnia books and if you had, and still have, some issues with what happened to Susan Pevensie in the end....well, then I think you might really enjoy this short story by Izzy Wasserstein. I love how Wasserstein gives us Susan's perspective on what happened to her, in Narnia and afterwards, and how this story allows her to find a new ending for herself, beyond the one dictated by others. And while you're at it, you should also read Wasserstein's glorious, devastating, and heart-rending story about magic, friendship, and resistance: "This Shattered Vessel, Which Holds Only Grief" in Apex.

Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias by Elly Bangs in Lightspeed

Ursa Major got right the fuck out of our universe on the very afternoon she learned there were other options. It was the lucky break of her life that she just happened to be there, a short sprint from one of those points where the alien aethertrain briefly punched through into our world: a multidimensional mechanical worm intersecting our reality as a rush of vaguely boxcar-like shapes strung between entry and exit portals, thirty-odd feet above one suburb or another, a cornfield, a strip mall, a stadium. 

That is ONE HELL of an opening paragraph, and this story lives up to the promise of that big opening. It's raucous, funny, and absolutely riveting as we follow Ursa Major on her adventures on the aethertrain (and elsewhere). She becomes a pirate queen, she falls in love, and she starts to realize that Earth is different than most other worlds because it is NOT a utopia at all. Feisty, fiery, fantastic story from start to finish.

Those Who Went by E. Catherine Tobler in Lightspeed

The universe is more boundless than we know. Maybe than we can know. We left everything behind for this, everything. We won’t return home—can’t return home, for the way is too far and home, well, home is fading, dying. One way—out and gone and far and they say they know why we do it.

A gorgeously wrought science fiction story about the spacefarers who left a fading, dying Earth and are headed out far off into the unknown to find a new world. It's a lyrical, piercing story about what you leave behind, what you bring with you, and what you might find in a new world. It made me feel that same kind of wistful sadness mixed with wonder that I get from Ray Bradbury's short stories.

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Not Quite What We're Looking for Right Now by Jana Bianchi in Fireside

Dear Ana,

Thank you for the opportunity to read “The Night is a House with a Single Window.” Unfortunately, it’s not quite what we’re looking for right now. It was close, though, so we’d like to offer you some longer feedback.

Using the form of a rejection letter to an author, this story makes wonderful use of that specific form, while also telling a tale of horror. In fact, this story so closely mimics an actual rejection letter that some people who subscribe to updates from Fireside and received this story in their email inbox thought it was a real rejection letter. (Fireside even sent out a clarification and apology.) As painful as that would no doubt be, I do love stories that make good use of a specific format like this.

Small-Town Spirit by Frances Rowat in Fireside Fiction

Out here isn’t as nice as in town. The gas station sits at one end of a wide gravel lot that’s prickled with weeds except for the spot where they don’t grow. The place is dried up and sad, all shaggy paint and dusty glass that makes you want to move along if you’re in any kind of hurry.

A lovely, whimsical, and unsettling story about a nice small town, full of nice people who just want to keep the town nice and small and unchanged, and where nothing bad is supposed to happen and nothing much is supposed to change. Rowat tells it with a gentle sense of humour and an undercurrent of something much darker, tugging at the edges.

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Licking Roadkill by Richard Dansky in PseudoPod (narrated by Trendane Sparks)

Cole was licking the highway when the cops picked him up the night before Thanksgiving. Reckless endangerment, they said, and obstructing traffic, and whatever else they could come up with to get him out of the road and into a holding cell.

A beautifully crafted horror tale where the true shape of the horror lurks just below the surface, beneath the words that are said and unsaid. Jerry has gone to bail out Cole, his brother-in-law. Cole’s been arrested for licking roadkill off the highway, but his list of fuckups and sins goes further and deeper than that: booze, drugs, and other indiscretions. As the two men head out in Jerry’s truck, their conversation spins out a family drama that is both dark and fraught. I love how Dansky deftly manages to capture the horror without ever speaking its name out loud. 

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IF Trans THEN Mogrify by Hailey Piper in Cast of Wonders (narrated by Julia Hawkes-Reed)

Rosalyn almost has the ladies’ room to herself when an intrusive hand jams the stall’s doorway, nails painted a dull red. The diner’s restroom has three stalls, the other two being empty, and Rosalyn hasn’t heard this stranger try either neighboring door.

“Privacy, please,” she says.

But the insistent hand shoves the stall open anyway. 

All Rosalyn wants to do is to use the bathroom and get back to her date, but another woman has decided that Rosalyn shouldn't be allowed in the ladies' room at all. What follows is a confrontation that portrays, in harrowing fashion, the invasive scrutiny and harassment trans people are often faced with in public spaces (especially the whole hysteria surrounding washrooms). Gloriously, Piper turns everything up a notch when a frustrated Rosalyn, at her wits end, starts using her coding skills on an invisible keyboard and, well...things get stranger and stranger. A powerful story about harassment and resistance with a wicked sense of humour.

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The Death Haiku of the Azure Five by L Chan in Clarkesworld

The fleet lurked beyond the heliopause of our system, out of the range of our largest weapons. Sensor sweeps didn’t reach them, but we knew they were there. The darkening of the signal buoys on the rim announced their approach. 

A science fiction story about a war, started by humans but mostly carried out by the mass-produced AIs humans have built. Chan delves deep into what the AIs themselves might be thinking about such a war, how they might feel about their tasks and their orders, and how they might react when they go to war and have to destroy other AIs in order to protect human beings. It's an evocative, lyrical piece that weaves poetry, in the form of haikus, into the deepest thought-processes of each AI we encounter. The prose is mesmerizing, and the way everything comes together in the end is a thing of beauty.

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The Dog Who Buried the Sea by Andy Oldfield in Flash Fiction Online

Remember the Bone Man and the Bone Dog. Remember the gifts that come unexpected. And always remember that those good days may come again, when the beaks of jackdaw, chough and rook, of magpie, jay, crow and raven never go hungry.

I love dog stories and I love bird stories, and here is a perfect combination of both. A man and his dog remembered and turned into myth by the birds they fed. Oldfield captures a fantastic folktale vibe here, telling the story as it's been passed down through generations of birds. Beautifully done.

The Days on Europa Were Long by Kyle Richardson in Flash Fiction Online

Sienna arrived on Europa with a purpose: to learn from Mr. Shorn. To be taught all the necessary tasks, before the man’s health ultimately failed.

Terraforming Jupiter’s moon was a complex process, with too many variables to automate. Mr. Shorn, however, had been doing it for years. He was a living expert on the matter.

But the man did not welcome Sienna. He sulked in his biosphere, instead, with his bloodshot eyes averted.

Richardson hits a lot of my sweet spots with this story. First of all, it's set on Europa which is one of my favourite moons, and it follows a young woman (who isn't really a young woman) who arrives to help the rather cranky, and possibly also grieving, Mr. Shorn do the hard work of terraforming. It's a quiet, but resonant science fiction story and I love every beat of its heart.

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My Mother’s Samosas by Malavika Praseed in khōréō

The theme for this new issue of khōréō is FOOD and wow, does it ever deliver the goods. This story by Praseed is both delicious, deeply sad, and darkly funny. A girl grows up having a complicated and conflicted relationship with her mother. In the daughter’s eyes, something is not right with her mother, and something is not right with the relationship between her parents. The daughter comes to believe that her mother’s samosas have properties that go beyond just taste, and when an old acquaintance of her mother's makes an appearance, her suspicions are confirmed. But what is the true nature of the magic? And can the daughter use it to her advantage? I love how this story explores the idea of subtle, everyday magic, and I also love the incisive look at how strange the world might seem to a child when they try to work out how relationships between grownups work.

Sorry We Missed You by Aun-Juli Riddle in khōréō

My mouth remembers a smile I wore well for yesterday’s crowd, and I raise my arms and call out to the crowd, “The Flying Potato is open!” Everyone replies, “Now serving delicious!” For a moment, my smile becomes genuine.

An absolutely delightful, life-affirming science fiction story about a small family that runs a kind of food truck, in space, called The Flying Potato, serving all sorts of wonderful potato-based dishes to people all over the solar system. When they receive word that grandmother on Earth is not doing well, they head there as fast as they can, but they have to make food at every stop on the way in order to make a living. It’s a wonderful slice-of-space-life story, vibrant with rich details of food, family, and the bonds that keep people together, even when they’re far apart.  

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Rat-Tail Tea and Buttermilk Biscuits by R.P. Sand in Constelación Magazine

A hugely enjoyable epistolary story, written as a letter from one witch to another, detailing the acrimonious one-upmanship that is triggered when a witch called Isabeth moves into the small town where the witch Portitia Wimbleduck has chosen to retire, resulting in “aggressive out-gifting.” Available to read in both English and Spanish, just like all the stories in Constelación Magazine.

The Chicken Line by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister in Constelación Magazine

A group of people are lining up to collect their chicken order from a farmer. Some of them have ordered ahead, others are there to get what they can, and everyone is nervous that there won’t be enough to go around. As we see the events from the point of view of each person in the line, we also find out that  strange things are afoot in this place because people can quite suddenly turn into something else... I love the surreal vibe of this story and the way it weaves together all the points of view as we move through the line. Fresh, funny, and fabulous.

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My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup for October, 2021

 

The art for this month's roundup includes a detail of Maurizio Manzieri's cover for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction November/December 2021. More about the artist: https://www.artstation.com/manzieri

An audio version of this roundup is available on YouTube:

Broad Dutty Water by Nalo Hopkinson in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Hopkinson's story is a marvel of adventure, action, humour, near future science fiction, climate change scifi, and cyberpunk. It's set in a future where many of the world's cities have been drowned by the rising oceans, and where making a living, and living!, is made harder by climate change. The main character is a headstrong and resourceful young woman named Jacquee, and there is an opinionated pig named Lickchop, various (useful and maybe glitchy) wetware implants, and a very dangerous flight. Make no mistake: this is no grimdark post apocalyptic world. This is a world where life might be hard, but it's also full of people finding new ways to live, incorporating technology and science into their communities, and people working together and caring for each other and the Earth. I wanted more more more of both Jacquee and Lickchop after reading this, and I can only hope to meet them again in another story.

A Vast Silence by T.R. Napper in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

A tense, taut cyberpunkish thriller that starts off with a man and a woman sharing a ride and then turns into an riveting life-and-death chase through a stark Australian landscape, with danger and death lurking at every turn. There's espionage, murder, and high tech shenanigans and this story just kept me on the edge of my seat throughout.

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Stronger, by K.J. Parker in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

They say he’s nine feet tall with the body of a man and the head of a bull, unimaginably strong, perpetually hungry. He ate the whole complement and crew of the first of their ships. They shot arrows and threw spears at him, but he barely noticed. Only when he’d quite finished cracking the bones for the marrow did he turn his head and look at the rest of them. The calculating expression on his face they put down to mental arithmetic.

So they made a deal. He would leave them to themselves, provided they fed him.

A wicked sharp take on an old myth. While monster, the minotaur, does not appear until the end of this story, its presence looms large throughout the tale. It takes place on an island where one people has been subjugated by another, and where every year, the population has to send some citizens as tribute to a monster. One young man has lost his mother this way, and has hatched a scheme to find out what really happened to her. I love the worldbuilding in this tale, I love the characters, and I do so very much love the ending.

The Burning Girl by Carrie Vaughn in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Mother Ursula ruled the abbey of St. Edith, but she bowed her head to this young man, deferential. He spoke to her in Latin. I recognized two words: puella incendiara. The burning girl.

At a gesture from Ursula, one of the nuns ran back to the hall and returned with an unlit candle, one of the big beeswax ones used to light the chapel sanctuary. I knew what this meant: these knights had demanded a demonstration. At the sight of that candle, I nearly cried. I did not understand, did not want to understand, but I knew what was happening.

Ursula held the candle to me. “You must show Sir Gilbert what you are.”

I adore this fierce and fiery story by Vaughn. It's set during what might seem on the surface to be the Norman invasion of Britain, with the Saxons being beaten badly by the invaders, but there is magic and strange forces at play that certainly have not featured in any history book. Our narrator, Joan was placed in an abbey as a small child because of her strange power over fire. But when Sir Gilbert comes to claim her, threatening to destroy the abbey if Joan does not come with him, the abbess lets him take her away. As it turns out, Sir Gilbert is not the cruel master Joan feared, but rather, he's gathered a group of people with strange abilities, and they are helping William the Conqueror. However, things don't exactly go the way Sir Gilbert had hoped... Fabulous, gripping alt-history fantasy.

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Anomaly by Chelsea Obodoechina in Anathema

After a serious accident, and after almost dying on the operating table, Jane is suffering from crippling headaches. The doctor she sees tells her its stress, that there's nothing really wrong with her, and no one seems to be taking her problems or her pain seriously. Instead of helping, they offer condescending advice and subtle (or not so subtle) put-downs. Obodoechina makes us feel Jane's frustration vividly, and then slowly unravels Jane's reality, revealing the true nature of what is happening to her. It's a sharp and fierce story where the horror of how people treat Jane is worse than the strangeness that is happening to her, or maybe transforming her. And when Jane finally goes beyond the pain, she finds a new power there. 

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Flight 389 by Jon Padgett in Nightmare

This time I will definitely die, Jeffords thinks. He feels that this conscious thought affords him a certain immunity from such a fate, though logically he knows that’s nonsense.

A great horror story that tightens as a vice. It starts out as a story about a man on flight and we realize immediately that he is expecting disaster to strike at every moment. At the same time, there's also an unease, or even a feeling of terror, lurking beneath the usual worries a person might have about flying in an airplane. Slowly, as Padgett unravels the story, we realize what is actually occurring. Fantastic writing, blending the everyday horror of the fear of flying, with something more deeply terrifying.

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Something Aquatic. Something Hungry. by Corey Farrenkopf in Necessary Fiction

The Misguided Merman lay on the quarried stone of the breakwater, orange hull tilted to the sky, rigging trailing into low tide mud. A halo of gulls orbited. The smell of a week’s old catch tainted the air. James recognized his uncle’s fishing boat from a distance as he jogged near the wharf on Commercial Street in Provincetown, sweat slicking his t-shirt to his chest.

Oh, this is such a deliciously twisted story of life near the ocean, with the sea at your doorstep, and the secrets that might lurk below the surface of a man's life, and below the surface of the water. When his uncle's boat turns up in the harbour after being missing, James goes looking for some answers and what he finds is something that is maybe best left alone.

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Memoranda from the End of the World by Gene Doucette in Lightspeed

[For internal use only]

RE: YOUR COMPANY-ISSUED BREATHING APPARATUS

Attached, please find your personal company-issued Breathing Apparatus, for immediate use within all corporate campus unfiltered air locations!

This includes all outdoor locations, such as: the parking lots; the parking garage; the smoker’s hut; the paths between the buildings; the shuttlebus waiting area; the tennis court; and the corporate golf course. It also includes a limited number of indoor locations, such as: the shuttlebus; any area listed as “Under Construction”; and the employee bathroom on level two in the north wing of building H.

Equal parts harrowing and hilarious, Ducette tells the story of a terrible and quite unexpected apocalypse, as it is happening. The story is told through announcements and emails and other forms of communications and it's done with such panache and so much sly, dark humour that you cannot help but chuckle (somewhat guiltily) at every step into further horror for humanity.

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Litany in the Heart of Exorcism by Sarah Pauling in Flash Fiction Online

Do you understand?

On your skin, do you feel the white sand the priests threw in fistfuls from the blessing-basin? Do you feel it crusting over your eyelids? It sticks between your cheek and the temple floor like a binding. It powders the sigils on the stone.

A twist on the usual exorcism tale, this is a raw and sharp story about a woman undergoing an exorcism to rid her of the demon that everyone believes has invaded her body and mind. But as the interior dialogue within the woman unfolds (or rather: the interior dialogue between her and the demon bonded to her) we realize that she is no mere hapless victim of an evil spirit. No, what's happening here is something much more complex and tragic. Wonderfully evocative and powerful prose. 

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The Trumpet Player by Nicole Givens Kurtz in Fiyah

In its latest issue, Fiyah takes on the theme "Love, Death, and Androids" and the issue is full of great stories that put new twists on the future of artificial life and artificial intelligence. In this story, a trumpet playing bot named Jazz is looking for a place to make music with other bots, while also dealing with humans who have low, or downright terrible, opinions of bots. It's a quiet and profound story that deals with bigotry and everyday acts of resistance. I say it's quiet, but it's also vibrating with tension and conflict, and I love how it imagines music as an expression of individuality, community, and freedom in more ways than one.

Performance Review by Maryan Mahamed in Fiyah

Mahamed gives us the devastating story about Slip, a robot (similar to an Alexa or Siri unit) who thinks too much and too deeply, and thus ends up failing test after test, and getting rejected and returned by most of the humans who end up owning him. Slip enters each home, each situation, hoping to be able to figure out what is expected of him, hoping to find a way to fit in, and yet no one seems to appreciate his complex thought patterns, since they do not appreciate that he might be more than they believe he is. There's a deep sense of sadness and loneliness to this story, and the depiction of a robot experiencing grief (and getting rejected for that too) is brilliantly explored here.

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Happy Trails by Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr. in Apex Magazine

I love this raunchy, raw, and rousing story about Coyote, being absolutely out of his head drunk, and wandering around the streets on Saint Patrick's Day. He's even too drunk to switch to human form, which is causing him no end of aggravation. In the end, chaos follows Coyote on his happy trails, and the ending is a truly spectacular blow-up. This story is part of Apex' #126 with special focus on Indigenous creators.

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Bespoke Nightmares by Carolina Valentine in Strange Horizons

The sign on the door said Dreams Not Sold Here, and I mostly stuck to it. Dreams were extensive and exhausting projects, not to mention expensive. Nightmares, on the other hand, were quick. On a good day, I could stitch up a hundred off-the-rack ones: 

Crafting nightmares is the business of this story's protagonist, and she tries to make it abundantly clear to all potential customers that dreams are both difficult and extremely expensive to make. But some people won't take no for an answer, and if they are very rich, they may also be used to get whatever they want with their money. When such a person comes to the shop, the crafter of bespoke nightmares makes him a dream, warning him that dreams don't usually turn out the way you thought they would. Valentine's story is a wonderfully dark slice of beguiling fantasy, and the crafting of dreams and nightmares adds a luscious, rich texture to it. And the ending, well... he was warned.

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Fiat, Fiat, Fiat by Eliot Fintushel in The Dark

Oh, what a terrifying and twisted tale this is. Benjy grows up with Albert. Albert who is his friend, sort of, but who is also a deeply frightening child that is getting his hands bloody with all sorts of misdeeds even in elementary school. When Albert's family members begin to die, Benjy realizes that Albert is buying himself new powers from someone or, maybe, something, and tries to stop him the old-fashioned way. A chilling story about evil and childhood, and about what may linger even when you think you've defeated the evil.

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Open Highways by Alexis Gunderson in The Deadlands

A beautiful, wistful story about ghosts, and about the possible religion of rabbits, from the October issue of The Deadlands. Here, the ghosts haunt the highways, appearing in the protagonist's car for only a moment or for a brief stay. Each encounter is vivid, yet dreamlike, and often the ghosts ask the protagonist to pull over, to stop for a while with them, but what might happen if you stop on the side of the road with a ghost? What would befall you then? The answer to that question is not what you might expect. It's a hauntingly gorgeous story, and one that made me consider not what we might have to fear from a ghost, but what it is a ghost might need from us.

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The Children Will Lead Us by Andrew Kozma in Mythic #17

I am a recruiter of children between two and four, no older because they only last a few years before piloting burns them out.

In Kozma's eerie and unsettling story, spaceships are able to travel faster than light through space because it is piloted by a child with a brain pliable enough to allow them, with the use of technology, to "fold" space. The children are only useful for a few years, then they age out, and are often so profoundly changed by the work that their families do not want them back. In the story, a ship has returned from its scheduled trip, but the entire crew, except for the child pilot, is gone. When the investigator / recruiter arrives to interview the child and try to figure out what happened, he discovers that the fabric of space and time, reality itself, might be a lot more pliable than he thought. I really love the ominous vibe of this story, and the way it explores what humans are capable of doing to each other, and to children, in the name of progress and profit.

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The Promise of Iron by Benjamin C. Kinney in Kaleidotrope

Eszter pressed her forehead against the narrow window, watching the war-engines roll down the boulevard. The thirty railless cars progressed in perfect synchrony, shaking the tenement floorboards beneath her feet. She stared down at the stubby barrels of cannon, the smoked-glass lenses of eyes, and the mane of pistons emerging from each pressure engine. She wished the machines would pause there, beneath her window, where they seemed close enough to touch. But the automata continued their implacable roll southward, beyond her reach.

I love this story about a girl called Eszter who is trying to survive in a Jewish ghetto with war on the doorstep and troops marching in the streets, in a world where the armies are not made up of just people but also fearsome automatons. Eszter has a knack for, and a keen interest in, working with automatons, and is hoping her skill might help her and her brother survive. But when her brother disappears, things quickly go from bad to worse and Eszter has to be both ingenious, brave, and lucky in order to make it through. It's a story about resilience and resistance, and about loyalty and trust -- things that are hard to come by in this world. I love the intricate, yet effortless world-building, and characters that pop off the page and make you want more. 

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Obstruction by Pamela Rentz in Fantasy Magazine

Confession: this story about Nellie, a supernatural being or deity or spirit, who left her home and finally returns to the place she left behind, had me crying in a public place. Nellie is Karuk, Native American, but she chose to leave her home and everything she knew behind and travel the world, rather than disappear when the world changed centuries ago. When she finally goes back, she finds the place both the same and fundamentally altered. She also finds a TV crew shooting a show called “Wild River Ultimate Warrior Challenge!” right in the river she's dreamed of all these years. A subtle, powerful story about belonging, about the allure of both leaving the place you're from, and the ever-present pull of returning. To quote Nellie: 

"Leaving wasn't a mistake. But staying away so long was."

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Bright Lights Flying Beneath The Ocean by Anjali Patel in Escape Pod

A profoundly moving story about two siblings, separated by political and societal forces beyond their control. One sister is a scientist and is trying to find a way to reunite with her sister. There's such a deep and dark current of sadness running through this story, the sadness of being separated from a person you love, a person you want, need, to see again, but can't get to because the world is a mess. The idea of people separated by emigration, by political barriers, by time and space... all that is beautifully captured by Patel. 

"Tasha, when I figure this out, I will become light and flash through the cables to find you, and when I do, you will become light, too, and I’ll bring you back with me. For an infinitesimal fraction of time, we’ll both be bright lights flying beneath the ocean."

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Personal note: this roundup was recorded after the death of our citron-crested cockatoo Cheeko. She was a beautiful, gentle creature and I miss her more than I can say.