Shortly Ever After: September

The accidental theme of this month’s Shortly Ever After is perspective, and the vastly different worlds we inhabit depending on where we’re standing. (I’m trying so hard not to say anything about These Troubled Times ™ because it’s beginning to seem like I have lost the ability to write a blog post without referencing These Troubled Times ™, but I swear to God I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it!) While I do love SFF for its mad ideas about what could be or might be someday, I also love its ability to make me step outside my own limited perspective and consider things and beings and people with entirely different viewpoints.¹

Kij Johnson’s “The Privilege of the Happy Ending” (Clarkesworld, 15,501 words)² is a novelette about a girl called Ada and her talking hen Blanche, who live in a cruel and unpredictable world while trying to survive it. There are kind people and cruel people and monsters with claws, and in the end — if I may spoil it for you — Blanche and Ada triumph over the odds and win their happy ending. It’s a fairy tale!

But what’s good about it is that Kij Johnson doesn’t just let it be a fairy tale. The story designs itself to make you care about Ada and Blanche, but Johnson turns her eye back on you to say: Why, though? Why is it so easy to forget about the boy who brings the message? What do we forget about when we let stories carry us away? When Johnson first employs that device, it’s a charming piece of metafiction (“and now he is gone from this story”), but she builds it up and up as the story continues, to a devastating effect at the end. It’s all the more devastating because even when she tells you what the story is doing, part of you stays swept up in it. Part of you just wants Ada and Blanche to be happy.

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J. M. Guzman’s “La Ciguapa, For the Reeds, For Herself” (Apex, 4700 words) is another story about stories. We begin with an unnamed narrator telling a story to an unnamed boy, about his grandfather who saw a monster, La Ciguapa, and taught his son to hunt her. But as the story moves on, we see that to the boy’s mother and sister — “they are who this story will always be about” — La Ciguapa has been an ally and a refuge. Guzman is a new-to-me author, and his creepy reworking of Dominican folklore leaves me eager to see what he’ll do next!

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Three and a half of Daryl Gregory’s books have been so perfect for me that I have felt physical pain about them. Another three and a half of his books have been, you know, fine. But that’s still a good enough average that I got excited when I saw his name pop up in my feedreader. His new story “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” (Tor.com, 11,900 words) was right in that Daryl Gregory sweet spot, the perfect balance of strange and gentle.

LT is ten when the space seeds start falling to earth, and he stays fascinated by them as he gets older and older. Humanity is doing everything it can to beat back the plague of invasive species that have grown from the seeds. But as LT keeps reminding people, humans go at animal speed, and plants at plant speed, and we are not talented at watching anything on the plant speed scale.

I don’t want to spoil the unfolding of this story, so I will just say that it meant a lot to me in this time when apocalypse seems very likely and tenderness and gentleness seem ever rarer.³

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Brenda Peynado’s “The Kite Maker” (Tor.com, 7026 words) is a strange and delicate piece of fiction about– among other things — genocide. A woman who participated in a massacre of aliens upon first contact now sells kites to them. Her shop is targeted by Nazi gangs who want to destroy the aliens and any contact between them and humans.

The story’s slow, dreamy tone makes a terrifying contrast to the violence it contains. Though the narrator generally shields her part in the massacres behind a collective we, the specifics of her culpability leak out in small, grim detail. At one point, she reflects, “I wanted forgiveness without having to name my sins.” That’s the line that got the story into this round-up — because isn’t that always the motherfucking way of the motherfucking world? She wants the world she lives in to be a different world than the one she’s made. Please call your elected officials. Please register people to vote. Please vote.