Hello, hello! Have you missed me? I have not been telling you about short fiction lately, but I am inspired by the start of a new semester to resume my short fiction reading, even though semesters are meaningless in my life now that I am no longer (thank God) in school. Suitably, though, I am starting with a kind of story that I’m a sucker for, the kind that is written like a pretend piece of scholarship. You know the way to my heart, M. E. Bronstein.
“Elegy of a Lanthornist,” by M. E. Bronstein (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 6700 words) excerpts the annotated journals of a historian of the Lantern Isle and the Lantern Poet, who wrote most famously an elegy of his beloved Lady Firefly. The historian, Isabel Hayes-Reyna, disappeared after apparently suffering some kind of breakdown, and her journals are consequently fragmented and strange; the footnotes carefully explain what elements of her narrative are likely to be true and which are fancy.
The story follows Isabel’s dawning realization that the Lantern Poet, whose work she has loved all her life, may not have spoken the truth about his lady love. It’s a nifty parallel to the structure of the story, as the reader also has to read past the authority of the academic who annotates and explains Isabel’s work and life. The question of this story is about the disconnect between art and life, and there is a question of violation that lies at its heart: When an artist depicts another person, what is being taken from that person? What pieces of her story are being left out? Bronstein takes up the question in a wonderfully, creepily literal way; the story’s final lines will leave you shuddering.
Having read An Unkindness of Ghosts, I expected to be thoroughly heartwrenched by Rivers Solomon’s “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” (6970 words, Tor.com) — and I was, although not in the ways I expected. The story opens with an enslaved girl, Sully, killing all the people who owned her, after the man of the house was killed in the Civil War. But her act of murder unsettles the etherworld, and it sends a girl named Ziza, who was alive before and dead before, and now is alive again. For every life Sully took, the etherworld gives her back a new life.
I loved Ziza, and Sully. Sully is so bruised and angry from the life she’s lived that she struggles to imagine a life for herself, while Ziza is all vision and hope. She is curious and fun and in love with the world, and I cherished her for loving Sully and helping Sully to see her own worth. Eventually, they form a community, Sully and Ziza and the other ghosts, and find ways to protect it. (Necromancy, for once, really does pay!) “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” has so much murder and sadness in it that it feels weird to say it’s life-affirming, but I felt genuinely life-affirmed and hopeful, reading it. It’s the story of a woman coming to realize that her life and her world are worth fighting for.
If you enjoy reading analyses of why everyone on Twitter noisily insists they want to be murdered by hot women they admire (I do), you’ll definitely want to check out Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s “Sweet Dreams Are Made of You” (2417 words, Nightmare). As with “Elegy of a Lanthornist,” it’s told in a nontraditional story structure, with clips from Wiki posts and news articles interspersed with second-person narration. It’s about a virtual reality game called “Vore,” wherein a girl with no name devours you and a partner (you have to bring someone else with you if you want to play).
File this one firmly under “weird shit” and do not read if cannibalism unnerves you — but Wolfmoor does an incredible job, in this short piece, of making the reader uncomfortable (with cannibalism) while quietly also introducing the idea that Things Are Not Right (like, even not-righter than consensual cannibalism).
You may file a complaint, or expound on your concerns, but understand that if you dream about the girl, if you dream about the game outside our facilities, there is nothing we can do. Some people find the experience so intoxicating they become addicted.
No, of course not you.
It probably says something about These Troubled Times that I’ve got two stories in here about women committing mass murders. But there is something ineffably good about the idea of women created for bondage breaking free of their constraints and just fucking shit up to the limits of their capacity. “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” is gloriously creepy and nightmarish.
Nightmare is a new addition to my short fiction reading schedule, and I have been very delighted with it. This issue featured two stories that I loved, the second of which is Letitia Trent (great name)’s “Wilderness” (5900 words). Horror always works best for me when its events are as close as possible to the real world, where a few things just aren’t quite right. “Wilderness” takes place in an airport, with all the rarefied weirdness of airports. Krista is traveling alone, and her plane keeps getting delayed; and as the delays continue, the passengers start to become aware that something has gone wrong outside the airport.
“Wilderness” is decidedly Shirley Jackson-ish, a higher compliment than which I cannot give. Trent’s writing is wry and detached and humorous:
The blonde woman spoke energetically about her two dachshunds, Buckeye and Alexis. They liked to eat the carpet, she said, so she had soaked the edges of the carpet in Tabasco sauce, which was, incidentally, the same color as the carpet. The pin-curled woman asked how they managed to walk on the carpet if it was soaked with Tabasco sauce. The blonde shrugged, as if this were a mystery to her as well, though a boring one that she had no interest in pursuing.
It makes the wrongness of the airport wait particularly unnerving. And like Shirley Jackson, Trent isn’t interested in giving us any answers. The story feels like the first act of a play whose second act we can imagine all too well — we get to see all the heightening paranoia, all the possible early signs of catastrophe, and then Trent gives us a wink and drops the curtain. I loved it.
What about you, friends? What short fiction has captured your fancy this month?