• the nature of truth
• flora and fauna
• living and dying
• fraught familial relationships

Aliette de Bodard’s “The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun” (3780 words, Uncanny) is one of the first short stories I read in the month of April, and it reminded me of all the reasons I love short fiction. We begin with a girl called Lan and the story her mother told her to explain why they live the way they live: A dragon flew out of their home planet’s sun, so they had to pile on ships and escape to the cramped space station where they currently live. Not quite content with that story, Lan begins to find out more, and each story that she learns about her people’s history adds another layer of information to what she thinks she knows. This author writes a lot about people rebuilding their lives after devastation, and “The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun” explores the different stories we tell to try and make sense of unthinkable tragedy.

Speaking of storytelling, Jamie Wahls’s “Truth Plus” (4959 words, Strange Horizons) is also about stories, even though it appears to be about the end of the world as we know it. Avi and his ex-wife are two among a small group of people tasked with saving humanity from a comet that’s heading straight for Planet Earth. She’s a scientist, and he’s a PR guy. Frankly, there isn’t a lot either of them can do. A comet is heading straight for Earth. I loved this story because I love this type of character and this take on truth:

Sometimes your audience is the intersection of the politicians and the public, where you need to tell a certain truth, and be very careful with the framing so as not prime people to think of other truths that the first truth implies.

This is put rather cynically, and of course one can navigate selective truths ethically or unethically, but: There are no unselective truths. The world is too vast to tell all the truth all the time, so we’re always choosing what to include and what to leave out. (said the INTJ girl very earnestly) As cynical as these characters sometimes are, and as tragic a story as “Truth Plus” is, it still gave me hope for our ability as humans to shine light in the darkness.

One terrific thing that Clarkesworld is doing is translating a ton of East Asian short stories, and I love them for bringing those stories to — look, I was going to say “an English-speaking audience” but lbr I actually mean “me”. Soyeon Jeong’s “The Flowering,” translated by Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar (5336 words) is a woman telling her story to an oppressive government. Or rather, not her story, but her sister’s. Her sister who has been doing something with seeds, in a future where the flow of information is controlled by the government, and it comes to a beautiful, hopeful conclusion at the end of the story.

(There’s this classic line for protestors, notably used by Mexican activists protesting disappeared students: “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” Though “The Flowering” isn’t referencing it, I still get a bit teary when activism and seeds are imaginatively linked.)

“Blue Morphos in the Garden,” by Lis Mitchell (4872 words, Tor.com), begins with the protagonist’s grandmother-in-law dissolving into butterflies. Though it sounds beautiful — and everyone but Vivian seems delighted by it — Vivian can only see the ugliness, weirdness, and loss. As the story continues, we realize that Vivian herself is very ill. If she marries into her husband’s family, her death won’t exactly be the end: She’ll turn into something, maybe something she chooses, maybe not, and the family will have that thing around forever. A tree. An armchair. Butterflies.

“Blue Morphos in the Garden” deals wonderfully with the challenge of navigating a family culture that is not your own, which partnered people do all the time, and the irreconcilable conflicts that can arise when one person refuses to accept the family culture of their partner. But it’s also about ownership of one’s death and legacy. Vivian’s husband wants her to die in a way that he finds comfortable and comforting for himself and their daughter, while Vivian is adamant that she wants to belong to herself. Dash’s family enchantment is never explained, but it doesn’t really need to be. What matters is the navigation of family cultures, the meaning of love for those you are leaving behind, and what counts as a good death.

Luv 2 include stories about EATING THE RICH in this round-up. “Boiled Bones and Black Eggs,” by Nghi Vo (4535 words, Beneath Ceaseless Skies), is a highly relatable story about a boorish, entitled restaurant guest and the steps the restaurant owners take to get rid of him. The protagonist works for her aunt at a restaurant called the Drunken Rooster that feeds the willing as well as the dead. It’s a good life, and they are paid by the locals to keep doing it, until the dead Lord Ning arrives at their table. No matter how glorious the food they give him, he just shouts “You will lay out your best food at once for me, for I am Lord Ning of the Eight Valleys, martyr of the Battle of West Ridge, and favored son of the Great Emperor of the Heavens. I conquered the Red Court of Shao Fan, and I will have my due,” and demands more, finer food.

Eventually the protagonist’s aunt gets tired of the dead Lord Ning and finds an excellent, excellent solution. Lord Ning makes himself particularly loathsome both in his nastiness to wait staff and the stories that he tells of brutality and conquest. It is great to see the restaurant owners triumph.

What have I missed? Tell me some of your favorite short fiction for the month of April!

The post Shortly Ever After: April appeared first on Reading the End.

(A complaint: If anybody has written an Avengers AU where they’re all circus performers, I have yet to read it. WYD, internet?)

The first of these circus stories is Mimi Mondal’s “His Footsteps, through Darkness and Light” (7500 words, Tor.com), which follows a circus boy called Binu’da who has been allowed into the confidence of Shehzad Marid, a lamp jinni who conjures magnificent illusions for the Majestic Oriental Circus. When their circus gets hired to perform at the wedding of a raja’s daughter, Binu’da finds himself caught between conflicting loyalties.

“His Footsteps, through Darkness and Light” considers what it means to be free, what it means to be bound to someone else’s service, and how to live ethically under any of those conditions. Shehzad Marid chose Binu’da to be the master of the lamp, and they have a close relationship in spite of the complexity of their situation. At the raja’s daughter’s wedding, Binu’da is approached a devadasi, one of the dancers for the temple, who seeks to find another life that does not bind her to the service of a raja and a god. Though Binu’da is free enough to offer her that life, he is not free enough to escape the consequences of his choice, or hers; and the choice he makes in the end leaves him with a life that will have much in common with that Savithri (the devadasi) and Shehzad Marid. It’s an interesting take on freedom and bondage within the context of love and choice.

Any new fiction from JY Yang is cause for celebration, so you can imagine my joy when they have elected to write about a girl running away from the circus to join real life. “Circus Girl, the Hunter, and Mirror Boy” (9100 words, Tor.com) follows a woman named Lynette who once performed in a circus. After an attack by a fellow performer that left her near death, she acquired a silent companion she called Mirror Boy, who looked back at her from mirrors and supported her when times were hard. As she got older, Mirror Boy appeared less and less often, and finally disappeared altogether; but now, when Lynette is in her twenties, he’s back, with a warning that Lynette is in danger.

Oh my GOSH the worldbuilding in this story! Yang is a dab hand at creating lived-in characters very quickly, and I particularly loved Chrissa, the witch Lynette goes to consult when she realizes that her situation requires more expertise than she possesses. Lynette refers to Chrissa’s home as “one of the pockets of weird I’d curated” in her new, circus-free life, which I absolutely love. This story’s matter-of-fact approach to supernatural creatures reminded me a little of Robin McKinley’s best book, Sunshine, such that I am deeply hopeful Yang will write more stories about Chrissa and her clients in this curious, dreamy city. The resolution to Lynette and Mirror Boy’s problem is tidy in an emotionally messy way, which I’m coming to find is a specialty of Yang’s. This story was absolutely terrific, and left me wanting more more more.

I missed a lot of the recent Discourse about hopepunk, and still do not feel very sure that I know what hopepunk is exactly, but I have to imagine that it sometimes looks like Jamie Wahl’s “Eater of Worlds” (4800 words, Clarkesworld). It’s about a very small ship, or missile, called Kali, who is falling or flying very quickly towards a planet, and trying to sort out what she’s come there to do. When she discovers that what she was sent there to do might be to destroy everything, she has to sort out within her own mind what kind of a creature she was made to be, and what kind of a creature she wants to be. This story has my favorite closing sentences that I’ve read in a while. Yr girl teared up reading them.

Reprints in Clarkesworld in January included Marissa Lingen’s “Left to Take the Lead” (11500 words), originally from Analog. It’s about an indentured servant in a future, more miserable version of Earth, trying to make her way in the world after a series of misfortunes split her family apart. Holly has been waiting to hear from her uncles, who have been doing everything they can to bring the family back together: their home, and Holly, and her two beloved younger siblings, Hans and Cora, whose well-being motivates every decision Holly makes. (Surprise, I loved a siblings story.) This story is evidently part of a series of Oort Cloud Stories, which may explain the robustness of the worldbuilding and the very very lived-in feeling that I got from Holly’s present on earth and her memories of Oort. At its heart, this is a story about waiting to be saved, and deciding when you will be the one doing the saving. So. You know. Topical.

What short fiction have you read this past month, friends? What did I miss that I should circle back to?

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