Five by Five: Five Short(er) Fictions for a Busy Time of Year

            With Thanksgiving ended, the busiest part of the season, for some people, has just begun. It can be difficult during the holiday seasons, with increased workloads and family obligations, to keep up with what's new in current short fiction. But not impossible. Keeping in mind that many of you may be oversaturated with events on your calendars during the next couple of weeks -- okay, months, really -- I've picked three shorter short fiction pieces to review from various online magazines. All of them are free, and all of them are worth checking out.

"Guide to a Childhood Diversion" by Emma Smith-Stevens

Web Conjunctions

http://conjunctions.com/webcon/smithstevens12.htm

            Many of the fiction pieces at Conjunctions blur the line between prose poetry and short fiction, and "Guide to a Childhood Diversion" is no exception. Set up as instructions for a game which must be played between two sisters, this story concerns the dynamic between the younger and oldest sibling. The game serves as a metaphor for the way these sisters will interact their whole lives; the story seems to say, this is the way all sister relationships are. A bit presumptuous, perhaps, but, for me, the youngest in a similar sibling pair, this rang true for me. I too have played the game of lasso, where one keeps agreeing to be the chasee only in hopes that one will, one day, be able to trick the chaser, grab the lasso, and turn the game around. The language here is beautiful and poignant, and Smith-Stevens often defines the two sister characters with lists, a technique which could have easily been boring but which is not, mainly because the items in those lists are actually quite fascinating.

"The 17th Contest of Body Artistry" by Alex Dally MacFarlane

Expanded Horizons

http://expandedhorizons.net/magazine/?page_id=2998

            This surreal story concerns, well, the 17^th contest of Body Artistry; in this future world, the concept of the juried art show has been taken to an all new level, with artists modifying their entire bodies. And this isn't your typical body modification; as MacFarlane writes in the first paragraph, one woman molds her torso into a replica of the space station, Goldchair; the contest takes place on the station, and the contest advisors this year have chosen as their theme the history of Goldchair, a decision which has upset many, as the theme is much more serious than it usually is, and many of the critics believe that choosing the space station as a theme is exclusionary to outsiders participating in the contest. This is not the plot of the story. In fact, this story, like the previous one, does not have an easily discernible plot. The story is made up of two sections which introduce the contest and then the controversy, and then descriptions of the winning entries: third place, second place, and first place.

            This flash piece is quirky and inventive. It reads like a news brief, an interesting one. The piece is moving and feels nearly complete; I wouldn't have minded some spot-on, specific details, especially in the penultimate section concerning the winner of the contest's entry, perhaps a specific image of one individual person emotionally moved by her display. As such, the description isn't quite specific enough to elicit a strong emotional response from me. And the last line sinks. It too could have benefited from some specifics, a final glimpse of the strange in the wonderfully strange world MacFarlane has given us. I would have loved, personally, to hear some of the ideas for the future contests. A missed opportunity, but the piece still resonates.

"They Make of You a Monster" by Damien Walters Grintalis

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/audio/bcs-093-they-make-of-you-a-monster/

            This story's a bit longer than the previous two, but it's available as an audio download, and so would be perfect to check out on a busy commute. The style this story's written in -- short, clipped paragraphs -- makes reading the story seem much faster, anyhow. In a patriarchal fantasy world where magic has been forbidden by the king -- the ability to do magic, in this world, is only found in women -- a young woman is locked in a prison where every day magic practitioners called Healers come by and torture her using the magic she herself is forbidden to use. That the king's oppression of magic is essentially an oppression of women is purposeful; this story seems to make a comment on man's fear of women's power and the harm that causes when those men come into power.

            The forbidden magic in the story is also compared to the female main character's somewhat-less-forbidden romantic relationship with another young woman. That their relationship is not treated as drastic a taboo as the use of magic is refreshing, though their relationship and the use of magic is intertwined, I won't tell you how. The majority of the story takes place inside the prison cell, where a transformation is taking place within the main character, one which, in the end, has both positive and negative consequences.

"Cutting" by Ken Liu

Electric Velocipede

http://www.electricvelocipede.com/2012/07/cutting-by-ken-liu/

            An editorial note at the bottom of this story expresses hope that the way the editors chose to lay it out worked in the story's favor. I'm going to go ahead and state that it does. At first, when I read the opening of Ken Liu's "Cutting," it felt like fairly standard fare. Monks cut words from their holy book to make up for human error. The next section shows us what the monks have pared the holy book down to, and the third yet another pairing. These last two sections read like Dada-esque poetry and are moving on their own. But there's a surprise hidden in the formatting, one which made me exclaim out loud. I won't spoil it, as the discovery is part of the experience. But I will recommend this story if not for the originality of idea then at least for the originality of structure.

"The Care and Feeding of Mammalian Bipeds, v. 2.1" by M. Darusha Wehm

EscapePod

http://escapepod.org/2012/11/15/ep369-the-care-and-feeding-of-mammalian-bipeds-v-2-1/

            This podcasted story runs about twenty-eight minutes, another good one to download and listen to while traveling. "The Care and Feeding of Mammalian Bipeds" caught my eye because of the funny title. In the story, a domestic robot named Rosie comes into a new home armed with the knowledge it has been given in the form of a manual by the company which made it. As a result of its tendency to take things literally and its lack of understanding for human complexity, studying "the herd" it works for like an anthropologist who has never experienced being human, the robot thinks that the family's daily fights are rituals and that "the herd" is perfectly healthy. The irony is that the reader knows quite clearly that the family is in fact falling apart, but the robot's obliviousness is both charming and sad.

            Christiana Ellis reads this story with a monotone-ish, unaffected robotic tone, which adds a great deal to the humor. Several times throughout the story I couldn't help laughing out loud. As the family falls apart, Rosie witnesses more and more of the family's transgressions. Unfortunately, the problems that the family faces are nothing new to fiction: cheating spouses, drunkenness, a child born unplanned. One thing I would've liked to see in this story was something new with regards to the way the family crumbled. And I felt as though the father figure is painted as too much the victim, and the mother as too much the villain. I longed to know more of the family's secrets, or seen a brief softer side to the mother, something to make the two parental figures as believable as the daughter. Still a hilarious piece of short fiction, one I highly recommend.

McSweeney's Issue 41

             As far as short fiction goes, McSweeney's has always been one of favorite magazines, partly because do not shy away from stories which contain fantastic elements. In the most recent issue--McSweeney's 41--we have twelve short fiction stories, four of which are written by Aboriginal Australian writers in a section highlighting Australian short fiction; each piece in the issue is illustrated. The issue also contains two excerpts from McSweeney's titles and two nonfiction essays.

            Of those twelve short stories, two contain speculative elements. Steven Millhauser's "American Tall Tale" is one of my favorites in the issue. The story tells of Paul Bunyon's lazy, skinny brother, James Bunyon, and the sleeping contest which takes place between them. Considering that I've never before heard a modern retelling of the tall tales I grew up with, the plot of this story was refreshing to me, and I enjoyed the lightheartedness of the story. It's a humorous piece and an entertaining exploration of sibling rivalry written in the style of those larger-than-life tall tales they teach to elementary schoolers.

            I'm less enthusiastic about Ryan Boudinot's "Robot Sex." This story concerns the life of a robot who works in an office and communicates regularly with two exiled orangutans in space who are plotting with the rest of their species to take over the world. The robot's life is much like ours, adjusted only slightly; he speaks like a wannabe hipster--an attempt at humor which sometimes fell flat--but copulation for his kind is illegal and involves finding a "chop-shop owner who's willing to look the other way for a couple of grand (pg. 170)," after which they weld, solder, and cross-connect their processors. He meets a lady robot, and trouble ensues. The ultimate message of the piece, that humanity is stuck in a violent cycle, is nothing new to fiction, and I felt as though the delivery wasn't a fresh one, and the writing doesn't blow me away. What I like about it, however, is that the technology is not viewed as destructive; rather, people are viewed as destructive toward technology.

            "The Wolf and the Wild" by Jess Walter is possibly my favorite story in the issue. Although the main character, Wade, is a rich man convicted of a white collar crime, I could relate to him. Sentenced to volunteer work first as highway cleanup and then as a tutor for a school district, Wade's attempts at redemption seem sincere. Because I read this story while working as an after school care provider in an elementary school also overly concerned with predators, I related to Wade even more. As one of the children repeatedly crawls on his lap during story time, Wade is forced to constantly push the child away, nervous that one of the teachers might see and think Wade had pulled the child onto his lap himself.

            In Thomas McGuire's "River Camp," two childhood friends with a tumultuous past--one of them has slept with the other's wife, and they both resent each other's lives--go on a camping trip with an increasingly unstable, eccentric guide who begins to unravel. The story's tension is palpable, and the two characters' personalities are so well established it was easy to believe that they could be real people.

            The hard Las Angeles agent, Richter, in Henry Bean's "The Virago" also strikes me as a realistic character. By the end of the story, I felt I might know her, that she might be someone out there who I could one day encounter. Again I was surprised at the sympathy I felt for the rich woman afraid of losing her good fortune; having overheard a table of four young women calling her names, Richter becomes obsessed with destroying the careers of each of them. Already on a downward spiral, this obsession only speeds that spiral up, and her desperate attempts at keeping her place in the entertainment world makes you feel for her. An inside look at a character who ordinarily would be treated as a black-and-white villain.

            We're also given the villain's point-of-view in Deb Onlin Unferth's "Stay Where You Are," though the majority of the story is told from Jane's point-of-view. In the story a married couple, Max and Jane, with a tendency to stay constantly on the move are captured by a South American gunman. As he speaks Spanish and the couple does not, they don't understand him, but the reader knows that the gunman has captured them in an attempt at impressing his group, thinking that they are Americans. Jane is tired of traveling all the time, wants to settle down, but Max cannot stand the idea. Jane's struggle consumes her even in the midst of the situation at hand, which literalizes her longing to break free.

            Aimee Bender's "Wordkeepers" is a humorous flash fiction piece on our society's reliance on technology, a young teacher and his students' inability to find words for things because of that reliance, and his relationship with his much more old-fashioned neighbor. Bender's ability to inhabit her stories is unrivaled; her narration feels like it comes from a person separate of her.

            The other flash fiction piece, Jowhor Ile's "Afternoon Street," baffled me. I couldn't quite suss out what was going on in the story or what the meaning of the story was meant to be.

            The stories in the Aboriginal Australian portion of the issue are also short, but they each provide an insight into Australian culture, a culture I am not too familiar with. In Tony Birch's "The Promise," an alcoholic whose wife has recently left him attempts to get her back, though not to change. The promise of the title is a promise he made as a young man, both to his wife and to anyone who asked of his plans for the future, to build a church. This is a story of hitting rock bottom, of transformation, and I appreciate Birch's ability to put the reader into the mind of his main character.

            Ellen Van Neervan-Currie's "S&J" is written in an Australian vernacular that can be somewhat difficult to parse through if you're unfamiliar with it, though far from impossible. Two young Aboriginal women pick up a hitchhiker. When one of them takes up with that hitchhiker, the other is faced with her own jealousy. The prose is well-written, sparse and to the point, and the distance of the narrative from the main character reflects her reluctance to admit to herself and others both her ethnic background and her sexuality.

            Tara June Winch's "It's Too Difficult to Explain" is about a well-known runner on his own downward spiral. Though the prose here is often beautiful, the light coming in through Vincent's window "the color of brittle toffee," it was difficult for me to inhabit the character. In Melissa Lucashenko's "Tonsils," it is much easier to inhabit the main character and narrator's head, as their inner thoughts are relayed to us. In this story, a parental figure who has taken in an abusive mother's gay daughter is forced to deal not only with the daughter's increasingly poor health--she has a chronic cough, but the doctors will not remove her tonsils--but also the appearance of the daughter's mother. I enjoyed the bits of Australian culture this story gave me, but it isn't one that will stick in my mind.         Overall, a solid issue of McSweeney's.

Issue 41 on sale through McSweeney's website.

And Now a Message: an overview of my short story sentiments

            Before continuing with today's review, I'd like to speak a little about my taste in short stories. I read far more short stories than novels, and what I love about shorts is their compactedness, that there is little room for fluff or extraneous information in a short story. I find that the form lends itself well to little revelations about the world we live in, about people and the way they behave. Some of the most important life lessons I turn to in times of crisis have come from short stories. I have realized some of the most defining characteristics of myself and others after reading of a character who possesses those same characteristics. Short stories have defined much of who I am, both the reading and writing of them.

            I have always had a deep love of the speculative. I'm not one of those individuals who believes that the speculative should only show itself when absolutely necessary; given the choice between a story with an extraneous speculative element and one without any speculative element, I will choose the speculative. I believe that the fantastical stretches the imagination and opens the mind. I do not read speculative stories wondering why the fantastical is present. I live in this world, and therefore when I read I want to read about life in other worlds, no matter how similar to ours those worlds are. In fact, I prefer the fantastic that has roots in this world. Magical realism and slipstream are therefore right up my alley.

            I also read of the non-speculative, but I do so mostly when I have become oversaturated with strange places and need a break from the extraordinary. I do not like stories about middle class bores going about their days. I have subscribed to The New Yorker for the past two years, and only three stories from the recent issues resonated with me so much that I remember them now, and those three stories contained elements of the fantastic, the surreal; I mostly read the magazine for the excellent nonfiction. I subscribe to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and Mcsweeney's as well, and these stories fit my taste much better.  I read a lot of Strange Horizons and Conjunctions and Clarkesworld and Lightspeed. I browse Expanded Horizons and listen to EscapePod and PodCastle. I read short story collections cover to cover.

            If I were to give a list of my favorite short story writers, that list would include Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, Jonathan Lethem, Ted Chiang, Elizabeth Hand, Karen Joy Fowler, Jeff Vandermeer, Jennifer Egan. I have a soft spot for retold fairy tales and myths and superhero stories which shatter cliché. And every time I read a really great short story, I always go online and look for other people who might be talking about that story, people who have posted reviews of it, and rarely do I find them. Thus I will attempt in this blog to review works that make me shiver. I would like to call attention to the great short stories out there, and so I will mostly review work that I like, rather than work I don't care for. I will always be honest and gentle; if you're looking for scathing reviews, I am not your reviewer. I will update regularly every other Monday, though I may update sporadically as well whenever the mood strikes. I hope that you will check out some of these short stories and short story collections and let me know what you think. Comments and critiques are always welcome.