I Read Stories: Scrap Metal Family by Elizabeth Cobbe

 

Scrap Metal Family by Elizabeth Cobbe in Kaleidotrope

Moonbeam’s a witch and even an old rotary phone makes her sick, she had to enchant it to work without wires or electricity. Her friend Hortencia is wild, a powerful witch, they had plans to raise the dead together before Hortencia got pregnant and had Oliver. Hortencia keeps getting attacked by robots, and leaves Oliver with Moonbeam; Oliver is fascinated by any horrible technology, wires and phones and so on.

Oliver fights with his mother, not learning magic. He goes away to college, studying electrical engineering. Hortencia vanishes, some think finally got by a killer robot, though Moonbeam saw the open graves and thinks she went her own way. And that’s that. Until a robot comes for her, a robot made from scraps.

A story of not seeing what is before you, of destiny. And it not being too late, perhaps, to find a family.

Read This: Story about parenting, robots and witchcraft and generational disputes
Don’t Read This: Witchcraft AND necromancy AND robots AND time travel just to discuss generational disputes