Short Story Catch Up 7

I said the last catch up post in the last short story post and I was wrong! Six short stories bringing me not-quite-up-to-date in reviewing short stories I had something to say about this year. Backlog has been reduced to a manageable size.

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1. Delivery by Eric Beetner in Tough

Lucy is a delivery driver for a Mexican takeout place. She’s held up, and so loses out the cost of the food, so when she gets to the place and finds a man with broken legs who offers to pay her to deliver something she takes the job.

It’s criminal, of course, and things spiral out of control

Read This: Gritty, low level crime-gone-wrong pulp
Don’t Read This: Terrible people doing horrible things is not for you

2. My Wife Is An Alligator by Anna Lindwasser in Moss Puppy

Regina works in a books store for cursed books; her girlfriend Caitlin is a nurse, and is it turns out she’s also an alligator transformed to a human. She can feel that if she goes back to the swamp it will take her and make her an alligator again.

They try the cursed books store for spells to help. It does not go as they expect and then they decide to get married anyway, and when one side of the family is alligators and the other works in magic-trades, and also there’s a global pandemic, things will never go as expected.

Read This: For a zany magical romance that is deep into alligator/human relations
Don’t Read This: Interspecies romance I can cope with but this is on page 52 of a pdf

3. Ladder by Jihoon Park in JMMW

Our narrator has jumped off the corporate ladder. As they fall, they encounter a variety of events on the floors of the building they pass.

46. The wind resistance on my tie constricts my throat.
45. I try loosening it, but the full Windsor knot is too secure.

But the vignettes have a satirical purpose, which eventually becomes more surreal, the revelation is not about the corporation and it’s culture which is destroying the city.

Read This: For 100 lines of falling through a life and a corporation
Don’t Read This: Jumping off a ladder should not be this weird

4. Mine by Melissa Llanes Browntree in Trampset

She took her lover from her sister, her sister who loved his boar shape. She did not love his boar shape, and she was fire and so when she bore his twins, and had something to make her own, she would turn this story to rage and tragedy but she could call it her own. Call it mine.

Read This: A powerful, horrific, burning myth of love and madness
Don’t Read This: A madness that destroys love and family

5. The Mountain’s Bones by Neil R Clark in The Molotov Cocktail

The narrator’s great grandfather coughed fire on him when he was a child. His grandfather grew fangs and spoke only in Old Norse. When his father’s time came he tried to spare his son, but there was a problem with the cage.

They live in the mountains now, and try to control their appetite to destroy.

Read This: For dragons and generational curses
Don’t Read This: Because fire and cadavers are bad enough

6. The God Of Odds And Ends by Kate Doughty in Uncharted

A hunter of monsters arrives at a gas station. But there is a Wraith, with a Marvel scratch card. And neither can predict what will happen as this is the resting place of the God Of Odds And Ends.

Read This: For a short horror that remakes it’s title and it’s premise as it goes on
Don’t Read This: If the Wraith scratching away towards winning is too tense