Short Story Review Round Up 4

Still catching up, here's 10 stories I read earlier this year.

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1. What Sisters Take by Kelly Sandoval in Apex

“Here’s the thing you need to know to understand this story: I was meant to be an only child. The doctors, when they examined my mother, only counted one heartbeat.”

Jessi though has a twin, and two other sets of twins are born at the same time. The cuckoos feed off their twin. They can alter minds. They grow feathers.

They will consume their sisters one day, unless the sisters can act first. But how when they can dominate them effortlessly. If they want to. If they act like parasites rather than sisters.

Read This: For a spooky tale of danger from within the family
Don’t Read This: If your sister as your best friend and worst enemy seems too hard

2. This Is How You Make Selkie Skins by Priya Sridha in Mermaids Monthly

A practical guide to making Selkie skins. Including materials and designs and what questions to ask and what not to. Warnings not to repair damaged skins.

Warnings not to dance or swim. Warnings from hard won experience.

Read This: A story about danger and desire in the form of practical advice
Don’t Read This: You can’t make a Selkie skin of faux-leather

3. Ocean’s 6 by Else Sjunneson in Mermaid’s Monthly

Lyall Grey is a Selkie. Selkie’s are made by the love of others and love of the sea. But that’s not important. What is important is that she had a lover who is a curator at the British Museum and he stole her sealskin and put it on display.

And not just hers. There are artefacts from a witch, a vampire, a whole gang of mismatched women who he seduced to put on display.

A whole crew looking for their stuff back.

Read This: For a brief magic heist and a despicable villain
Don’t Read This: If a telegraphic heist that invites you to join the dots is not for you

4. Grandma’s Shrunken Head Decorates My Backyard Tiki Bar by Cheryl Merkosky in New Flash Fiction Review

Grandma had to hustle and sometimes even beg to keep her family together, and that didn’t work out sometimes. And with every new shame, or problem or just event, she took, or had imposed on her, one more step towards becoming a shrunken head decorating a backyard tiki bar.

Read This: To learn some family history and how to make a shrunken head
Don’t Read This: If the metaphor is too visceral

5. Tell Us Three Things About Yourself One Of Which Is A Lie by Sharon Telfer in New Flash Fiction Review

The three things are their grandmother used to be a Russian Countess, they once killed a soldier in the woods and they had to get some balance in their life so they bought a unicycle. All of these reflect Baba Yaga in one way or another.

One of them is a lie.

Read This: Because we know the woods are full of bad things
Don’t Read This: You prefer your Russian family history and folklore unmixed with lies

6. Bone Dolls by S E Hartz in Crow And Cross Keys

The narrator’s father sends Baba away after he remarries. Unlike her husband he does not hit his new wife or her daughters, or his daughter. He has other ways of influencing them.

These include locking them up, starving them, lies and favouritism. But Baba is still in the woods and she is cooking up a response.

Read This: To see how the women deal with their oppressor
Don’t Read This: If you’d prefer the monsters of the wood to be worse than those at home

7. Lace, Comb, Apple by Y M Pang in Dark

A magic mirror is asked who is the fairest of them all. Having never seen anyone else they answer that it is the questioner.

The magic mirror exists within the mirror. She has an apple and laces and a comb. She wishes to leave the mirror.

The owner of the mirror marries a king who has a daughter and she takes the mirror with her. The laces, the apple and the comb, they may just get the mirror out. But that will require betraying everyone with lies.

Read This: For Snow White from another angle
Don’t Read This: Snow White? From another angle? Again?

8. Lawn And Garden by Timothy Boudreau in Monkey Bicycle

The world may be ending. The people at the Lawn And Garden centre may slowly be falling apart. There may be insects everywhere, and head office wants to do a pesticide promotion, when pesticides may be amongst the things destroying everything.

What’s important though is the people who work at the Lawn And Garden and the people they love.

Read This: For a brief story of living through disaster
Don’t Read This: You’ve done too much living with disaster

9. Old Ghosts by Gregory D Mele in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly

Nopaltzin Seven-Reed is haunted by the ghost of his brother-in-law and comrade-in-arms. He goes to a witch and they journey to the underworld to find out what’s going on. It turns out to be a complicated murder mystery.

This is a Pre-Columbian Meso-American* noir ghost story in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, so there’s a lot of fairly effortless cluing in of the local customs, and a blood-thirstiness in some sections and a delicacy of etiquette and politeness in others.

Read This: For an Aztec occult detective story
Don’t Read This: Aztecs and ghosts and murder and confession all seems a bit much

* I think it's lightly flavoured with some ancient Greek ideas though my ignorance of ancient Mexico means I might be mis-attributing these

10. Spinning Sugar by Fija Callaghan in Crow And Cross Keys

Nadia has a little shop in a train station in Yorkshire, where she sells sweets and cakes. She was taught confectionary, and she was taught sleep and dreams and the sweets give people dreams.

Someone comes who knows what her sweets do, and how and why she arrived here is declared and maybe she can start to get over her grief.

Read This: Very lightly magical shop and Yorkshire
Don’t Read This: Nadia lost a child and she and her partner couldn’t cope and that may be too much