June Short Story Update 1

10 stories I read

1. We Never Went Away, We Just Got Better At Hiding by Sam Rebelein in House Of Gamut

There’s a guy on a date, and he loves to explain things, it’s a bit of a cliché. Now he’s talking about the uncanny valley. That’s where you see something that looks like a human, but a bit off, and it’s horrifying. Or terrifying. Maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe humans ought to be scared of things that are almost – but not quite – right.

There’s something just a little off about his apartment.

Read This: As things get stranger and creepier
Don’t Read This: A plausible reason for fear of “looks like people but a bit off” is dead bodies, and avoiding hanging around them and catching rot and disease that likes humans

2. Date Night by Jan Stinchcomb in House Of Gamut

The husband and wife go out on a date night. They take their time. They go to a restaurant, they go to a movie. In the movie there is a man with a knife and a girl alone in the house. They’ve left their two daughters with the babysitter. She’s very good with them.

The mother has left the babysitter a knife. She remembers when she was a babysitter.

Read This: Making and breaking the cycles of victim and attacker
Don’t Read This: It makes all this assault of children into a stylised game

3. Diamond Jack by Abby Hubbard in Crow And Cross Keys

Jack dresses up smart and goes to the carnival. He starts small, changing signs so they point the wrong way, adding signs that lead to attractions that don’t exist. Pushing in line to take some spun sugar, the server too incautious to know the rule; never take money from a Jack.

Everywhere they go there’s chaos. Everywhere they go it gets worse. Jack is looking for something, someone. Needs someone. Everyone has their part to play.

Read This: All the fun of the Carnival and all the menace and malice of it too
Don’t Read This: Jack’s chaos costs lives, teaches nothing

4. Kill Rudy Johnson by Rudy Johnson in Vanity

Rudy Johnson is in a video game, a bunch of video games. You have to kill Rudy Johnson. You have to save Rudy Johnson. You have to manipulate the onscreen elements to win the game with Rudy Johnson.

Rudy Johnson is making progress with this poem, because he’s not using the word, and when he might use the word, he writes Rudy Johnson instead. Rudy Johnson cannot be killed because this is a video game. Kill Rudy Johnson.

Read This: Rudy Johnson finds his way through video games and life and back again
Don’t Read This: It revels in being offensively ambiguous, or ambiguously offensive

5. Time Between Her Teeth by Erin Keating in Kaleidotrope

Colleen has lost her grandmother, lost her mother to death. And one night out on the ice her sister Gloriana was taken by death as well.

Colleen knows all the stories, was told them, all the stories about death. In life Gloriana spoke for the sisters, but now Colleen enters the Otherworld. She has stories to tell, and finds her own voice. She will make a bargain with death. Because to live without her sister is unbearable.

And she knows all about death.

A twist on the folk tales about rescuing the lost loved one. The usual elements gorgeously described, as Colleen finds her voice and uses her stories.

Read This: A story of death, and love
Don’t Read This: You should leave the dead in peace

6. Electric Chair Suplex by J B Kalf in Roi Fainéant

Greg is a weather man, but he’s also The Weather Man, a wrestler. His friend Kent has a kid, Victor, who’s ill. With cancer. He’s asked to visit so he does, in full outfit, in full character.

He’s going to make it rain the pain. He’s going to put on a show. He’s going to arm wrestle Victor.

Read This: Man who is wrestler to break out of the monotony ham-handedly tries to do good
Don’t Read This: He THROWS THE FIGHT. It’s all A FIX.

7. Bluebeard’s Widow by Iain Rowan in Corvid Queen

Bluebeard’s widow is at her second wedding, at the feast. She has some questions. Questions for her brothers, and what they knew about her first marriage. Questions for her new husband, and what he knew about the first.

They might be drunk enough to tell the truth.

Read This: A brief grim coda to the classic tale
Don’t Read This: Such joy in dark things does not amuse

8. The Spider by Lisa France in Hearth And Coffin

Our narrator receives a letter from Penelope. It seems that Charles, a friend from medical school, has died. He remembers.

One summer, at a loose end and disappointed in love he went to stay with Charles. Everyone was very proud of him. As well as his parents there is his cousin, Penelope, and her younger sister Polly. He had saved Polly’s life when she lost a leg. He encourages her to exercise, to walk on her stumps. Our narrator finds this odd, cruel even. Penelope and Polly are orphans, brought up by Charles’s parents. Penelope is going to marry Charles, though she does not love him.

She’s going to marry him though she knows what he’s done to Polly and what he’s doing to Polly. Though she might take some other important steps first.

Read This: Dark story of ruthless medicine
Don’t Read This: Lies, people being crippled, lives ruined

9. Marginalia by Mary Robinette Kowal in Uncanny

Margery’s mother’s ill. She had to retire to a farm Lord Strange offered her, and Margery had to leave service at the manor house, but they get along, her and mother and her brother Hugh. And the cat Sir Humphrey. Hugh wants to be a squire but there would have been faint chance even if they were still at the manor.

And now a snail is coming, one bigger than a prize bull, maybe as big as a cottage. A monster that leaves acid in its trail. Hugh went to watch Lord Strange ride out against it. But now his horse has returned riderless, and no Hugh either. Margery must try and save them all.

Read This: A story that takes the great snails from illuminated texts and makes them truly monstrous, while revealing the great capability of those the nobility think beneath them, and of even the old and disabled, as well as Margery’s experience in lifting a disabled person converting to rescuing an injured man in armour
Don’t Read This: Snails are our friends

10. Corn Tricks by Abby Feden in Wigleaf 

Our narrator used to hang with the boys, impressing them by eating dead corn husks. So she was allowed to spit dip with them, to hear them talk about the girls, rate their tits and asses.

It left her with a bloody mouth. It let her think about girls. She wasn’t like the other girls. She was like the other girls. For those nights, on the mostly cleared field, where the trucks lit up the girls and the boys watched them.

Read This: A summer of belonging and rejection
Don’t Read This: Don’t eat dead corn husks, that’s bad