December Stories Update 3

8 Stories and poems I read earlier this year.

**** 

1. Opus Hades by Kimberley White in Crow And Cross Keys

Do you think the infinity of death
is limited to the imagination
of one underworld god?

Hades maintains the underworld. Persephone made a choice. Here in seven parts they explore the nature of their love, their existence in the dark.

Read This: Word-shatteringly beautiful meditations on gods of death and rebirth
Don’t Read This: You’ve had enough Hades/Persephone reinterpretations

2. Unfinished Architectures Of The Human-Fae War by Caroline M Yoachim in Uncanny

The humans open a rift into the world of the fae. One of the first humans to see it designs a house based on the strange city she sees through it. the design is confiscated and never built.

Vyvv, the hivequeen, builds her hive beneath the first rift. This stunts it so it can never achieve it’s full growth. Vyvv seeks to use her hive in the war, but this is deemed unlikely to succeed so she flees to the timeseer queens.

Other buildings associated with the war are unfinished, marking the progress or obliquely not doing so, sitting outside the war itself. Showing how the course of the war – foreseen by the timeseer queens and so planning for the aftermath – is as much about what isn’t done, what isn’t fought. How events may play out in the fullness of time.

Read This: Story about time, conflict, aftermath, curses and buildings
Don’t Read This: Refuses to finish anything

3. Five Different Realities To Explore And One To Avoid by Bree Wernicke in Orion’s Belt

There were five times the first person narrator might have made a different choice. Five times when their friend could have been turned from their path. Kept to their research, their publication of demon summoning rituals.

Five times they could have admitted they loved them, to their friend, or to themselves at least. And one time it was too late.

Read This: A story told in counterfactuals, each stranger and more heartbreaking than the next.
Don’t Read This: Demons and words not spoken

4. Resurrections by Emet North in Strange Horizons

You go to the underworld and she brings you back from the dead. She’s the queen of the underworld, the goddess of spring. You want to help her and sometimes you die and she brings you back.

She gives you the garden to look after, and the dog. You care for them while she’s away. But her garden is deadly, and even after you learn to care for it there are problems. Problems that require Him to assist.

She brings you back each time but you cannot say what you want.

Read This: Obsession death and strangeness, again and again
Don’t Read This: Persephone and Hades again?

5. Baby Phones by Elena Zhang in X-R-A-Y

Babies are born with phones in their hands. This is not the allegory you think it is.

A tiny exquisitely devastating micro story.

Read This: Very short story about failing to be safe
Don’t Read This: Absurd and oblique

6. The Skill Of The Sculptor by Joyce Bingham in Crow And Cross Keys

A rich man comes to the sculptor in her studio by the sea. Despite his cane and difficulty walking he insists on climbing the stairs to her studio. He wants her to sculpt a mermaid, like the one in the old photos, like she was before she changed.

She hears the story, sees the photo. Doesn’t believe but it’s a commission and a lucrative one. She makes the mermaid out of clay, in preparation for casting in bronze.

At night she wakes, goes to the studio. Something has happened and she ahs to change the clay. Change the sculpture. Make it like the mermaid, but after she changed. Make her like a sea hag. And let the client see what she’s made.

Read This: Deeply imagined sculptor is possessed by mermaid spirit
Don’t Read This: Being obsessed with fish-people is weird

7. Postman, Soldier, Traitor by Vijayalaxmi Samal in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Akshar is a bad soldier, assigned the job of killing the enemy wounded. While making a mess of that, a dying young enemy soldier passes an envelope onto him. Akshar is the son of a postman, who honestly delivered messages – sometimes having to read them to those who could not. So when the envelope pulls on him Akshar deserts.

He crosses the border, the succession wars having emptied out the lands between, and joins a caravan of the displaced on the other side. They are heading in the direction the envelope wants to go, and he finds some peace with them. One of them sees his sword that he keeps hidden, and asks to learn how to use it. He teaches her, but is ambivalent about this.

He can’t undo what he’s done in the war, a war he was ill-suited for. But perhaps he can deliver a letter.

Read This: Story of coming to terms with horror and making amends
Don’t Read This: Gruesome start, no real answers

8. Incompleteness by Amy DeBellis in Hex Literary

She sees shoes hanging from the tree, shoes like her husbands. As though he’s died and they’ve been hung. Her husband is there when she gets home. But she’s haunted by the idea he might be dead. And after a party they take their masks off and she has to see what is underneath.

Read This: Dream-like fragment of how precarious life seems
Don’t Read This: Something has to be under a mask, even if it’s nothing