June Story Update
Ten short stories and poems from earlier this year
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The Queen Of The Underworld is alone this evening. The girl with the portal to the underworld is going out on a date. The Queen’s Apple Watch shows her updates and selfies. The Queen throws them away, considers her evening alone.
The girl on the date tells her date about herself. Where she came from. What she does. Who she used to love.
Read This: Tiny brief story of impossibly large feelings
Don’t Read This: Just two people missing each other
Bernard is a student in Paris, and making his confession. His cousin Louis takes him to a secret dissection of a body, which is puzzling as he has no intention of studying medicine, concentrating on theology and canon law. It is performed by Gerhert van Brugge, and it is revealed the body is of another student, who attempted alchemy.
Bernard is suspicious of this, worried that it might be heretical, and making his confession. He prefers the sermons of Achille La Rocelle, a Dominican, who has his own circle of students. When Louis invites Bernard to another late night meeting, to view an astronomical conjunction, Bernard refuses. Instead he joins La Rocelle’s group.
But not all is as it seems and Bernard is making his confession. Who can be trusted, who is a heretic, who has secret knowledge, all that will be revealed in a bloody ending as Bernard makes his confession.
Read This: Occult mystery within the medieval university of
Paris
Don’t Read This: Lies, magic, desecration of bodies
“Getting Ready for Hibernation” is the caption on the post and it goes viral, becomes a trend. Everyone eating big meals, fatty food, piling on the weight for the winter. And then they realise, what if they mean it. They’ve done the eating and the preparation.
A brief absurd look at what is important in life. And food, rich, fatty, nourishing food.
Read This: To nourish yourself for the coming winter
Don’t Read This: Humans remain active all year round,
unfortunately
Jack gets a shift out on the fishing boat Dagny, and to his surprise brings out a merrow. Jack learned three things from his father, how to gut a fish, how to hate himself, and how not to lose his soul to a merrow. But his father is gone, and after he lets the merrow free he loses the catch. He needs another job, especially if his brother is going to university.
He talks to his friends Trishna and Dex. The merrow talked about cages he had to tend under the sea. Jack’s got nothing else, he has to see them. To learn about the merrow. And maybe figure out what’s happening.
Read This: The depression of dying fishing ports meets the
perils of folklore
Don’t Read This: Drowning in depression
A wrench comes in the post, then parts of a bike. Bundles of newspaper. Our narrator takes to delivering them. Not everywhere has good news. But maybe he can do something about that.
Gooseberry Pie publishes stories of exactly six sentences and this, on the of the best, uses that constraint to sketch in the oddness and the mundanity.
Read This: Brief ray of sunshine
Don’t Read This: Too short to give anything
They dig the sand to make the glass for a celebration. No, they make the workers dig the sand, not knowing or caring where the sand comes from. Not worrying about the deaths when the furnace explodes, or when the they flog them, or the plague comes.
A brief poem about disaster that comes from lack of care, or maybe just horrid things happening to horrid people; the title of course tells you what is going on.
Read This: Cursed glass for cursed people
Don’t Read This: A list of bad things
Nikanor is a member of the Theban Sacred Band; he and his older lover Orios travel to Samos to visit a guest-friend Conon. There, Conon is commissioned to put together an escort of hoplites, to take a Colchian Princess to the Great King in Susa. On the way they are attacked by bandits; Nikanor sees that they are accompanied by ghosts, who incapacitate him. Orios believes his tale; Conon does not know him, seeks omens, reasons, decides to continue.
Yet there are more attacks. Nikanor and the princess are the only ones that can see the ghosts, and things get stranger. Conon attempts to see this in terms of the favour of the gods and other divine beings. That doesn’t quite fit yet when the Princess is taken from them, they might understand enough to find a solution to the curse that has overwhelmed them.
To suggest that this heroic fantasy of ancient Greeks in the Persian Empire is realistic is a stretch too far. Yet to my admittedly amateur eye, this feels something like what we might expect from real people encountering the supernatural. And on top of that, a stirring adventure.
Read This: Excellent historical action fantasy
Don’t Read This: Hoplites lose a princess, try to get her
back
Death, the lord of justice, keeps returning one particular soul to the wheel of resurrection. They were offered a boon by The Innocent One, to be given the easy life they were destined but failed to have. They return too early, climbing the wheel, seizing a life that was not the one intended. No matter what happens they rage against the constraints set against them, turning the life they are supposed to have aside, seeking justice. Selflessly saving those about them.
Death does their best, trying to save them, to give them a short life when it will be a hard one. Yet that never works, no matter what they try, they will try and save people, even the unworthy. But perhaps Death can ask for a boon of their own.
Episodic, periodic, summing up lives, ordinary, extraordinary, and legendary in a paragraph or two, a clever story that treats it’s deep knowledge and compassion lightly.
Read This: Life, death, resurrection and even love
Don’t Read This: Some people doing variations on the same
thing a lot
In the afterlife you’re allowed just one phone call. There are rules, rules you have to follow. Rules that make no sense.
A deliriously strange piece that flirts with making sense, always just out of reach.
Read This: Startling unpredictable riff off arbitrary limits
Don’t Read This: Makes no sense from any direction
Alice Li saved the world when she was sixteen and has never reached that high again. She knows what her Celestial Guardian would tell her – but it would be NETHERWORLD OPEN. KILL DEMONS. OTHERWISE HUMANITY DIES. And they killed the demons and closed the netherworlds.
Now she can’t make her train on time, can’t use the right font at work, can’t get her life together. Misses Vera who could heal her. There’s no healing this.
Does she have to be such a bitch about it all? Yes, maybe she does.
Read This: Bad tempered mundanity meets fallout of
fantastical heroism
Don’t Read This: You don’t care about magical girls OR
corporate women
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