Welcome once more to a Short Fiction Roundup of some stories I’ve enjoyed reading in the last week or so and hope you might too. As always if you do enjoy any of these stories yourself I hope you’ll consider giving them and the places that publish them a shout out. It’s a great way to support short fiction. These roundups are pretty simple. I cast about for stories to read and when I find one I like I put it in the roundup. Often though, I look over them when I’m done and realize an inadvertent theme has emerged. This week I’d say if there is such a theme I didn’t plan for but see now I’d say it was endings. I can’t promise every story fits under that broad umbrella, but it does seem like many of these tales talk of coming to the end of a story.

“Little Free Library” by Naomi Kritzer from Tor.com

After a couple Roundups filled with generally dark or sad feeling stories it was delightful to come across this fun little tale.¹Though it should be said that dark and sad feel appropriate to the times and this does hint at something very tragic indeed taking place. The set up is fairly straightforward: Meigan, having recently moved to St. Paul, decides to set up a Little Free Library to try and connect with her new neighbourhood. What follows is not quite so straightforward as a surprising friendship develops with a mysterious fan of her little free library. I should note that I am always going to be a fan of anything that reminds me of the story “Pockets” by Amal Al-Mohtar, even if only slightly,²Is ‘a series mysterious trinkets appear mysteriously’ a genre? If so, call me a fan! or one that references the books of The Belgariad, a childhood favourite. That said, despite my bias, I do think this is an appealing tale for anyone to enjoy. I only wish that in the many, many times I’ve move in my life that I had been able to stumble across a little of the magic Meigan does with her little free library. Of course, in it’s own way exploring and discovering a new home always has a bit of that, come to think of it.

“Sunset Coda” by Patrick Hurley from Abyss & Apex #74

I am a big fan of flash fiction³Possibly because I’ve written more of it than anything else. and one of the things I most like seeing in a flash fiction story are reminders that even in a form with such limited word count there is always room for different approaches. A lot of people will tell you that flash fiction relies on having a twist at the end. A surprise to add impact so the story can punch above its weight. This is supposedly because you just don’t have the space to develop a fully fleshed out story without a twist to carry the load. I don’t happen to believe that’s true and I always enjoy finding a story that appears to agree with me. “Sunset Coda” does not rush and it does not have what I would call a twist at the end. It gives us what it says in the title, a coda to our protagonist’s story as an older man meets the sea witch he shared an adventure with many years before. Its a quiet and nostalgic tale of looking back, on both that moment they shared and lives lived afterward. There is a peacefulness to it I quite enjoy. Amidst the chaos of the day a short tale of of a life well lived and taking things quietly on one’s own terms is a nice change of pace.

“Her Cage of Root and Bone” by Kali Wallace from Beneath Ceaseless Skies #309

With this story we turn back to something dark, but also lush and spellbinding.⁴When you read it, you’ll see what I did there, and I don’t apologize. I regret nothing. This is a fantastic tale of an epic, hate-filled rivalry between two powerful magical sisters all told through a relatively quiet conversation over tea. Well, there are also flashbacks. But much of those are to more conversations over tea. I quite like that Wallace weaves a story that is both a fantastic tapestry of a grand struggle between the sisters, Lottie and Nell, and a moment that is very personal and contained. I also enjoy the shifting sand the reader finds themselves on, as natural assumptions about which is “good” sister or the “evil” are forced to contend with something that may not be so simple.

“The Breaking” by Vanessa Fogg from Mithila Review 13

I touched on this in the first Roundup of 2020 a few weeks back, but some stories we read now, as in now while we all live with the first worldwide, universal and modern pandemic, take on dimensions that they probably weren’t intended to have when first written. This is likely especially going to be the case for anything that feels as if it were written with climate change in mind.⁵Whether explicitly, or more indirectly. “The Breaking” invokes feelings about climate change, and indeed in the story the world and it’s climate are changed and it is also, most often, the young and children who see this change coming first and the older who are most likely to deny it. But when I read “In a distant country there are relatives I barely know, but they never came for Jamie and me. There are too many restrictions on the world now” it’s hard not to see things in the story that I wouldn’t have a few months ago.

In addition to feeling like a story evoking a climate-change-devastated future seen through a fantastical/horror lens filter it now can sometimes feel like our world right now, seen through a fantastical/horror lens filter. The fit is not perfect of course, but the notes of resonance add a slightly eerie element to the experience and the feelings of the characters, lost and slightly dazed in the face of sudden momentous change but needing to still figure out how to carry on with life, feel especially poignant and easy to sympathize with. I’m sure I would have liked this story if had read it months ago, but I might like it even more reading it now. Not only because of that added new resonance but because I always appreciate reminders that reading a story is not a static experience. Different readers will see and feel different things and we ourselves can not even be relied upon to always experience a story the same way each time we read it: we are rarely the exact same person from one reading to the next and that only becomes more true in the face of momentous life moments.

“Glass Bottle Dancer” by Celeste Rita Baker from Lightspeed #119

So this was certainly something unexpected. A bit weird. Definitely fun. And very full of humanity in the best of ways. In other words, an excellent story to end the Roundup with. There is a trap I sometimes fall into when I read a short story in a spec fic magazine and it starts off quite ‘normal’ (for lack of a better word): I find myself looking for the trick. Or perhaps the trope would be a better way to put it. Where, I wonder, is the thing that makes this sci fi, or epic fantasy, or urban fantasy, or horror, or a fairy tale? It’s a bad habit. Let me help you avoid that so you can more easily take “Glass Bottle Dancer” at face value: despite being in a magazine called Lightspeed this is not a sci fi story. Lightspeed also deals in fantasy and that is where this would more broadly fit, but probably not in any typical fantasy genre you are likely to first think of when I say that. Don’t worry about it. Just enjoy the story, of a middle aged woman who decides to do something for herself, because it’s fun, and because it makes her happy to try. Enjoy the wonderfully real family who surround her and their relationships to one another. And enjoy their unexpected allies who mirror them. Let it suck you in from the beginning and you’ll find yourself cheering for Mable DelaCourt at the end.

And that is all for the third short fiction rec roundup of 2020. If you’d like to see the full list of previous Roundups and the authors included in each you can find that here. I always hope to be back in a week with another roundup, right now the time seems to be a bit longer than that. But you can expect some more story recs to be coming soon!