Short Fiction Fridays #13: 2022 Favorites
Pomegranates, ink, lighthouses, and more...
Welcome back to Short Fiction Friday! Okay, I know it’s not Friday, but to be fair this issue isn’t all short fiction either. The theme is 2022 Favorites. I wanted to highlight some of my favorite works from the past year before the close of award nominations, but even if you’ve opened this in the future, I hope you’ll find something you enjoy reading.
For your consideration: seven short stories, three novelettes, and a handful of other fictional delights, including pomegranates with teeth, living ink, CRISPR/synCas-X, lighthouses, and more…
SHORT STORY: “Coming Through in Waves” by Samantha Murray
Lia’s mother has dementia, and doesn’t know it’s not Christmas. Lia’s partner doesn’t have security clearance, and doesn’t know there are aliens on the space station. The aliens can’t remember how to help. Sweet, sensitive, and poignant.
CW: Cancer (mentioned), dementia
I am surrounded by experts and ferociously clever people, and I am sticking words together and hoping I sound like I know what I’m talking about, nodding and smiling, just wanting to please. Like my mother.
Read “Coming Through in Waves” in Strange Horizons
SHORT STORY: “Girl Eats Girl” by Gnesis Villar
The narrator and her classmate, Soledad, aren’t exactly friends. They know of each other’s existence—it’s a small town, and they’re the only girls in their class who aren’t white—but that’s it, until Soledad shows up in the icy night with a severe bite wound and nowhere else to go. Snow falls on the monster in the woods. Full of rage, tenderness, and the kind of cold that burns.
CW: Racism, gore, physical abuse
“Your heart rate is speeding up again.” Her eyes, which she’d closed to better focus, slitted open, a thin sliver of black. I stood frozen in that look’s clutch. “You’re not sure if you should believe me. You’re not sure if you should be scared. You want to know what’s happening to me. You want to know if you can help. You can’t.”
Read “Girl Eats Girl” in FIYAH
SHORT STORY: “Slow Communication” by Dominique Dickey
The women in Darla’s family are part of an unbroken conversation with an alien being, a leviathan who moves slowly through time. Each woman receives the answer to her mother’s question before asking a question of her own. That would be a lot of pressure for any teenage girl, and Darla isn’t even sure if she’s a girl. Painful, joyful, and buoyant.
CW: Death of a grandparent
1. The leviathan will come for you. She will come suddenly and without warning.
2. You will feel great joy and pain at the moment she contacts you. Be prepared. You may only ask her one question.
3. If you change yourself too much—if you do not bear resemblance to your mother, your grandmother, the long line of women the leviathan has touched—she may not be able to find you when it is your time.
Read “Slow Communication” in Fantasy Magazine
SHORT STORY: “The CRISPR Cookbook: A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Abortion in a Post-Roe World” by MKRNYILGLD
This story is exactly what the title promises. The steps of the gene-modding process also reveal the rebellion brewing in the heart of one scientist, a talented researcher forced out of the lab and into pregnancy. There’s a reason the Department of Homeland Biosecurity is getting desperate. Bitter, sharp, and seething, like a pot about to boil over.
CW: Sexual assault by a partner, abortion, cancer
If you’re reading this—on some godforsaken imageboard, or dog-eared book page, or in encrypted base pairs sequenced off 3D-printed oligos—you’re probably grappling with a pretty tough decision right now.
Breathe.
NOVELETTE: “Shadows of the Hungry, the Broken, the Transformed” by Izzy Wasserstein
Justine is a doctoral candidate in heartweaving, the sacred craft of pulling thread from her own soul to weave into tapestries. She walks home after curfew so that the night can hide her lack of a shadow. When an undergraduate invites her to a support group for the shadowless, Justine finds herself involved with the very same protests that lead to the death of her partner. Weary, gentle, and persistent.
CW: Police brutality, death of a partner, death of a sibling
And then a terrible thought: is it even possible to heartweave without one’s shadow? No one has told her otherwise, but then, who would?
In her grief after Zara’s death, she lost her shadow. If she has lost her craft, too, there is nothing left.
Read “Shadows of the Hungry, the Broken, the Transformed” in Cossmass Infinities
NOVELETTE: “Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home” by C.L. Clark
When the lighthouse for the Strait of Splintered Masts unexpectedly goes dark, Sigo falls from her tilting ship. Audei, the mysterious lighthouse keeper, rescues her and helps her recover from her injuries. Every night, Audei burns alone. Steady, heartwrenching, and incandescent.
CW: Sexual content
She is light, she is light, she is light, she is light.
NOVELETTE: “We Built This City” by Marie Vibbert
Everyone living on New Tenochtitlan, a city floating in the atmosphere of Venus, must have a job. Julia works as a washer for the protective dome that keeps everything afloat. When layoffs cut her already-understaffed team down to just four people, Julia struggles to maintain both worker solidarity and the city’s dome. Strong, principled, and dutiful.
CW: Deportation
He thinks they’ll be laid off? The city needs them. They never got a robot washer to work. Even if they did, there’s no room in the city to store a washing robot, and to leave it out in the atmosphere is to ask for it to be slowly destroyed.
Read “We Built This City” in Clarkesworld
PREVIOUSLY RECOMMENDED FAVORITES
“Girl Oil” by Grace P. Fong in Issue #4: Modern Problems
- Aspiring actress Chelle grows jealous of her friend Wenqian and her seemingly effortless beauty, but Chelle’s perspective changes as her new skincare oil melts her away…
“Lily, the Immortal” by Kylie Lee Baker in Issue #4: Modern Problems
- When a famous vlogger dies without leaving a will, her video editor girlfriend discovers just how little the world cares about reality…
“The Weight of it All” by Jennifer Hudak in Issue #8: Ghosts
- An anorexic girl who longs to become insubstantial is possessed by a ghost who wants nothing more than to feel weighty and alive…
LONG FICTION FAVORITES
NOVEL: “The Dawnhounds” by Sascha Stronach
- Like if eXistenZ was about sapphic pirates and deconstructions of copaganda. Full of dry humor, mistakes that hurt, and cool biological tech like a jellyfish taser.
YA NOVEL: “The Scratch Daughters” by H.A. Clarke
- Witches, friends, feral lesbians, gender(?), solidarity, impulsive hair dye & punk rock. A nuanced and caring portrayal of being a butch teenager, in the way that getting up to fight again after being punched in the gut is a type of caring.
GRAPHIC NOVEL: “Where Black Stars Rise” by Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger
- A sharp-edged story about the King In Yellow mythos, talk therapy, schizophrenia, diaspora, and pomegranates full of teeth.
NOVELLA: “Even Though I Knew The End” by C.L. Polk
- Sapphic noir on a deadline, with angels, demons, and the bone-deep knowledge that contentment cannot last.
NOVELLA: “I Never Liked You Anyway” by Jordan Kurella
- Orpheus and Eurydice, retold as college musicians in a lively life-after-death journey that will resonate with anyone whose voice is unheard.
UP NEXT
The next issue’s theme will be Music, and it will be about short fiction, and it will be on a Friday! I promise!
THANK YOU FOR READING
If you enjoyed any of these stories, please support their authors and the magazines that published them. I’d also love to hear any suggestions for future list themes! Just reply to this email or contact me elsewhere and I’ll use your theme (within reason) for a future newsletter.