SHORT STORY REX APRIL 2026

1. “Not a Shard of Bone” and “Baywater”, Crystal Koo

I have a confession to make: I made a pretty big whoopsie in a newsletter that went out a couple months ago and mistakenly listed the writer Crystal Koo’s first name as ‘Carolyn’. Rurns out one of the risks of typing these things up at like, midnight on a Monday is that my brain is liable to see a group of letters that contains ‘c’,’r’,’y’,’l’ and leap to a very erroneous conclusion as to how those letters are arranged and what they spell!

Luckily, Gareth Jelley (editor of Interzone) got in touch to point out my error, which I quickly corrected in the SSR archive of the post. He also pointed me in the direction of Koo’s isfdb page, specifically to the two most recent stories on there, and I am grateful he did so, because that means I can make amends for my February brainfart by talking first about “Not a Shard of Bone” in longlived Australian zine Antipodean SF, a flash piece which wallows in the tragic junkshop mystique of the post-apocalypse: “We lashed together everything we could find,” the narrator says, “A taxidermied fox, a beheaded chess piece, a gas mask […] the green lens of a traffic light, a rusted door handle”, all of which coalesces in the form of two giant praying hands. This prayer of sorts does not, however, receive the answer they might have hoped for, if indeed they had any hope at all.

Meanwhile, in “Baywater” (from issue #303 of Interzone), the nameless protagonist has been

cleft in two, like a lobster split from head to tail in mirror halves, with a cut so precise she does not bleed. One lung inflates, enclosed in the half-glove of her ribcage; an eye blinks.

Each half leaves the train station and goes their separate ways. One half wanders towards what it still thinks of as home, the other searches for somewhere else to belong to. I was pleased to discover these stories were just as vivid and artful and original as her “Ghost Leopard”, and am equally pleased there’s quite a bit more Crystal Koo out there to read. A name I promise not to forget again!

2. “La ola”, “Meteorito”, and “Cuento con pájaro”, Liliana Colanzi

If my mind was of a more practical bent, I would have by now learned to take advantage of the hold system of my local library. As it stands, I'm not sure why i tend to shirk agency in finding new reading material, but i do. Im a slave to the happy accidents of fate, poking my head here and there in hopes that some volume by some author I wished to read has materialized on the shelf since my last visit.¹
I had been monitoring the 'C's' for some time and finally a collection by Liliana Colanzi appeared, her excellent Nuestro mundo muerto.
Id read her in translation, a couple of stories from her more recent book You Glow in the Dark, both of which I loved, and this was my first time reading her in the original Spanish. A formidable collection all the way through, but a few stories stand out for me.
“La ola” begins with a young Bolivian woman in the throes of depression during a blizzard in Ithaca NY, where she is studying literature. It feels obvious to point out that Colanzi herself is a Bolivian woman who studied (and subsequently became an instructor) at Cornell (in Ithaca), and it’s even more obvious to caution oneself against conflating the first-person narrator with the author no matter how much the autobiographical details appear to overlap. In any case, this perspective provides a kind of rhetorical ethos which grounds the rest of the story in important ways. Our narrator is a writer, you see, a somewhat frustrated one, trying her best to keep her "antenna" up to catch the stories of her characters, whom she sometimes imagines as little figures she can see amid the snow outside her window, but the signals are carried away by the overpowering effects of depression, the titular "Ola", or Wave.
A phone call with news about her father's failing health prompts unhappy reminiscences about life back home, and the Wave carries her physically all the way to Bolivia. Once there she hires a taxi driver and what follows is a trip within a trip, as the taxi driver tells her a story that a mysterious young woman told him, a story that mirrors and parallels the narrators own, both in the motives of the two women's journeys and between the imaginations of one and the hallucinations of the other.
Then there's "Meteorito" the story of Ruddy, an overweight rancher whom his wife Dayana has jokingly nicknamed ‘Captain America’ and who is plagued with regret over an accident involving a cow and a local native boy who claims he can commune with aliens. (An English translation is free to read online from The White Review.) Without wanting to give too much away this one reminds me of (and if you know me at all, you know this is high praise coming from me) something out of Nathan Ballingrud's North American Lake Monsters in how richly it depicts the nitty-grit of its character's lives and how thoroughly they are devastated by the encounter with the unknown. The book's final story, “Cuento con pájaro" (“Story with Bird”) is a sort of non-linear oral-history eco-horror which incorporates actual testimonies from the indigenous Ayoreo people (quoted from the writings of anthropologist Lucase Bessire) to brutally heart-wrenching effect.

I don’t know what to say. We ate honey. We killed fish. We were dirty. I don’t know my story. I don’t know what to say. My thoughts and my memories are gone. They won’t come to me anymore. I don’t know my own story. It is done.

NOT-A-STORY REC: Boredoms, Soul Discharge

I was moved to a new workspace recently at the dayjob and as a result have been exposed to my boss's musical tastes to an unprecedented degree, as his Alexa spits out a very limited Spotify repertoire of what I guess you’d call Spanish-language "mainstream indie". A lot of it (if I may indulge in some lazy rock-critic “this-meets-this” business) sounds like if you mixed Heroes del Silencio with, like, Hootie & the Blowfish (if you saw that video about 'mohaim' and wondered where that style of singing went...well, I know where). Not my bag, really.² Call it dentist's-office-waiting-room rock. Unfortunately, some of it is pretty catchy. Too catchy, in fact. (Although I guess anything can get stuck in your head if you hear it multiple times a day Monday through Friday for a couple of months.) Sometimes I need something to just bleach that crud right out of my brain. I've discovered this old Bordeoms record does the trick nicely. (To indulge again:) imagine early Buttholes Surfers fronted by an ever-expanding choir of Muppets, oh and also Daffy Duck is there and he’s getting his balls chopped off and he is Loving It. Maybe you will find it appropriate for all your earworm-extermination needs