August 31, 2025

SHORT STORY REX Aug 2025

1 “The Things We Should Have Asked the Baby”, Kay Vaindal

I feel compelled to say something like "this story speaks to our current moment". To which some might reply, but Nicky what can a story about “the baby-in-the-cup-of-water-that-is-the-cactus-on-the-ground-in-the-cheatgrass-dimension” say about our current moment, and i would say "uh-uh-uh, not gonna tell you, that would be cheating". Part of it is probably to do with the rhizomaticity (is that a word? am i using it right?) by which the story seems to progress, as before your very eyes a possibility sprouts off the main trunk of the narration with each sentence, or sometimes multiple sprouts per sentence, or per clause, or per word, and at each branching-off the narration makes a choice, like the baby answering “yes” or “no”, and the story follows its choices to its ultimate, most pathetic consequence. Anyways, what would you ask the baby, dear reader? Think about it!

2 “möbius loop”, Samir Sirk Morató

For decades, various pop psychology and self-help texts have exhorted us to variously discover, recover, reclaim, or rescue our “inner child”. At the outset of this story, Fermin--or I should say, a Fermin--does not want to reclaim or rescue his younger self but rather beat the shit out of it. Travel back in time and punish the present for all the wrong which, wittingly or not, it has perpetrated against the future. Punish its lack of foresight, of gumption and wherewithal. But as the title suggests the cycle of blame and revenge twists over itself, successive Fermins avenging themselves on prior Fermins. All the while there's an increasingly grimy and dystopian present to live through, a possibility of healing and happiness still left to cling to

He stares at the childhood enemy growing in his reflection [...] and repeats what he’s always known:
• He plans on making this right.
• The worst is coming.
• The worst is already here.

3 “The Fix,” Percival Everett

at the time of writing, there is still some discoursing taking place on Bluesky about the death of science fiction, the proposed existence of something called “post-sci-fi”, etc. At the moment I do not have time to dust off a half-formed idea I have for an essay on a similar topic, with the working title “Whither ‘Slipstream’?” So I will instead talk a bit about a book I found at the library entitled The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story.

The inside front flap of the book jacket describes the book as “a selection of the best and most representative contemporary American short fiction from 1970 to 2020”, and the back cover gives us a list of names of authors whose work appears in the book. Mixed in with all the capital-L, capital-F Literary Fiction icons and New Yorker stalwarts (your Raymond Carvers, your Grace Paleys, your Karen Russells and Junot Diazes), I was pleased to see a healthy share of writers from unabashedly “genre” traditions included: Ursula K. LeGuin (OMG you guys you will NEVER guess which UKLG story they chose!), Ken Liu (you can also probably guess which story), and Ted Chiang (this one might surprise you)¹.

But ultimately I had already read all those stories. I was, however, intrigued by the presence of Percival Everett—not a name I associated a priori with the short story form² and which piqued my curiosity enough to check the book out.

“The Fix” is a parable which begins when a mysterious stranger is rescued from a gang of attackers by a New York sandwich shop owner, and in return the stranger fixes a mechanical problem with the shop owner’s refrigerator. The stranger goes on to demonstrate more talents as a fix-it man, the shop owner gives him a job, and pretty soon people are coming from miles around to get all kinds of fixes, from the merely mechanical to the outright miraculous. The story starts from a place of such groundedness and matter-of-factness, and the characters are so simply and cleanly defined, that when the literary realism shifts into the fantastical it all feels not only earned but inevitable. A story about what happens when a person—or people—give and give and don’t receive. Who will fix the fixer?

POETRY REC: “Some column poems”, Samuel M. Moss

I have recommended pieces from experimental horror litmag ergot. ad infinitum at this point (see above) so of course i was interested when ergot.’s editor Samuel M. Moss (whose novel The Veldt Institute is on the way this fall) and his “Some Column Poems” drifted across my feed via the Always Crashing newsletter. The newsletter describes the writing process thusly:

Moss has said that the “mode that produced these poems came on suddenly, lasted for a month or so, then left” and was “the closest I’ve ever felt to being ‘inhabited’”.

That feeling absolutely comes through in these poems—something about the text’s formal rigidity gives its succession of images the urgency of an external imposition, a dictate from on high, some shit you ignore at your own goddamn peril

NOT-SHORT STORY RECS: The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe / Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami

I had bought my second Kobo Abe book a while ago (after having read and been captivated by The Box Man last year) but was saving it for this summer. The Woman in the Dunes (1965) is a much more compact and straightforward affair than that later, much tricksier and more twisted novel, and probably would have been an easier in-road into Abe’s world but hey.

An amateur entomologist searching for a rare type of beetle becomes trapped in a village where the sand dunes are forever threatening to swallow the tiny settlement whole. Speaking of ‘hole’, nearly all of the book’s action takes place inside the titular woman’s home at the bottom of a deep hole that she and the entomologist, now the villagers’ captive and slave, must work constantly to dig out bucket by bucket. It’s an absurdist Sisyphean nightmare in which the entomologist grapples with both his desire for freedom and his ever shifting feelings of mistrust and desire for the woman he shares the hole with. It’s a story about life’s unending and ultimately doomed battle against the forces of entropy and unstructured time, and Abe is not at all kind to any of his characters here (or his readers, either), with some passages being particularly grueling, but there’s something about Abe’s blend of verbosity and disjointedness that I vibe with immensely³

In related summer-reading-of-decades-old-novels-by-legendary-Japanese-authors, I also nabbed a secondhand copy of Haruki Murakami’s second novel. Having only ever read one collection of his (Men without Women) and a few loose stories here and there—all very deadpan and about 'relationships' in a very non-fantastical way—I was surprised by how frankly “speculative” the book was, and not in the bad way (the surprise or the speculativeness)

The story switches chapter by chapter between a jaunty science fiction caper (the “Hard-Boiled Wonderland”) and a sort of slow meditative dream narrative (“The End of the World”), and reading it was not unlike playing ping pong against yourself but instead of a paddle and a ball and a net you're playing with a golf club and golf ball and a ten foot high stone wall so you're not sure where the balls gonna land every time it changes side but it always lands in the right place, and Murakami does an amazing job officiating the game to a satisfying close imo. Seriously, this guy’s pretty good, they should give him a Nobel Prize or something

Also, there's almost certainly an essay to be written about this book’s relation to its cyberpunk contemporaries (it was first published the same year Neuromancer won the ‘Triple Crown’ of Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K Dick Award, for example)—some argument that juxtaposes Murakami’s obsession with Western pop-culture commodities and the cyberpunks’ fetishized techno-orientalism, but someone else is gonna have to write it lol