SHORT STORY REX Aug/Sep 2024
1. “Letter from Mt. Monroe Elementary 3rd Grade”, Sarah Pauling
I’ll admit things trend toward “bleak” or at the least “darkly, darkly obtuse” here at Short Story Rex but this one is actually kind of…nice?? I actually…liked it???
Which is weird, as this ostensibly “voicey” type of epistolary short SFF usually loses me. Why? Well, because it usually fails to pick up on the cadence of its “target language” in a convincing way. Most often the problem comes when a writer’s clearly trying to shoehorn in story details (characterization, plot, world-buildling) in a way the format is ill-suited for and that strains the reader’s goodwill.
Happily, that’s not the case here, the ‘kids-writing-a-letter-for-a-school-assignment’ voice feels genuine and believable, the science-fiction plot information is woven in such that it never stretches credulity, and the ending is open-ended enough that it feels neither forced nor saccharine, but instead gives a clear-eyed sense of the possibilities good and bad of its imagined future
2. “The King of No”, J Billings
Loved this story in the Summer 2024 issue of Propagule. J Billings (whose “Someone Coughs in the Darkness” I recommended back in March 2023) brings us a story which, much like Walter Becker and Donald Fagen did back in 1980, asks the question: “who is the Gaucho, amigo?”
Corny Dan jokes aside, "The King of No" presents the reader with a journalist (working in a conflictedly self-aware Gonzo mode) sent to interview The Gaucho, a figure who could be described as shadowy at best, and at worst an unmitigated force of pure evil. An abyss soon opens between reporter and subject, between the Self and an exoticized, mythologized Other:
I’ve written this picture before. I’m writing all the time in my head. I memorize my thoughts and log them in a mental book and it grows and grows along with my age and my darkness. Yet, the Gaucho’s mind is silent. He’s squeezing it out of me, like an anaconda. When will he take me there? When will he take me to his horrid place?
3. “The Green Wall Plot”, Nick Mamatas
We start with a call to action for the Cyphers to seize their moment and break through the Green Wall. Then the story zooms out to reveal this dystopia is just one of many, petri-dish experiments overseen by manipulative Benefactors, little worlds where every so often some youngster chafes against the strictures of both authoritarian structures and genre convention.
At one point, a lucky subject is invited onto an "observation platform [...] created for purposes of sensawonda nostalgia"; winks to Orwell, Huxley, Yevgeny Samyatin's WE et al abound. Is there any path forward to liberation that can come from endlessly iterating on what's come before? Or is the only hope to be subsumed by the oppressive structure, to become oneself a Revisionist? The answer, this story suggests, is a giant, smirking, intricately ornamented shruggie emoji
4. “Auxiliary, Supplementary, Inessential”, Christi Nogle
So ive taught very little at the university level and im hardly ever in the classroom at all anymore but ive been a teacher and i know the stress of facing rooms full of distrustful entitled shitheads (and also some, er, very fine people), i know the long unremunerated hours one must commit to preparing for and decompressing from that stressful daily face-off, and this story by Christi Nogle captures that quite well. In it, a part-time uni professor finds herself being exploited even in her dreams. The line between one world and the other, the work hours and free time, work and freedom, waking life and dreams is blurred, erased, the eraser shavings are brushed away, the line is redrawn then erased again. While most everyone's had nightmares of being a student (youre naked, or you forgot you signed up for a class and never showed up and now theres an exam etc), id wager not everyone has had teaching nightmares, but even if you havent i think you will dig this story
5. “The Clown Watches the Clown”, Sarah S. Messenger
Speaking of teaching, i am the owner of several books with titles like Meaning and the English Verb which i refer to when i need to be pedantic on Discord and the like, and according to the aforementioned book, the present simple verb tense has what they describe as an unrestricted use, “so called because it places no limitation on the extension of the state into past and future time” and “is suitable for the employment in the expression of ‘eternal truths’, and so is found in scientific, mathematical, and other statements ‘for all time’”, citing for example the sentence “Two and three makes five.”
This contrasts to the instantaneous use, which “signifies an event simultaneous with the present moment, and normally only occurs in certain easily definable contexts”—the author gives the example of sports commentaries (“Napier passes the ball to Atwater, who heads it straight into the goal!”).
Another context this use features prominently is in the narration of prose fiction. I know many readers who are leery of stories narrated in present. Mentally, they associate its use with various types of literature they deem undesirable--sometimes with good cause! It can often seem like a cheap trick, because there’s an idea (erroneous to my way of thinking) that the main attraction of using present tense is to somehow "put the reader in the moment" In fact, some might argue it does just the opposite.
To me, present tense narration is interesting and effective insasmuch as it offers affordances to exploit the inherent ambiguity between those two aforementioned use cases--unrestricted and instantaneous, explaining habits, routines and universal constants versus narrating a sequence of actions taking place at the very moment of speech. Because there is something subtly, inherently unsettling in that tension, in that moment of uncertainty when one reads a sentence and must parse--usually unconsciously, subliminally--"hey, wait, is this something that is always true or something that was not true in the past nor will be in the future but rather is only true in this moment?"
The first sentence in Sara S Messenger's story "The Clown Watches the Clown" is a great example of this.
I dress up as a clown and let people beat me up in the alley behind the cybermotel.
The second sentence clears up this ambiguity immediately, but for a second we have to ask: Is this just something that's happening now? Or is there some inherent, unchanging truth in this painful-sounding situation? Is there a possibility of change or is this just how things are?
And these are the questions the rest of the story goes on to explore, as our protagonist is buffeted by the fists of lost love, the cruel prejudices of space-colony life, the cold calculus of rent and hunger. The clown watches the clown, but for how long, or will it always?
More short story recs
“Grottmata”, Thomas Ha: all I’m gonna say about this one is “hot diggity dog”
If you thought I was going to somehow let a month go by without recommending something from ergot., guess again. You should read “I'M NOT TRYING TO SELL YOU ANYTHING AND I'M NOT TRYING TO SCAM YOU” by Jack Klausner, a brilliant flash piece which I won’t go on at length about lest the rec grow longer than the story
Issue #11 of Seize the Press is out for Patreon subscribers, but if you’re not subscribed, you’re just gonna have to wait. Haven’t read the whole thing yet but Joe Koch’s “These Are His Memories” is great, as is Eric Horvitz’s “A History of the Avodion in Five Artists”. So, I dunno dude, maybe I beat this drum a lot but it bears repeating, i think you should subscribe to their Patreon. Support good writing!
Not-short story recs
This post is getting super lengthy so I won’t go into much detail but I read and enjoyed Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame and Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova this summer and recommend them both, so there