SHORT STORY REX January 2025
SHORT STORY REX January 2025
1. “The Dancer’s Dozen”, R.L. Summerling
A little bit of deja vu here, as last January this newsletter began “I mean to continue this year of short story recommendations much as i’ve been doing up to now, ie recommending excellent work from ergot.”, and well here we are! I love the sinister singsong quality of this one. It’s not quite a nursery rhyme, it’s not clear who’s singing, or to whom, or why. And who are the children named at the very beginning, who is the dancer that comes to us at the end? Doesn’t matter who, there’s a mysterious, fucked-up egg for each and every one
2. “This Movie Theater Sits on a Leyline”, Maxine Sophia Wolff
"I butter the popcorn. I clean the butter machine.” Let’s put aside, for a moment, the hard-to-account-for unease that the phrase ‘butter machine’ produces in me. Instead, let’s start with how that first line, which later becomes a refrain, and how the choice of using present simple tense, achieves the delightful ambivalent effect I’ve written about before—the deliberate conflation of right now and always
Although maybe I should qualify my use of the word ‘delightful’. From the outset what this story seeks is your revulsion, and it finds it. Quickly. “The whole business,” our narrator says at one point, “makes my guts turn,” and by “the whole business” they could also just be referring to the first paragraph.
This is not the cozy enterprise of some fae small business tyrant. The titular movie theater on the leyline is beyond all control, ravaged by “the planet god”, and all the reader and the employees can do is try their best to find their place amid the chaos and the endless vomit. And somehow, despite everything, at the end of the story I am left with a hankering for something called ‘Buncha Crunch’
3. “Collecting the Autographs of Pro Football’s Top Stars”, GD Holloway
With the by-now-traditional ergot. and Seize the Press stories taken care of, let’s take things a completely different direction
“If you’re reading this brochure, it’s because you, like thousands of your fellow people, are interested in collecting the autographs of pro football’s top stars.”
The story begins innocently enough, with one “Jack Talleyrand, DE, Pittsburgh 1970-1979”, but things steadily progress as we learn about one fictitious star of American Football (as opposed to the real kind1) after another after another and it gets all kinds of sad and sordid and surreal. A story that scratches the butt-slapping spandex surface of American masculinity to reveal the melancholy and squalor and tragic ugliness beneath.
4. “Poolhorse” and “Pearlescent Tickwad”, Samir Sirk Morató
Lacking visceral imagism2 in your diet? Help yourself to a double shot of Samir Sirk Morató! I missed “Poolhorse” when it came out last summer but luckily some kind internet friends set me on the path. Morató’s gift for pure sensorial discomfort is on full display in this one; there is no objective reason that reading something as simple as the word “face-lid” or the phrase “elastic rings of throat” should make my skin crawl and yet…!
As for my recommendation of “Pearlescent Tickwad”, I’m tempted to say you pretty much know from the titular neologism3 whether this story about becoming and acceptance is gonna be for you or not. It’s Strange Horizons so there’s a button for Content Warnings, go ahead and click if you need to. Failing that the first line will give you more clues: “She doesn’t realize that she’s made of ticks until she gets her nipples pierced.”
Here again Morató is playing in the splash zone between revulsion and fascination, but doing so in a way that manages to be both sweet and magical and that also features the phrase “opaline snot trails”, quite a feat if you’re asking me
Not-a-story rec: “Offspring Are Blank”, Dirty Projectors
in my heart lately its 2012 again, “because reasons” as they used to say
and that acoustic guitar and drum fill around 2:25-2:49 “is everything” as they used to say