SHORT STORY REX March 2024
SHORT STORY REX March 2024
1. "Dirt Retreat", Eugénie Szwalek
The cover of the new Fusion Fragment is beautiful and the story its based on, equally so. Reductively speaking, its a story about the deathwish. A story where Death wears a fluorescent pink robe with a nametag that says GREG, but make no mistake, its still Death.
A voice on the radio sings its praises, asking you what are you waiting for? They ply you with cake, with everything your heart didnt even know it desired, as if to say: there is no consumerist whim we cannot or will not cater to
And the story itself mimics this obsequiousness, piling on the delights, the luscious images and similes. Buttering us up for the dirt retreat, and we go, willingly!
2. "Scrape Runner", Ryan Kelley
Was largely unfamiliar with this mag and writer when i saw this story shared somewhere. What with the title and accompanying blurb ("3.5k-word PKD-esque fiction") it both is and isn't exactly what it says on the tin.
The reader is never really quite sure what the writer is playing at here, parody or pastiche, put-on or homage, or all of the above--and the reading experience is all the better for it, imo
The protag's a "Scrape" instead of "Blade" Runner (not technically a PKD phrase, but hey), and instead of Replicants they're hunting "Typals" i.e., not androids but humans who are infected by "schizophrenic wraithforms" and are unable or unwilling to pass the SchizoTuring (a test as simple as asserting, when asked, that the sky is blue, to say "Everything's normal" and that "People are people")
Its all clearly and suitably Dickian, right down to the scene of domestic stress with the wife character, a hallmark of classic PKD (here with the misogyny toned way down comparatively and thankfully). So if acid-noir meditations on sanity and identity are your thing, you are in for a treat
3. "The Lightbulb Cannot Be Changed", Sasha Brown
Another good 'un from Sasha Brown, but while other stories of his I've read and recommended have tended towards the quirky and fun, here my man is not joking around with us motherfuckers anymore
Speaking of jokes the title might suggest one of those "how many [nouns] does it take to screw in etc" but in fact it comes from a much gnarlier place midway through the story
“A man reaches to change a burned-out lightbulb,” said the doctor. “His ladder is unsteady. Everyone says, ‘Watch out, you will fall!’ But he does not listen. He keeps reaching until the ladder tips. There’s a great clatter. Now everything is a mess, and still there is no light. What do we do with that man who cannot stop reaching to change the lightbulb?"
Not to say the story is without flashes of whimsy, but it's an urgent whimsy, hard-earned and never twee, in a story about traumatized people who have suffered injustice but who still seek out and deserve to find joy
4. "Good Friday 2033", Men's Recovery Project
We are less than a decade away, folks. When this story(? “piece”? "track”?) was released back in 93 it was 40 years away: the 2000th anniversary of Christ’s death of the cross. Here the future festivities are imagined by a young Sam McPheeters, former frontman of radical leftist hardcore band Born Against, on the first recording from his subsequent undertaking, the amorphous electro-weird outfit Men’s Recovery Project. Starring are the president, "an enormous lumbering man ravaged by various degenerative skin diseases", and "Vice President Friend the Robot". A didgeridoo also features prominently.
Maybe it’s me, maybe I don’t move in the right circles, but I feel like I don’t hear much about “spoken word” anymore. Is that still a thing? It was for a while, or it seemed like, at the very least, in punk and punk-adjacent scenes. And while the aesthetic sensibilities may have drifted away from punk/HC orthodoxy into a more experimental confrontationalism, this story (? “piece”? “track”?) remains delightfully puerile in its irreverence and irreverent in its puerility, ie punk as fuck
NOT-SHORT STORY REC: Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar
Or rather, a story of variable length depending on how much (or which parts) of it you read, definitely not short, also potentially infinite, in the way of an endless loop?
I'd been a fan of Cortázar for a long time but had never taken the plunge with his most famous novel. For years, my wife's copy had sat on the bookshelf, alternately mocking, daring, and beckoning to me. Finally, around the end of last year, the time came.
Yes, this is the novel that you're famously encouraged and/or allowed and/or meant to read "out of order"--although in the "Tablero de dirección" that introduces the book, there are in fact two authorially prescribed ways of reading it. 1) Reading the numbered sections straight through from 1 to 56 or 2) Following this order: 73-1-2-116-3-44-4-71-5 etc etc etc.
I used a sort of hybrid method on my first reading. I read the first section straight through 1-36. This is the part that takes place in Paris, describing our protagonist Horacio Oliveira's life as an immigrant and bohemian and his doomed love affair with 'la Maga'. I must say the sections where Oliveira et al engage in at-times entertaining and at-time horribly pretentious discussions and arguments about the scratchy old jazz and blues records in various shabby apartments rang especially true for me, as I too in my youth engaged in equally entertaining and pretentious conversations about much the same types of records in similarly shabby digs.
The second part, which takes place after Oliveira's less-than-voluntary return to Argentina, I also began reading straight through, but was gradually tempted to start jumping around into the so-called "Expendable Chapters", which coincidentally proved fitting with Oliveira´s deteriorating mind-state as the book progresses and he comes to terms with what his life was in Paris and what he has done, and with what life back home is and what he can't help but do now.
It's a truism that you never read the same book twice (because the reader who does the reading is changing and becoming a different person, like Horacio changes and is changed, and their reading changes with it), but I plan to reread this one again, multiple times even and both of us will be different every time.