SHORT STORY REX March 2026

1 and 2. “Ice Cream”, Hugh Beim-Steinberg and “The Forest of Almost Death”, Timothy Fox

Wait, have I not recommended anything from ergot. this year? How very uncharacteristic of me! What on earth is my problem? Should I seek professional help, like the therapist in Hugh Beim-Steinberg’s “Ice Cream”, one who “doesn’t try to impale you or gouge out your eyeballs, or tell you how dirty you are”, who “doesn’t even slice off bits of you to snack on while you cry”? The desire to heal and the impulse to hurt get wrapped up in the craving for reward, and not just with the titular treat but with the delectable prospect of the healing and hurting being turned back on itself, for the sharp object to plunge into one’s own orifice. Maybe that would fix me.

Or would I be better off at the near-deserted hospital in Timothy Fox’s “The Forest of Almost Death”, where we get a glimpse of a Ballardian swimming pool "(drained for obvious reasons)”, a full-service cafeteria where you are the sole customer, a hospital room where the topic of conversation is the terrible crimes you’ve been a party to in the past, if “the past” can be said to exist in such a place, which does not seem likely.

On second thought, I’m good. I do not, as Steve Mariott once said¹, “need no doctor”.

3. “Mozart Balls”, Camilla Grudova

While we’re on the subject of doctors, our narrator in this story introduces himself like so:

I am dismissed by some psychological associations as a madman, accused of creating a ‘congested atmosphere which displays my hoarding compulsion’, but my collection of things isn’t musty or disorganised, it is a museum of my own making and design.

Despite initial appearances, “Mozart Balls” is not the doctor’s story but rather that of his patient Sissy, a “cymbalist in an Edinburgh orchestra”, and that story is framed in an account of her therapeutic journey in that office full of “jade figurines and tiny Chinese cork dioramas of landscapes in narrow rectangles of glass mounted on ebony stands, baboons, donkeys and birds of marble and wood, a porcelain French bulldog, clusters of Pelham puppets, dragon- and bear-shaped netsuke, tin toys, skulls of plastic and plastic dinosaurs too”. As readers, we piece together Sissy’s story step by step through her therapist’s discoveries. His hunches and theories about what ails Sissy seem far-fetched at first, but as the details and overall shape of her life come to light, this doctor-patient dyad increasingly seems to be made for one another.

Along the way, the hallmarks of Grudova are on display, the penchant for lists, the many viscerally unpleasant details, the preoccupation with excretion on one hand and food on the other, including the titular “Mozart Balls”. Sounds appetizing, doesn’t it?

4. “Paper Pills”, Sherwood Anderson

Last time I mentioned that LC von Hessen’s excellent David Lynch tribute “One of Our Girls is in Trouble” reminded me of Sherwood Anderson’s “The Dumb Man”, mainly because of how the archetypal triumvirate of menacing males in von Hessen’s story reminded me of “the three men in a house in a street” in Anderson’s:

One is young and dandified. He continually laughs.

There is a second man who has a long white beard. He is consumed with doubt but occasionally his doubt leaves him and he sleeps.

A third man there is who has wicked eyes and who moves nervously about the room rubbing his hands together. The three men are waiting -- waiting.

Upstairs in the house there is a woman standing with her back to a wall, in half darkness by a window.

That is the foundation of my story and everything I will ever know is distilled in it.

In fact, it was not until reading the von Hessen story that I even thought of the work of Sherwood Anderson as being even close to “Lynchian” but upon further review it’s kind of hard to read passages like the one above, or about how “the man with the wicked eyes became like a boiling liquid--he ran back and forth like a caged animal” while “the dandified fellow lay on the floor…[and] laughed and played with his tiny black mustache” without hearing at least a trace of an “ominous whoosh”…

We’re not talking about that story today, of course, but it was the story that prompted me to revisit Winesburg, Ohio and decide beyond a shadow of a doubt that another of Anderson’s stories (which, curiously, also involves one woman and three men) the classic “Paper Pills” is Weird fiction², to me

And perhaps that descriptor is not one you’d associate with this monument of small-town proto-Modernism³ but consider Doctor Reefy (another doctor??). He is described as an “old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands” who, after the death of his younger wife, “sat all day in his empty office close by a window that was covered with cobwebs” and “worked ceaselessly […] Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids.”

Now I don’t care what anybody says, this man is clearly a wizard, a practitioner of white magic on a power level equal to Eibon or Malygris or any other necromancer from the Clark Ashton Smith oeuvre, for example. Or maybe not, but I would humbly suggest it as a fruitful lens through which to think about the nature of those titular pills, the “written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts”…

NOT-A-STORY REC: Smokin’, Humble Pie

but especially this track: