Last month’s SH fiction
I've dropped the ball on my plan to post every week about what we're publishing at SH. Apologies to the authors.
I'm gonna try to catch up by posting this one post with all of the fiction from the end of February through the end of March (leaving out the nonfiction and poetry for time and space reasons); then I'll try and get back to week-by-week. We'll see if I can keep that up.
Last time I posted about SH fiction was in mid-February, pointing to "The First Time We Met." Starting from the week after that:
"Sometimes We Arrive Home," by K. Bird Lincoln (23 February). A short-short about finding home in an alien place:
This alien air feels familiar, like something from her own pores.
(This is K. Bird Lincoln's second story for SH; the first was "Valley of Darkness," way back in October of 2000, our second month of publishing. A very different story--that one was, more or less, a WWII Japanese vampire story.)
At the beginning of March, we ran Sandra McDonald's "Diana Comet," split across two weeks. It features a woman with a secret, in an alternate (?) Victorian-ish world, traveling to a distant city to find her beloved:
Miss Harvegstraem tilted her head. "Let me guess. A handsome visitor, both well spoken and highly educated. Scion of some wealthy family. He came to you in the cover of darkness, promising sweetness and fidelity, stealing your hard-protected virtue."
(Sandra's previous SH story was "Lost and Found," in 2003.)
Next up was Shweta Narayan's "Nira and I," about two girls in a South-Asian-flavored city where the mist changes things. I'm adding a few sentences here to the pull quote from the site, just 'cause I can:
Nira and I are six when her eldest brother loses his way in the mist. Three days later his bones get home. An extra finger sprouts from the left hand, and the skull has no eye sockets. But his clothes dangle from the shoulder blades, and dry knuckles scratch at the door for two days before the King's men come.
This happens, but not to us. We are rememberers. We know each corner, every cobblestone. The mist cannot tempt us into a street that never was, can never make us think that we are home, or that we are kittens or fish. We are the city's traders, its messengers; we know it from wharf to hill.
The week of March 23rd, we ran "The Spider in You," by Sean E. Markey, a dark and compelling short piece about sacrifice and children and society:
We kept our god under the sink, in an old aquarium, so it wouldn't spill its web all over the house.
Our final March story was "Turning the Apples," by Tina Connolly, whose "On the Eyeball Floor" we published last summer. This new story is about a young man on another planet who can reprogram the minds of people who've caught a coma-causing infection:
"This ain't a negotiation, boyo," says Jonny. "They're fresh and Hawk's in a lather, he needs what you do." Then Jonny is gone and Szo is sick to his knees because he's just remembered that fresh means awake and screaming.
Okay, that's all the March fiction. I'll try and post about this past week's story soon.