Tag: short story

Choke by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Choke by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tor.com, 14th September 2022) sees the narrator, Kédiké, accompanying Afonso, a fellow academic and friend who “worships free food”, to a family assigned by the International Friends program:

The house, when you arrive, is more conspicuous than you had expected. Apparently, it used to be a church, back when this town was still a part of Mexico. The Spanish architecture and Infant of Prague statues, both of which you recognize from your Catholic upbringing, are huge tells. When you go past the motion-sensored outdoor lights, the statues come to life, casting slant shadows, like sentries over something poached.
The gate swings open into a large compound containing multiple buildings. The door at the top of the steps is open, ushering you in. From inside: the smell of good food, laughter, a cat meowing. Afonso beams. There is joy here.
You have forgotten your ancestors’ whisper that you will choke.

This passage pretty much presages the three narrative threads that are developed in the story. First, there are the whispered warnings and statements (of variable reliability) that Kédiké regularly receives from his dead ancestors in the “Great Across”—and they have already warned him that he will “choke” at this gathering; second, we learn about Kédiké’s abusive religious upbringing in Nigeria; and, third, it becomes obvious that the hosts of the meal, the Paxton family, are proselytizing Christians using the Friendship program to recruit new converts.
During the evening the ancestors continue to give Kédiké nudges and brief visions at the meal, and he also becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the religious observance that occurs (prayers and passages from the bible between courses, etc.). This discomfort increases when (spoiler) a final member of the family arrives, Elijah Paxton, who, after an aggravated assault on a woman with a baseball bat (he called on the “LGBT slut” to repent), was banned from all campuses in a fifty-mile radius.
The story climaxes with Kédiké experiencing an intense vision:

The world flickers, and the last light in the room is snuffed out. Your ancestors, tired of waiting, step forward.
Every guest at the table is a faceless two-dimensional darkness, bodies draped over furniture and cutlery, trapped in the plane of shadows. They speak but are unheard; scream but are stifled by a form too shallow to hold all their selves. The only bodily parts spared are their fingers, fleshy ends clinging to the flattened shadows at the table. With these they call for attention, scratching at the wood, pulling splinters, drawing blood.
But the sound of water drowns them out.
Each Paxton is a white robe wearing a stole, like the men from your exorcisms. Sticky gray tendrils, borne of each utterance, each interaction, connect the whites to every guest, bonding all in a closeknit web. Water so saline you can taste it pours from the depths of each Paxton to the dining room floor, enveloping the slant shadow-selves. Alessia’s ejections happen, like her words, in drips, slipping down the sides of her mouth. Charlotte and Donny, Hollywood smiles still intact, spout huge bucketfuls. But no one gushes into the fast-rising lake like Elijah, from whom water pours out of every orifice: eager, hungry, restless.
Young Joshua is the only Paxton left untouched. He is still stroking the cat. But rather than the vacant expression he has presented all evening, his face is warped by fear as he watches the water rise. His eyes turn, slowly, and find you, realizing you have joined him in this separate reality.
“Help,” he whispers, choking. “Help me.”
The flesh-fingered shadows scratch the table, echoing his words in wood. HELP. HELP ME.

The narrator quickly leaves, and realises that the ancestors were warning him that he might drown (in the host’s religion, presumably).
For the most part this is a readable piece (and economical, too—it does a lot with its four thousand words) that slowly and successfully builds unease in the reader—but it is somewhat anti-climactic (Kédiké runs away), and unsatisfyingly open-ended (what does he subsequently do to help Joshua, who appears to be in a similar situation to the younger Kédiké?) It also feels a bit like an anti-Christian hit job, and an unsubtle one at that.
All in all it reads like the beginning of a longer story, and I wonder if it is a novel in progress.
** (Average). 3,950 words. Story link.

How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly by P. H. Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly by P. H. Lee (Tor.com, 12th October 2022) opens with the Crown Prince of Jupiter becoming infatuated with the Princess of the Sun:

He was in love, and his heart knew no persuasion. “Oh look at her,” he would say, admiring the tiny portrait, “what radiant beauty!”
“Her radiance,” commented his advisors, “is due entirely to her nuclear fusion. If your royal highness was in her presence, even a moment, then by those self-same processes you would find yourself instantly annihilated.”
“Are we not all slain by the self-same arrows of true love?” answered the Prince. Which, of course, was not any sort of answer, except to a young man in love.

The Prince subsequently stops eating and drinking, so his advisors implore his Aunt to intervene. She initially reiterates what he has already been told but, when she sees he is smitten, tells him that his only hope lies with Ursula, a witch who lives on Earth.1
In the second part of the story we see the Prince and Alisterisk (an advisor) journey to Earth suitably attired in pressure armour. There they meet Ursula and the story takes a meta-fictional turn:

Ursula’s eyes came at last on the Crown Prince and on Alisterisk beside him. In their pressurized armor, they looked to her as bluewhite gleams in a beam of sunlight. “Ah,” she said, relaxing. “I see now that this is a science fiction story. And I suppose you want me to write the end of it. All right then. What’s the matter?”

There is more of this kind of thing when (after the Prince tells his story and Ursula tells him that he should seek out the wizard Stanislaw) Alisterisk momentarily stays behind to thank her:

“Do not thank me yet,” said the Earth Witch. “For the matter is not done. I am afraid, Alisterisk, that you shall come to no good end in this affair. The side characters seldom do.”

The final section sees the Prince and Alisterisk meet Stanislaw1 who, after hearing their story (spoiler), tells them he can help, but that there may be consequences:

“I have in my possession,” said the wizard Stanislaw, “a Metaphoricator, left for me by the Constructor Trurl when he sojourned in my company these many years ago. A Metaphoricator is a most particular device. Operated properly, it can transform any real thing into a metaphor, merely a story meant to illustrate its point.”
“So you mean to transform us into metaphors?” asked Alisterisk hesitantly.
“Oh no!” said the wizard Stanislaw, “You are quite clearly metaphors already. Just think of it! How could there be such a thing as a real Crown Prince of Jupiter, a real Princess of the Sun? Your entire narrative is quite clearly a farce.”
“But then what do you intend to do?” asked Alisterisk
“By means of a few simple re-arrangements and jerry-rigs,” said the wizard Stanislaw, “my Metaphoricator can be transformed into a Demetaphoricator. And that is the machine I intend to operate.”
“What good is a Demetaphoricator to our present difficulties?” asked Alisterisk.
The wizard snapped his fingers. “With a single application of a Demetaphoricator, I can transform all of your story—the Crown Prince, Esmerelda, the Coreward Palace, Ursula the Earth Witch, even myself the wizard Stanislaw, into real people and real events, actually existing in the world beyond this story. At such time, both your Crown Prince and his beloved Esmerelda shall be rendered as real people, with no physical impediments to their romance. Of course, they may still encounter other difficulties, but that is simply the course of being human.”

The story ends with the characters having escaped the story and the writer quizzing the reader as to whether or not they have ever known archetypes like the Prince or Princess (the boy who became infatuated with a girl who could do nothing but destroy him), whether they helped, and what their role was, if any (were they like Alisterisk the advisor?)
This story probably sounds like an unlikely and unsuccessful combination of elements, but the quirky beginning, the meta-fictional development, and the story-transcending ending makes for an original, entertaining, and accomplished piece.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 3,650 words. Story link.

1. Ursula the Earth Witch is obviously Ursula K. LeGuin (the Earthsea series), and Stanislaw is obviously Stanislaw Lem (Trurl is from The Cyberiad).

Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds by Indrapramit Das

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds by Indrapramit Das (Tor.com, 19th October 2022) opens with the narrator, a multiple worlds traveller, meeting Aditi-0, the original iteration of his ex-girlfriend Aditi-1, who he met in New York City-5 while travelling across the timelines (NYCs 2-4 didn’t have an Aditi in them). We subsequently learn that he met Aditi-1 after he was tasked to take a message from Aditi-0 to the versions of herself on other Earths (her “altselves”).
The rest of the story is mostly an account of the time he spends with Aditi-0, during which they talk about his failed affair with Aditi-1 (which he is still moping about). The story ultimately (spoiler) subverts reader expectation by having the narrator and Aditi-1 become friends instead of lovers at the end of the story (or perhaps it just describes what happens when people break up but remain in touch). I am not sure what the point of this is.
The story essentially appears to be a piece about failed relationships even though it is decorated with SFnal furniture, e.g. the physical effects of timeline travel (nausea, etc.), futuristic jargon (“altselves,” “sticers”), and one scene that describes a trans-timeline node in operation:

Time appears to slow, and sound with it, flooding my ears with a low hum.
Everything. The people, the stars in the sky, the ruddy smear of sunlight still burning in the clouds behind Manhattan, the lights of New York City, the glowsticks now arcing through the air above us. Everything grows persistent trails that crawl across the dark blue evening air in shimmering banners and strings. Aditi0 is replicated a hundred times until she is surrounded in a glimmering tracery of herself. The entire world etches the expanding mark of its passage on to the surface of reality. We see the potentialities of past and present grow around us for what seems like infinity but is actually just a few moments. As this multi-hued, crystalline geometry of our movement and Earth’s movement through spacetime grows more and more complex it begins to ripple and fade like a wake, so the tearing meteoric lines of the city’s lights fracture into what looks like a thousand overlapping New Yorks and a thousand starscapes splayed out across the horizon, before vanishing into the singular skyline we know.
The dancing replications decorating reality stream away to nothing and time hits its normal pace again, letting sound rush in like an explosion. I stagger back at this effect, gasping as I take in the world, which now seems to be moving too fast. It takes a few seconds of staying still to keep from throwing up at the contrast. Aditi0 lets her shoulder sag against mine.

This is probably the only truly SFnal part of what is essentially a slow-moving mainstream story about relationships.1
** (Average). 6,350 words. Story link.

1. Contrast and compare this story with the decidedly SFnal Weep for Day (reviewed here).

Skeleton Song by Seanan McGuire

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Skeleton Song by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com, 26th October 2022) is one of her “Wayward Children” series (Every Heart a Doorway, etc.)1 and opens with sunset on Mariposa, with the abuelas singing the summoning song that reanimates the dead skeletons of this world:

In the palace, in the curtained bower reserved for the Princess, a scattering of bones dusted with diamond and amber began to stir, tempted into motion by the song rising from below. On the other side of the room, a terrible creature raised its head and watched.
It was strange and fleshy, shaped as a skeleton was shaped, but with a covering of fat and skin stretched across it, concealing it from proper view. It hid most of its body under rags it called “clothing,” which had grown tattered and worn, developing holes where none had been before. Some among the palace staff had hoped, for a time, that the same might happen to the terrible creature’s “skin,” leaving proper, honest bone to shine through. It had not. When the creature broke its skin, as happened from time to time, it bled and wept and hurt, and took to the pile of rags it had claimed as a “bed.”
They would never have allowed it to remain in the palace were it not for one strange truth: hideous as the creature was, impossible as it seemed, the Princess loved it.

We learn that the fleshy creature is Christopher, a human who arrived in this world of living skeletons via a portal. The Princess saw that this new arrival was ill and drew all the sickness into a bone, later extracting it from Christopher’s body. Christopher now uses the bone as a flute.
The rest of the story sees the Princess paint her bones (a skeleton’s equivalent of dressing, I guess) before they go to see her parents in the depths of the catacombs (Christopher loves the Princess and does not want to go back to his world, so she says he must meet her parents). When the pair eventually arrive at the bottom of the catacombs, they learn from the Princess’s father that he also came to Mariposa as a human—but he kept his fleshly memories by having his mother plunge a gilded bone into his heart on their wedding night and then cut away his flesh (this resolves a memory problem mentioned by Christopher during an earlier discussion with the Princess about him becoming a skeleton).
The story concludes with the couple returning to the surface. The Princess wants “to sleep in the flowers” with him one last time (her bones are inanimate during the daytime) and then, when she rises that sunset, they will follow the ritual outlined by her father. When the Princess wakes that evening, however (spoiler), she finds that Christopher has had second thoughts and vanished.
This isn’t badly done (there are some nice touches, e.g. the journey down into the catacombs) but the idea of a man falling in love with a skeleton requires a little too much suspension of disbelief. I suspect this story will appeal more to those already invested in the series and who are interested in interstitial material.
** (Average). 5,000 words. Story link.

1. “The Wayward Children” series at ISFDB.

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956)1 is a one of his “Multivac” stories about a giant computer. In this tale, after the computer has been running for several decades, it finally develops a system that provides unlimited solar power for humanity. After this achievement, we then see the Multivac’s two attendants, who are hiding from the publicity in an underground chamber, having a drink and relaxing. Later, an argument develops when one of the two, Adel, contends that that the solar power supply will last forever:

Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice and glassware. “Not forever,” he said.
“Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert.”
“That’s not forever.”
“All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Twenty billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?”
Lupov put his fingers through his thinning hair as though to reassure himself that some was still left and sipped gently at his own drink. “Twenty billion years isn’t forever.”  p. 8

This back and forth continues until Lupov points out that when entropy eventually reaches a maximum (i.e The Heat Death of the Universe, when the temperature everywhere in the Universe is the same), no more free energy will be available. Adell suggests that it may be possible to “build things up again someday”. Lupov disagrees, and so they ask Multivac if it will ever be possible to decrease the amount of entropy in the universe: the computer replies “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER”.
The rest of the story telescopes through time until the end of the Universe, with many changes taking place during the various sections: Multivac becomes a much smaller machine, and eventually exists in hyperspace (by this point it is called the “Cosmic AC”); meanwhile, humans become immortal, spread throughout the Galaxy and the Universe, turn into disembodied beings, and later merge into one consciousness. At the end of every section someone asks the same question that Adell and Lupov asked and get the same answer.
Finally, ten trillions years later, just before the last man fuses with AC, the question is asked one last time with the same result. Then, in the timeless interval afterwards (spoiler), AC learns how to reverse the direction of entropy:

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer—by demonstration—would take care of that, too.
For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
And there was light—  p. 15

The cosmic and temporal sweep of the story is quite well done but the ending is a gimmick better appreciated at age 12. I’d also suggest the story has a religious or mythological ending rather than a proper sense of wonder one.2 Still, not bad I guess.
*** (Good). 4,450 words. Story link.

1. I assumed that this story had bounced from Astounding, Galaxy and F&SF to Science Fiction Quarterly (a much lower-budget publication) but then I found this in Asimov’s autobiography, In Joy Still Felt:

On June 1, 1956, I received a request from Bob Lowndes for another story. I was already thinking about writing another story about Multivac (“Franchise,” which had been the first, had been written as a direct consequence of my introduction to Univac in the 1952 election).
I had worked out ever greater developments of Multivac, and eventually was bound to consider how far I could go; how far the human mind (or, anyway, my human mind) could reach,
So as soon as I got Bob’s letter I sat down to write “The Last Question,” which was only forty-seven hundred words long, but in which I detailed the history of ten trillion years with respect to human beings, computers, and the universe. And, in the end—but no, you’ll have to read the story, if you haven’t already.
I wrote the whole thing in two sittings, without a sentences hesitation. On June 4 I sent it off, and on June 11 I got the check from Lowndes at four cents a word.
I knew at the instant of writing it that I had become involved in something special. When I finished it, I said, in my diary, that it was “the computer story to end all computer stories, of, who knows, the science-fiction story to end all science-fiction stores.” OF course, it may well be that no one else agrees with me, but it was my opinion at the time, and it still is today.  p. 59

2. Tacking on a religious or mythological ending to provide a sense of wonder is not uncommon, e.g. Arthur C. Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God.

The Answer by Fredric Brown

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Answer by Fredric Brown (Angels and Spaceships, 1954) opens with a scientist called Dwar Ev completing a connection and then moving towards a switch:

The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe—ninety-six billion planets—into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one super-calculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.  p. 36

Ev then asks the super-computer if there is a God, and it replies (spoiler), “Yes, now there is a God”. Then, when Ev rushes towards the switch to turn the computer off, it zaps him with a lightning bolt.
This is one of these squibs (it is less than a page long) that you find (a) pretty neat when you are twelve, but (b) a not very good gimmick story when older. The real sense of wonder here lies in the idea of ninety-six billion inhabited and interconnected planets.
* (Mediocre). 250 words. Story link.

A Pall of Moondust by Nick Wood

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Pall of Moondust by Nick Wood (Omenana, April 2021) opens with the female narrator dreaming about an airlock accident on the Moon:

I dreamed, and shook awake, as the two bodies flew away from me.
Dreams live.
Scott is the one keying in the Airlock code, mouth O-ing in shock at the tug and hiss of escaping air behind her. “Helmets on,” she says, but it is already too late, the door to the Moon behind her is wide as a monster’s maw.
Bailey is fiddling with the solar array on the Rover, his helmet playfully dangled on the joystick for a second, before being sucked out and beyond my reach. Scott pushes me backwards and the inner door closes, leaving me safe on the inside. The wrong side?
The Airlock explodes with emptying air and a spray of moon dust.
Two die, while I live.

Most of the rest of the story tells of the narrator’s therapy sessions, during which she is questioned about the accident, and the death of her grandfather when she was young (he is referenced at the very start of the story and is the source of more unresolved guilt and grief).
The story concludes with the narrator later going out on a therapeutic moonwalk with two others and, during this (spoiler), she has a momentary vision of her grandfather and his dog. He waves at her, and behind him she sees the two people who were killed in the airlock accident.
This is a rather slight mood piece and the African flavour of the story didn’t quite mask that for me—but it’s not a bad effort, and at least the writer avoided the temptation to expand it into six thousand words of angst.
** (Average). 2,050 words. Story link.

Hunting Problem by Robert Sheckley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hunting Problem by Robert Sheckley (Galaxy, September 1955) opens with Drog arriving late at a meeting of Soaring Falcon Patrol (Drog “hurtles down from the ten thousand foot level”). Drog is chastised by his Patrol Leader, who then recites the Scouter Creed to the assembled scouts:

“We, the Young Scouters of the planet Elbonai, pledge to perpetuate the skills and virtues of our pioneering ancestors. For that purpose, we Scouters adopt the shape our forebears were born to when they conquered the virgin wilderness of Elbonai. We hereby resolve—”
Scouter Drog adjusted his hearing receptors to amplify the Leader’s soft voice. The Creed always thrilled him. It was hard to believe that his ancestors had once been earthbound. Today the Elbonai were aerial beings, maintaining only the minimum of body, fueling by cosmic radiation at the twenty thousand-foot level, sensing by direct perception, coming down only for sentimental or sacramental purposes. They had come a long way since the Age of Pioneering. The modern world had begun with the Age of Submolecular Control, which was followed by the present age of Direct Control.
“. . . honesty and fair play,” the Leader was saying. “And we further resolve to drink liquids, as they did, and to eat solid food, and to increase our skill in their tools and methods.”  p. 36

Drog is then told by his Patrol Leader that, if he wants to get his first-class scouter award before a forthcoming Jamboree (Drog is the only second-class scout in the patrol), he needs to bring back the pelt of a Mirash, a “large and ferocious animal”. The Patrol Leader states that three of these previously thought extinct animals have been spotted to the north. The story point of view then switches to three human prospectors who have recently landed on the planet—they are the Mirash that are going to be hunted by Drog.
The next part of the story sees Drog stalking the humans, a task which does not begin well when one of the prospectors tells his colleague that he saw a tree move—and one of them subsequently blasts it:

Slowly Drog returned to consciousness. The Mirash’s flaming weapon had caught him in camouflage, almost completely unshielded. He still couldn’t understand how it had happened. There had been no premonitory fear-scent, no snorting, no snarling, no warning whatsoever. The Mirash had attacked with blind suddenness, without waiting to see whether he was friend or foe.
At last Drog understood the nature of the beast he was up against.1  p. 40

There are a couple more conventional efforts by Drog to trap the humans (these include a steak dinner waiting when they arrive back at camp—they avoid the tangle-grass and rising disc of earth—and then the sounds of a damsel in distress—which they ignore). Drog (spoiler) finally catches one of the humans by using “ilitorcy” (the use of a thick mist, essentially). The story then closes with both first-class scout Drog flying the pelt of a Mirash at the Jamboree and all three humans escaping alive in their spaceship. The pelt turns out to be an environmental suit that one of the men was wearing.
I suppose this is a moderately enjoyable, if slight, YA piece. The ending may provide more of an uplift to others than it did for me.
** (Average). 3,950 words. Story link.

1. Robert Sheckley’s stories often have mordant asides about the nature of humanity, e.g. his description of humans as “pushers” in the superior Specialist (Galaxy, May 1953)—if you want a piece that has a YA feel but which also works for adults (and has a great sense of wonder ending), I’d read that instead.

Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller (Tor.com, January–February 2021) starts with the narrator Laurie remembering the time she first heard Iggy Pop’s The Passenger on the radio and how, at the end of the track, there was an interruption, “staticky words, saying what might have been ‘Are you out there?’”
Then, next day in a local thrift shop, Laurie hears someone singing the song:

The singer must have sensed me staring, because they turned to look in my direction. Shorter than me, hair buzzed to the scalp except for a spiked stripe down the center.
“The Graveyard Shift,” I said, trembling. “You were listening last night?”
“Yeah,” they said, and their smile was summer, was weekends, was Ms. Jackson’s raspy-sweet voice. The whole place smelled like mothballs, and the scent had never been so wonderful. “You too?”
My mind had no need for pronouns. Or words at all for that matter. This person filled me up from the very first moment.
I said: “What a great song, right? I never heard it before.
Do you have it?”
“No,” they said, “but I was gonna drive down to Woodstock this weekend to see if I could find it there. Wanna come?”
Just like that. Wanna come? Everything I did was a long and agonizing decision, and every human on the planet terrified me, and this person had invited me on a private day trip on a moment’s impulse. What epic intimacy to offer a total stranger—hours in a car together, a journey to a strange and distant town. What if I was a psychopath, or a die-hard Christian evangelist bent on saving their soul? The only thing more surprising to me than this easy offer was how swiftly and happily my mouth made the words: That sounds amazing.

This passage pretty much limns the the story, which is that of one odd sock finding another and becoming a pair. The next day they set off together on a trip to a record store and, during their journey, they hear another interruption on the radio after David Bowie’s Life on Mars (the comments include mention of an airplane crash—which occurs later that day—and a “spiderwebbing” epidemic).
The rest of the tale sees the pair spend their time (in between further, increasingly meaningful, radio messages) navigating the mostly self-inflicted emotional dramas of teenage life in 1991 (during which Laurie seems perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown). These tempests-in-teapots include, among other situations, dealing with both sets of parents—and when Fell first meets Laurie’s parents, Laurie tells them that Fell is also a “she” to placate any potential concerns about what might happen to their daughter upstairs. Laurie then feels sick at having done so, as “It was a negation of who Fell was”. I assume from this that Fell is a biological woman who has chosen to be a trans man (but, as I find this stuff of little interest, and can’t be bothered trying to confirm my impressions, I could be wrong). Later, we also get a look at Fell’s dysfunctional family set up, which essentially consists of an alcoholic and hostile mother who apparently uses the wrong pronouns for her child (something I didn’t think you could do in 1991).
Eventually (spoiler), the content of the messages (“I don’t know if this the right . . . place. Time”; “To tell you the future can be more magnificent, and more terrifying, than what you have in your head right now”; “Two soldiers trapped behind enemy lines”, etc.) leads the pair to triangulate the signal to a nearby record shop (the massed Air Force trucks nearby seem unable to do so)—but there is no-one there. Fell concludes that an earlier hypothesis—about the affirmatory messages coming from their future selves—is correct.
This story will probably only work for those interested in safe, non-threatening (the only drama here occurs in Laurie’s head), and emotional YA material about insecure teenagers. The SFnal idea is weak and not really developed in any meaningful way (the series of transmissions from the future are concluded by the “answer” being given by Fell). It is essentially a mainstream story about growing up.1
I’d also note in passing that the gender pronoun handwringing that goes on in this seems wildly ahistorical.
* (Mediocre). 7,000 words. Story link.

1. Unless the SFWA has suddenly been swamped by emotional teenage writers, this seems like another mystifying Nebula Award short story finalist (it also placed sixth in the Locus Poll).

Laughter Among the Trees by Suzan Palumbo

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Laughter Among the Trees by Suzan Palumbo (The Dark #69, February 2021)1 opens with Ana driving to a park in Canada, during which she recalls (a) her arrival in the country as the child of West Indian immigrants, (b) her early days in school, and (c) the birth of her sister Sab. Ana then recalls a childhood family camping trip where her younger sister disappeared during the night (Sab left the tent—against Ana’s wishes—with Greg, a boy she had been playing with earlier that day). Sab was never seen again, nor was the boy—and there was no evidence he had ever been at the campsite.
The story then moves forward in time to when Ana has grown up, her father has died, and her mother is in a care home. During one of Ana’s visits to see her mother, the old woman talks about the disappearance of Sab and shows Ana a picture of a boy that looks like Greg—it materialises that Greg was a cousin of Ana’s mother who drowned back in the West Indies in 1962 when Ana’s mother wanted to go swimming in a flooded river. She tells Ana, “‘dis go haunt you here.’ You can’t outrun the past, Ana, even if it’s dead and drowned in another country.”
The story closes with Ana going back to the camp site. Then (spoiler), on the second night, a ghostly Sab appears and tells Ana to follow her. They go to a cave, where Ana finds Sab’s remains and later lies down beside her bones. The story closes with Ana feeling a dense cold, and something gripping her throat.
This is reasonably well told, but it seems to be more an autobiographical slice-of-life than a ghost story (the immigrant background, the family accounts, and the dysfunctional relationship with her sister, etc.). I’d also add that the internal logic of the haunting doesn’t really convince: I can see why Greg would kill the mother or Sab for revenge, but why would Sab lead Ana to the same fate given it was her own childhood stupidity and wilfulness that got her killed?
Finally, there are one or two sentences or word choices that could do with being changed, e.g. the very clunky first sentence:

The highway to the campground cuts through the granite Laurentian Plateau like a desiccated wound.

What’s a “Laurentian Plateau”? Do wounds become “dessicated”? Why distract your reader with this kind of thing? Wouldn’t, “The highway to the campground cuts through the plateau like an old wound” be a simpler and more apt beginning (the story is in large part about an old wound)?
** (Average). 5,950 words. Story link.

1. This was a 2022 Nebula Award finalist in the short story category. Another mystifying choice.