Tag: short story

For Lack of a Bed by John Wiswell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

For Lack of a Bed by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots #74, 16th April 2021) opens with Noémi trying to relieve her constant pain by sleeping on the floor. While she distracts herself with social media, her friend Tariq texts with the offer of a sofa. But there is a catch though—apparently someone died on it. But, as the sofa is clean, Noémi accepts the offer, and Tariq, who is actually standing outside her door, brings it in. Noémi subsequently sleeps well.
Noémi is then woken late the next morning by Lili, her boss at the pet shop where she works; Lili (who is a succubus) tells Noémi that there has been trouble with the mogwai overnight and to head in to work (we later find that the shop also stocks gryphons and basilisks, etc.)
The story’s only real complication comes later that day when Noemi is woken again (she fell asleep after the call) by someone knocking on her door. It is Lili, it is six-thirty at night, and, after checking that Noémi is okay, Lili points at the sofa:

Lili looked like she’d bitten into an extremely ripe lime. “When did you invite her?”
“Her? Are you gendering my furniture?”
Lili pointed a sangria red fingernail at the sofa. “That’s not furniture. That’s a succubus.”
Noémi tilted her head. Giving it a few seconds didn’t make it make any more sense. “I know you’re the expert, but I’m pretty sure succubi don’t have armrests.”
“Come on. You know my mom is a used bookstore, right?”
“I thought she owned a used bookstore.”
“The sex economy sucks. With all the hook-up apps and free porn out there, a succubus starves. My mom turned into a bookstore so people would take bits of her home and hold them in bed. It’s why I work at the pet store and cuddle the hell hound puppies before we open.”
Noémi asked, “Is that why they never bite you?”
“What do you think? Everybody else gets puppy bites, except me. I get fuzzy, affectionate joy-energy. Gets me through the day, like a cruelty-free smoothie.” Lili blew a frizzy strand of gold from her face.
“But this sofa has devolved really far into this form. I know succubi that went out like her—she’s just a pit of hunger shaped to look enticing. No mind. Just murder. Where’d you even find her?”

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Noémi, Tariq and Lili burn the sofa outside the apartment block. We subsequently learn that Noémi is till sleeping well because she kept one of the cushions.
This is a slight tale with an odd setting (e.g. a fantasy world where a succubus can become a sofa or a bookstore) and I don’t think it really works. I’d also add that the fact that it ended up as a Nebula finalist is baffling and seems to indicate a group of voters who are over-enamoured with frothy, feel-good pieces (or perhaps suffer from chronic pain themselves).
* (Mediocre). 2,750 words. Story link.

Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison (Amazing, June 1976) begins with two Highway Patrolmen taking Willis Kaw to identify the body of his daughter after she has been involved in a car accident (“The dark brown smear that began sixty yards west of the covered shape disappeared under the blanket”). We then see more of Kaw’s travails: he is a diabetic; his son, who is ninety-five per cent disabled, lives in a hospital; his house roof leaks in heavy rain; and so on. During these various trials Kaw thinks that he may be an alien:

He dreamed of his home world and—perhaps because the sun was high and the ocean made eternal sounds—he was able to bring much of it back. The bright green sky, the skimmers swooping and rising overhead, the motes of pale yellow light that flamed and then floated up and were lost to sight. He felt himself in his real body, the movement of many legs working in unison, carrying him across the mist sands, the smell of alien flowers in his mind. He knew he had been born on that world, had been raised there, had grown to maturity and then. . .
Sent away.
In his human mind, Willis Kaw knew he had been sent away for doing something bad. He knew he had been condemned to this planet, this Earth, for having perhaps committed a crime. But he could not remember what it was. And in the dream he could feel no guilt.  p. 35

Kaw later visits a psychotherapist and tells him about these alien thoughts and feelings, and speculates that Earth is a planet where bad people are sent to atone for their crimes. After listening his patient for some time, the psychotherapist recommends that Kaw places himself in an institution.
The story ends with Kaw committing suicide and (spoiler) he then finds himself being welcomed back to his home world by the Consul. When Kaw (now called Plydo) asks the Consul what he did to be banished to such a terrible place, the story flips the paradigm and Kaw/Plydo is told that he wasn’t being punished but honoured—life on Earth is so much better than on his home world!
The sophomoric message1 in this story, and the way it is delivered, is a useful reminder that Ellison didn’t do subtlety (or use Western Union).
* (Mediocre). 2,800 words. Story link.

1. Earth may have provided a pleasurable existence for a few but, for the vast majority of humanity throughout the ages, life has been short and brutal.

Good and Faithful Servant by Thomas F. Monteleone

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Good and Faithful Servant by Thomas F. Monteleone (Amazing, March 1976)1 begins with an exoskeleton clad future soldier called Denek reporting to his controller in Chicago that he has located approaching intruders and is going to engage. The subsequent combat sequence (which extends through the night and into the next day) sees him destroy three vehicles with laser and mortar fire. During the action we learn that Chicago may be the only world that Denek knows:

He wanted to finish this last one and return home. He missed the protective shell of the City, wrapped around him and the others like a great cocoon. It was incredible that anyone would wish to destroy Chicago. It was so unnatural to him, he could not understand.
What type of beings were the intruders? The question emerged slowly in his simple brain. Never seen, they were only known as an invading force that occasionally appeared on Chicago’s warning screens. Perhaps he would someday learn more about them.  p. 113

Before Denek leaves the battleground he notices one of the intruders is still moving. When he investigates he discovers it is a woman. Denek starts talking to her and learns that she is from another city state like Chicago, they have made a number of efforts to contact his city, and, unlike Denek and his fellow citizens who are controlled by Chicago’s computer, they are free.
Later that evening (spoiler) Denek takes off his exoskeleton and he and the woman make love but, when he wakes the next morning and puts it on again, the controls are overridden. Denek watches as his arm rises and the laser fires at the woman, killing her. The Chicago computer tells Denek that it is aware of what he did last night—and what he learned—before using the exoskeleton to tear his body apart.
This is a readable enough piece, but the action is fairly formulaic, and some may wonder why the computer didn’t override him the moment the woman started talking (thus saving itself a trained soldier).
** (Average). 4,200 words. Story link.  

1. This story and three other “Chicago” stories, Chicago (Future City, 1973), Breath’s a Ware That Will Not Keep (Dystopian Visions, 1975) and Far from Eve and Morning (Amazing, October 1977), were incorporated into the novel, The Time-Swept City (1977).

Stone Circle by Lisa Tuttle

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Stone Circle by Lisa Tuttle (Amazing, March 1976)1 opens with the narrator (after a short passage where, I think, she fantasises about being a huge stone statue) performing oral sex on a government inspector in exchange for meat (there are further indications that set this story in a totalitarian and oppressive society). After the inspector leaves, the building manager comes sniffing around and agrees to cook the meat for her.
When the narrator is later out in the street she ends up saving a young woman called Kit (who is under the influence of a drug called “Chill”) from being run over by a vehicle. Kit ends up going home with her and they become lovers.
After the couple have been together for a while, Kit—previously described as a “young revolutionary”—discovers there is an underground movement and starts meeting with two young men. The narrator isn’t interested in becoming involved, but agrees to let Kit and the men meet in her flat when one of the men loses his.
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees another government agent arrive at the flat to question the narrator about Kit, who is out at the time. He threatens to take the narrator’s flat away from her, before suggesting he will overlook the matter in exchange for sex. She gets undressed and he toys with her for a while before leaving abruptly. He tells her he will be back.
The narrator subsequently sees Kit kissing and groping one of the men in the stairwell of the building. Then, the next day, the narrator watches as the couple enter her flat on their own—at which point she betrays them to the government agent. Kit is not in the flat that evening, but the agent later turns up for sex.
There isn’t much to this brief piece apart from sexual exploitation and betrayal, a dystopian background, and some stone based imagery (“my marble flank”, “he’ll get no milk from my granite teat”, etc.). It’s hard to see what the point of all this is.
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words. Story link.

1. This story was a Nebula Award finalist.

The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr by George R. R. Martin

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr by George R. R. Martin (Fantastic, May 1976) opens with Sharra passing through a world gate. She has injuries from her fight with the gate’s guardian, and washes her wounds before falling asleep in a sheltered spot in the wood. Then Sharra regains consciousness to find that she is being lifted into the arms of a man. She is too weak to struggle, and he takes her to a nearby castle that was not there before.
When Sharra next wakes up she finds out that her saviour is called Laren Dorr, and the rest of the story sees them spend a month together at the castle (she agrees to stay and rest if he will show her where the next gate is). During this time, they talk and travel, and eventually become lovers.
From their conversations we learn the backstories of both characters: Sharra is making her way through various world gates as she searches for her lover, Kaydar, but the Seven don’t want her to succeed and have instructed the guardians of the gates to prevent her from passing; Dorr lost a battle with the Seven an age ago, was banished here, and has spent many years alone. Some of the information about Dorr is revealed through the songs that he sings for Sharra while playing an exotic sixteen-string instrument:

He touched it again, and the music rose and died, lost notes without a tune. And he brushed the light-bars and the very air shimmered and changed color.
He began to sing.
I am the lord of loneliness,
Empty my domain . . .
. . . the first words ran, sung low and sweet in Laren’s mellow far-off fog voice. The rest of the song—Sharra clutched at it, heard each word and tried to remember, but lost them all. They brushed her, touched her, then melted away, back into the fog, here and gone again so swift that she could not remember quite what they had been. With the words, the music; wistful and melancholy and full of secrets, pulling at her, crying, whispering promises of a thousand tales untold. All around the room the candles flamed up brighter, and globes of light grew and danced and flowed together until the air was full of color.
Words, music, light; Laren Dorr put them all together, and wove for her a vision.
She saw him then as he saw himself in his dreams; a king, strong and tall and still proud, with hair as black as hers and eyes that snapped. He was dressed all in shimmering white, pants that clung tight and a shirt that ballooned at the sleeves, and a great cloak that moved and curled in the wind like a sheet of solid snow.
Around his brow he wore a crown of flashing silver, and a slim, straight sword flashed just as bright at his side. This Laren, this younger Laren, this dream vision, moved without melancholy, moved in a world of sweet ivory minarets and languid blue canals. And the world moved around him, friends and lovers and one special woman whom Laren drew with words and lights of fire, and there was an infinity of easy days and laughter. Then, sudden, abrupt; darkness, he was here.  pp. 50-51

At the end of the month Shaara tells Dorr it is time for her to leave, and he takes her to the gate which, to Shaara’s surprise, is in third tower of the castle. On their arrival (spoiler), she is surprised to discover that there is no guardian present—at which point Dorr reveals himself and pushes her through the gate.
I thought this was a very good piece the first time I read it, but this time around I thought it was somewhat overwritten and a little slow-moving (see the passage above). That said, the part where Dorr pushes her through the gate rather than detain her is a neat twist (I think my subconscious was expecting him to be the guardian but I did not anticipate his actions) and, overall, it is a decent mood piece.
*** (Good). 7,250 words. Story link.

The Burning Man by Ray Bradbury

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Burning Man by Ray Bradbury (Long After Midnight, 1976)1 opens with a boy called Doug and his Aunt Neva driving to the lake in a “rickety Ford” on a baking hot day. On the way they stop to pick up a hitchhiker, a strange man who, as soon he gets in the car, starts raving about the heat, whether it can make you crazy, and various other things. Eventually, after asking Neva if she thinks there is genetic evil in the world, he articulates his strangest idea yet:

“Now,” said the man, squinting one eye at the cool lake five miles ahead, his other eye shut into darkness and ruminating on coal-bins of fact there, “listen. What if the intense heat, I mean the really hot hot heat of a month like this, week like this, day like today, just baked the Ornery Man right out of the river mud. Been there buried in the mud for forty-seven years, like a damn larva, waiting to be born. And he shook himself awake and looked around, full grown, and climbed out of the hot mud into the world and said, ‘I think I’ll eat me some summer.’”
“How’s that again?”
“Eat me some summer, boy, summer, ma’am. Just devour it whole. Look at them trees, ain’t they a whole dinner? Look at that field of wheat, ain’t that a feast? Them sunflowers by the road, by golly, there’s breakfast. Tarpaper on top that house, there’s lunch. And the lake, way up ahead, Jehoshaphat, that’s dinner wine, drink it all!”
“I’m thirsty, all right,” said Doug.
“Thirsty, hell, boy, thirst don’t begin to describe the state of a man, come to think about him, come to talk, who’s been waiting in the hot mud thirty years and is born but to die in one day! Thirst! Ye Gods! Your ignorance is complete.”
“Well,” said Doug.
“Well,” said the man. “Not only thirst but hunger. Hunger. Look around. Not only eat the trees and then the flowers blazing by the roads but then the white-hot panting dogs. There’s one. There’s another! And all the cats in the country. There’s two, just passed three! And then just glutton-happy begin to why, why not, begin to get around to, let me tell you, how’s this strike you, eat people? I mean—people! Fried, cooked, boiled, and parboiled people. Sunburned beauties of people. Old men, young. Old  ladies’ hats and then old ladies under their hats and then young ladies’ scarves and young ladies, and then young boys’ swim-trunks, by God, and young boys, elbows, ankles, ears, toes, and eyebrows! Eyebrows, by God, men, women, boys, ladies, dogs, fill up the menu, sharpen your teeth, lick your lips, dinner’s on!”

At this point Aunt Neva, who is obviously alarmed by the man’s raving, stops the car and tells him to get out, adding that she is armed with various items to ward off evil (crucifixes, holy water, wooden stakes, etc.). Aunt Neva and Doug continue their journey to the beach, and he learns that she lied to the man about being suitably equipped.
After a few hours at the lake they drive home in the dark. On the way (spoiler) they pick up a nine-year-old boy who has supposedly been left behind after a picnic. He is silent for a while, but then says something to Aunt Neva that makes her go pale. When Doug asks the boy what he said the car’s engine stops, and the boy asks whether either of them have ever wondered “if there is such a thing as genetic evil in the world?”
This is, like most late-period Bradbury, over-written and fanciful, and in this case has also a random ending—presumably the boy is another incarnation of the man, but this doesn’t tie in with the creation theory outlined earlier, or explain why the man didn’t pull this trick when he was first in the car. Just because this is a fantasy, it doesn’t mean that any old thing can happen.
* (Mediocre). 2,400 words. Story link.

1. According to ISFDB, this was first published as El Hombre Que Ardea in Gente (Argentina), 31st July 1975.

If the Martians Have Magic by P. Djèlí Clark

Posted on by Paul Fraser

If the Martians Have Magic by P. Djèlí Clark (Uncanny, September-October 2021)1 appears to be set in an alternate world where magic was discovered between the second and third Martian invasions of Earth and then used to defeat the aliens in that final encounter (the first invasion, in 1897, is presumably the one recounted in H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds; the third encounter takes place in 1903).
The story itself opens in Marrakesh some thirty years after the end of the war and sees a Mambo (voodoo priestess) called Minette, after initially negotiating the city traffic in a conventional way, make a deal with a loa (spirit intermediary) to loft her up to the Flying Citadel where The Council of Magical Equilibrium are assembled. Minette subsequently gatecrashes the meeting and pleads for the lives of three Martians.
During the exchanges that follow we learn that Minette has been studying (and joining with) a Martian triad (the Martians are only sentient when they join together in threes), and that the aliens may be on the verge of discovering a Martian form of magic (which would then alter their position under human law). Several of the council see any possible breakthrough as a threat, the most outspoken of whom is the war-mongering General Koorang. During the arguments between him and Minette we get an insight to this world’s complex background, which is full of throw away detail like this:

“Not every Martian was a soldier,” Minette reminded, speaking as much to the others gathered. “The One I joined with were worker drones. They never even saw fighting. That’s why it was so easy for the Central Intellect to abandon Them in the retreat.”
“And what did they work on?” the general asked, unmoved. “Was it their stalking dreadnoughts? Their infernal weapons what almost blew us to hell? Come visit the Archipelago sometime, Professor, and I’ll show you Martian gentleness.”
Minette bit her lip to keep from replying. That was unfair. The Archipelago was all that was left of what used to be Australia. The waters of the South Sea were mostly off-limits now: teeming with monsters that wandered in through torn rifts between worlds. That it was humans playing with Martian weapons who had brought on the disaster seemed to matter little to the general.

When the Council finally vote they decide that the prospect of Martian magic is too much of a threat to ignore but, rather than have Minette’s Martians euthanized, the Council decides to separate the creatures so they cannot form their sentient triad.
After the meeting Minette returns to the Martians and joins with them, after which they learn about what happened in the Council. Then the Martians give Minette a vision that suggests they are close to discovering their old magic.
The rest of the story sees the “mist-faced” woman from the Council meeting, who voted against Minette, secretly visit her and offer sanctuary to the Martians in exchange for some of their magic if they are successful. Then she and Minette plan how to smuggle the Martians out of the Academy.
The climactic scene (spoiler) sees Minette and the Martians intercepted by General Koorang and another man called Aziz as they try to leave. Minette then combines with the three Martians and, in a moment of insight, realises what she has to do to help them summon their magic:

Papa Damballah appeared. But not like Minette had ever seen.
This Damballah was a being made up of tentacles of light, intertwined to form the body of a great white serpent. And she suddenly understood what she was seeing. The loa met the needs of their children. Papa Damballah had left Africa’s shores and changed in the bowels of slave ships. He changed under the harsh toil of sugar and coffee plantations. And when his children wielded machetes and fire to win freedom, he changed then too. Now to protect his newest children, born of two worlds, he changed once again.
Minette opened up to the loa and Martian magic coursed through her, erupting from her fingertips. The guards, General Koorang and Aziz drew back, as the great tentacles of Papa Damballah grew up from her, rising above the market tents as a towering white serpent: a leviathan that burned bright against the night. For a moment brief as a heartbeat—or as long as the burning heart of a star—it seemed to Minette she saw through the loa’s eyes. The cosmos danced about her. It trembled and heaved and moved.
And then Damballah was gone.

Aziz tells the general the Martians are now protected under the charter, and Minette and the Martians get on the mist-faced woman’s airship and quickly leave.
This has an inventive and entertaining setting—the mixture of War of the Worlds Martians, magical councils and voodoo shouldn’t really work as well as it does—but the ending is weaker (it is literally a deus ex machina).
*** (Good). 7,050 words. Story link.

1. This is a Sturgeon and World Fantasy Award finalist, and placed third in the Locus Poll.

Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots, June 2020) is narrated by a haunted house, and sees it on its best behaviour when Mrs Weiss, a local realtor (estate agent), puts the house on the market:

The house misses 1989. It has spent so much of the time since vacant.
Today it is going to change that. It is on its best behaviour as the realtor, Mrs. Weiss, sweeps up. She puts out trays of store-bought cookies and hides scent dispensers, while 133 Poisonwood summons a gentle breeze and uses its aura to spook any groundhogs off the property. Both the realtor and the real estate need this open house to work.
Stragglers trickle in. They are bored people more interested in snacks than the restored plumbing. The house straightens its aching floorboards, like a human sucking in their belly. Stragglers track mud everywhere. The house would love nothing more than any of them to spend the rest of their lives tracking mud into it.

A widower and his rumbustious four-year-old daughter later arrive at the open house and start viewing the property. As they do so the house makes a number of minor interventions (it blows the door shut, gives the father a vision of his daughter’s vertigo, etc.) before finally showing them a hidden room. Unfortunately, Ana runs into a spinning wheel she sees in the room and knocks it over, cutting her hand and losing a bracelet into a crack in the floor. The father grabs his daughter and leaves. The house resists the urge to trap the pair in the room, but realises in that moment why other houses sometimes go bad.
Later that day (spoiler), the father and Ana, having realised she has lost her bracelet (which was previously her dead mother’s), return to find it. The house helps them to do so, and during the process we learn more about the pair’s backstory and the death of Ana’s mother. The father finally decides to buy the house.
A charming (and feel-good) haunted house story.
*** (Good). 3,000 words. Story link.

1. This story won the 2021 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. It was also the runner up in its Locus Poll category, fourth in the Hugo Award, and was also a World Fantasy Award finalist.

The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! by Peter Wood

Posted on by Paul Fraser 1 Comment on The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! by Peter Wood

The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! by Peter Wood (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2022) opens with the narrator, Savannah Myles, on a Western Alliance space station when the alarm goes off. She goes to the flight deck and we learn that (a) the female captain is her ex-girlfriend as of three weeks ago, (b) an alien spaceship moving at 60 times the speed of light is heading towards them (the aliens have somehow managed to message the station to let them know they are coming), and (c) Savannah is now attracted to Ingrid, another crewmember (even in the midst of the this momentous occasion we are told, “Ingrid was 100 percent the opposite of my hard-drinking, up-for-anything-anytime, blowing-off-work ex-husband”).
The rest of the first half of the story seems to be as concerned with Savannah’s interpersonal concerns as it is with the impending First Contact, and one of the other things we get throughout the story is a lot of literary name-dropping:1

I read the recreation activities wipe board. Canasta tournament Saturday. Book
Club tonight. Catcher in the Rye. Good God. We had just finished The Bell Jar. Somebody should write a book where the two depressed 1950s NYC protagonists find each other. Of course, I was a fine one to criticize depression.
I wanted to tell Ingrid a few things. Again. But I couldn’t go down that road. I shared the blame for our problems anyway. I signed up for station duty to escape a nasty divorce and then jumped right back in the water.  p. 143

Also mixed in with all of the above are a quirky robot called Yossarian (named after the Catch 22 character, presumably), and various messages from two feuding political parties on Earth, one of which looks likely to be replaced by the other around the time of the alien ship’s arrival (elections are currently taking place).
This all comes to a head when (spoiler) the two political parties’ spaceships arrive at the station at the same time as the aliens do. Then, when the opposition party ship subsequently attempts to dock with the station after being refused permission by the ruling party, it rips a hole in the superstructure. The crew have to abandon the station, and the aliens are not impressed with the squabbling politicians, so much so they make to leave. Only Savannah’s impassioned plea to the aliens that all humans are not the same (they just elect the politicians) stops them leaving.
There is the seed of a decent story here, and some amusing dialogue with Yossarian the robot, but the story can’t seem to decide if it is a First Contact story, a domestic soap opera, a literary salon, or a political satire. Consequently, it is a bloated mess (and one with an odd title).
* (Mediocre). 7,450 words.
 
1. As well as the two titles above, we also see mention of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ulysses, Things Fall Apart, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, and Bartleby the Scribner (I think this latter is meant to be Bartleby, the Scrivener, unless I have missed some joke). There are also references to Pablo Picasso, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ursula K. Le Guin (this latter is followed by an unconvincing, “Greatest writer of the twentieth century”.)


The Sin of America by Catherynne M. Valente

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Sin of America by Catherynne M. Valente (Uncanny #39, March-April 2022)1 has a beginning that suggests (more or less correctly) that the story is going to be an overwritten myth:

There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky comes so near to earth it has to use the crosswalk just like everybody else.
There’s a woman outside of Sheridan, sitting in the sun-yellow booth in the far back corner of the Blue Bison Diner & Souvenir Shoppe under a busted wagon wheel and a pair of wall-mounted commemorative plates. One’s from the moon landing. The other’s from old Barnum Brown discovering the first T-Rex skeleton up at Hell Creek.
There’s a woman outside of Sheridan and she is eating the sin of America.

We subsequently learn about (a) the woman (Ruby-Rose Martineau, middle aged, dead baby, parents run a butterfly farm, eating the sin of America), (b) the teenage waitress Emmeline (pregnant by the older and widowed owner), and (c) the diner (various items of décor). Then we see the diner’s clientele watch TV, and news of the trial of a man called Salazar.
Eventually, Ruby-Roses’s huge meal arrives and, as she works her way through it, she thinks about her past and how she came to be selected for her current task.
Many pages of description later, Ruby-Rose finishes her meal. She then goes outside—where (spoiler) the rest of the customers beat her to death. When a new customer arrives in the diner car park and sees Ruby-Rose’s body, a blood-spattered Emmeline tells him it’s okay, and “It’s the beginning of a new era. We’re all better now.” The TV in the diner shows the news that Ruby-Rose was behind a hedge fund Ponzi scheme.
I had no idea what the point of this was. Two suggestions in one of my Facebook groups were (a) that it is a Christ-allegory (she dies for their sins) or (b) it is similar to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, with its themes of scapegoating and conformity.2
Another story that illustrates the adage, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union”.
* (Mediocre). 5,600 words. Story link.

1. This is a 2022 Hugo Award short story finalist.

2. This is one of the Wikipedia interpretations of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.