Tag: 2020

The Dragon Slayer by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dragon Slayer by Michael Swanwick (The Book of Dragons, 2020) begins with Olav’s backstory, and we learn that he is a wanderer and adventurer and was briefly married to a witch—until he caught her coupling with a demon and slew them both. When we catch up with him he is working as a guard for a desert caravan, which is later ambushed by brigands. Only Olav and (what he thinks is) a young boy survive. Then, when they camp that night, a demon comes out of the forest for Olav, and they only just escape after Olav sets the dry undergrowth on the periphery ablaze.
When the pair arrive at the city of Kheshem, Olav works as a cutpurse to get them the money they need:

The day’s haul was such that he bought the two of them a rich meal with wine and then a long soak in hot water at the private baths. When Nahal, face slick with grease, fiercely declared himself in no need of such fripperies, Olav lifted him, struggling, into the air and dropped him in the bath. Then, wading in (himself already naked), he stripped the wet clothes off the boy.
Which was how Olav discovered that Nahal was actually Nahala—a girl. Her guardians had chopped her hair short and taught her to swear like a boy in order to protect her from the rough sorts with whom traveling merchants must necessarily deal.
The discovery made no great difference in their relationship. Nahala was every bit as sullen as Nahal had been, and no less industrious. She knew how to cook, mend, clean, and perform all the chores a man needed to do on the road. Olav considered buying cloth and having her make a dress for herself but, for much the same reasons as her guardians before him, decided to leave things be. When she came of age—soon, he imagined—they would deal with such matters. Until then, it was easier to let her remain a boy.
At her insistence, he continued the lessons in weapons use.

Olav ends up working for a wizard called Ushted the Uncanny after Ushted materialises in their room and tells Olav that if he continues to steal purses he will be caught. The wizard explains that he can time-travel, and has talked to a condemned future-Olav in his cell. To prove his point, Ushted then takes the current Olav forward in time to show him what happened, and brings back an ashen-faced one in need of drink.
After this there are two other developments, Nahala makes a friend of her own age called Sliv (he doesn’t know she is a girl), and the demon from earlier in the story sets up a lair on a hillside near the city.
The story eventually concludes with Olav, Nahala, Ushted and Sliv going to confront the demon (the creature is terrorising the area and Ushted has volunteered his services to the city’s rulers), and the story proceeds to a busy conclusion which includes (spoilers): (a) Sliv discovering that Nahala is a girl and consequently showing his contempt; (b) Ushted the wizard making a deal with the demon (who is revealed as Olav’s witch-wife) for a time-travelling amulet; (c) Ushted giving Sliv the amulet after Sliv is revealed as the younger Ushted; (d) Nahala acquiring the amulet but being unable to use it; (e) a future-Nahala arriving and killing Ushted the wizard and the dragon-witch. After all this Nahala admires her future self, and the future-Nahala admires the unconscious Olav; she then tells the younger Nahala to tell him it was he who slew the dragon when he wakes up (“you know what a child he can be”).
If this all sounds over-complicated, it is—and it doesn’t explain why the time-travelling Ushted didn’t see what was coming. A pity, as it is reasonably entertaining story to that point.
** (Average). 6,450 words.

Those We Serve by Eugenia Triantafyllou

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Those We Serve by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Interzone #287, May-June 2020)1 begins with Manoli, an artificial, putting his summer skin on his steel chassis. Manoli is an illegal copy (the real/original Manoli lives in an undersea city) and he works on an island that is a tourist destination:

For a few precious hours the island seemed to belong only to the artificials. Manoli let himself feel enchanted by the walls painted bright summer colors but also by the pure white ones, as radiant as the sun. By the calm sea and the oceanic pools (such was their architecture that they seem to pour into the sea like a tilted glass of water). As he went up the wide and curved stairs that led to a small white church, he admired its decrepit beauty, the chipped green paint of the bells. The priest, another artificial, pulled at the rope and let them boom all the way out to the sea, his long black robes and bushy beard blowing in the high wind. He greeted Manoli with a subtle nod and then crossed his hands and fixed his stare at the horizon.
How could the priest reconcile his nature with his birth memory? Did he still believe he was a God’s creature? Manoli wondered the same thing about every artificial but he always reached the same conclusion: it depended on the person they were made from. Their birth memories and the personality their human had. They could not escape it.

The rest of the piece sees Manoli looking for a woman called Amelia, who arrives later but does not seem to be aware that Manoli is an artificial. Then we see Manoli experiencing the memories of his original who, when Manoli meets him later, complains about living in the undersea city and tells Manoli that the originals are coming to take their lives back. When Amelia later arrives at the bar to join the two of them, she doesn’t recognise the original Manoli.
The piece ends with (spoiler) Manoli managing to overcome his programming and leave the island with Amelia.
This has a confusing start and the rest of it is pretty mystifying too. Even once I realised that Manoli was an artificial person, the reason for their existence never convinced (real people hiding away from the tourists in an undersea city). I also didn’t understand why Amelia was with Manoli (did she not know he was an artificial?) or why she didn’t recognise the original in the bar. This may be one of those stories that is operating on a dreamlike or allegorical or symbolic level—if so, it went over my head.
* (Mediocre). 5,800 words.

1. The writer briefly speaks about the story here.

Behind Our Irises by Tlotlo Tsamaase

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Behind Our Irises by Tlotlo Tsamaase (Africafuturism, 2020) opens with the unemployed female narrator getting a new job—but one which later has a catch:

Every eye in our firm runs surveillance programs behind its pupil. Connected through the authenticated enterprise cloud network to the central servers of the Firm. Able to detect corporate theft, infraction, abuse of work assets and more. Much more. I knew about the eyes but I only noticed the holes in our necks, stabbed into the jugular, into the carotid artery in that unsurveilled split second when my black pupils blinked silver and then back to black as the company automatically upgraded me. In that fraction of a second, when all their restraints loosened, I tried to scream.

The story charts the narrator’s journey from unemployed to intern to nanotech-injected corporate slave—an in-your-face and nuance free anti-capitalist tale (“Each one of us a well-oiled cog of the workplace machine”, etc.) which unconvincingly over-dramatizes the dystopian aspects of corporate jobs.
* (Mediocre). 4,300 words. Story link.

Retention by Alec Nevala-Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Retention by Alec Nevala-Lee (Analog, July-August 2020)1 is in the form of a customer service call where the caller is continually fobbed off when he tries to cancel his contract:

Thank you, Perry. How can I help you today?
I want to disconnect my security system and close my account, please.
I see. Just so we’re on the same page, you’re saying that you have some issues with your current service, and you want to explore your options?
That’s not what I’m saying. I’ve decided to disconnect my security system and close my account.
I understand. We know that your needs can change and that you want your services to reflect this. But we appreciate your business, and we hate to lose you. To help you figure out your options, I’d like to ask you a few questions. Okay?
I’m not sure why you need to ask me anything. I just want to cancel.
It helps me put together a package that meets your budget and your needs.
The price isn’t the problem.
You see, it helps me to know that. What do you value the most in your current package?
Again, I don’t see why you need to ask this.
Well, my job is to have a conversation with you about your service.
With all due respect, I don’t think your job involves having a conversation with me at all. I’d just like to cancel my account, please. Is that something you can do? Yes or no?

It soon becomes apparent that (a) the answer is “no” and (b) that he is talking (spoiler) to an AI. Then we discover that the caller isn’t human either, but an algorithm that reflects his dead owner’s tastes and needs. The story ends with the two still going round in circles hundreds of years later.
This has an amusing beginning, and becomes pleasingly and quirkily existential later.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 2,750 words.

1. Nevala-Lee notes on his blog that there are three versions of the story available (two are audio recordings).

Lovers on a Bridge by Alexandra Seidel

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Lovers on a Bridge by Alexandra Seidel (Past Tense, 2020) opens with Gretchen looking at a painting (Woman at the Window by Caspar David Friedrich) which is displayed in a place she does not recognise. Then, as she tries to work out where she is, there is the sound of footsteps in the darkness that surrounds her. She flees, and later comes upon another painting (Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Meditation), and sees a man sitting on a bench in front of it. He tells her that she is no longer in the Louvre. Shortly afterwards, he adds:

“I’m The Curator, by the way. It is very nice to meet you.”
“Gretchen,” Gretchen says.
“Oh. That reminds me of the fairy tale, the one with Hansel and Gretel, lost and alone, and a witch, no less alone, but a good quantity more hungry.” The Curator smiles warmly at Gretchen. He indeed sits there as if it were a sunny Sunday afternoon in Central Park, not pitch black night in a strange room with a painting that shouldn’t give off light but does anyway.
“Ah . . . ”
“Heh. In case you worry I might eat you, don’t. After all, you walked into The Gallery because you could, and that makes you a guest.”
Gretchen’s hands roll themselves tight. “Out of curiosity, can guests leave whenever they want to?”
The Curator’s face drops, not in an angry way. He looks almost like a beaten dog, and Gretchen, for some silly reason, finds herself feeling sorry for him. “They can. Whenever they so desire.”

The rest of the story sees the pair wandering around this strange place looking at other works (The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh; Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet; The Luncheon on the Grass by Edouard Manet; Witches at their Incantations by Salvator Rosa; The Lovers by Sandro Botticelli; Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian; The Ambassadors by Hans Hohlbein the Younger, etc.), all of which give the impression they may be portals to other places. During the tour Gretchen becomes attracted to the curator, but also starts having flashback images and fears she may be dead.
Finally (spoiler), the man reveals to her (a) that the Gallery (a supernatural entity, I presume) must have a curator who is not an artist, and that person cannot leave until they recruit a replacement, and (b) that she is his. The Curator baulks when it comes time to leave her though, and his exit closes. The story ends with an artist painting the now-lovers and joint curators standing at the apex of a bridge.
This is an okay piece but a slow moving one, and I’m glad it didn’t go for the obvious switched persons ending. That said, its multiple painting and mythology references will probably be of more interest to fine arts graduates than they were to me (I could only visualise one, the van Gogh).
** (Average). 4,900 words.

The Moon Fairy by Sofia Samatar

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Moon Fairy by Sofia Samatar (Conjunctions #74, 2020) begins with a moon fairy arriving in the life of a young girl called Sylvie. Most of the rest of the story details their relationship (as well as Sylvie’s domestic arrangements):

[Poor] Mittens, whom no one loved more than Sylvie, was given away to the neighbor children soon after the fairy’s arrival. From the window on the landing overlooking the neighbors’ garden, Mittens could be observed in her new circumstances, mewling piteously as the children forced her into doll clothes, tied her up in a wagon, and dragged it over the grass. “Poor creature!” Sylvie was heard to murmur, standing at the window. However, she made no attempt to rescue the cat, which had scratched her darling’s wing, leaving a gash that took days to heal. As she looked down, holding the curtain back with one hand, the Moon Fairy curled up in its customary place on her shoulder, sighing placidly and nuzzling her neck.
It really was a charming creature. It smiled, laughed, turned somersaults in the air, played hide-and-seek among the clothes on the line, danced when Ellen played Chopin—did everything but speak. In the evenings, when its energy tended to rise, it would fly round the room up close to the ceiling, emitting a happy buzzing sound. Sylvie said it was singing, but Uncle Claudius, who often dropped by in the evening to have a drink with Father, opined that the buzzing was caused by the movement of the fairy’s wings, “in the manner of a bumblebee or other insect.” “Nonsense,” said Sylvie, frowning. She disliked hearing the fairy compared to an animal. Since the fateful evening when the young man she’d been walking out with that summer (the son of some family friends, a law student with excellent prospects) had rashly referred to the Moon Fairy as “your new pet,” he had been forbidden the house, and the increasingly desperate telephone messages from him we wrote down were crumpled up unread.

Sylvie’s intense relationship with the fairy eventually starts to unravel (Sylvie becomes possessive—she ties a thread to its ankle—and the fairy later turns on her). Then the fairy returns to the Moon, leaving the girl broken-hearted and inconsolable, a condition that still pertains years afterwards.
It is hard to see what point this is trying to make, unless it is an allegory for love affairs in general (dump your current attachments—the cat and the suitor—then get dumped yourself and pine away). If it is about that then the twee tone and content undermine the message.
** (Average). 3,150 words. Story link.

Fog and Pearls at the King’s Cross Junction by Aliya Whiteley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Fog and Pearls at the King’s Cross Junction by Aliya Whiteley (London Centric, 2020) begins with some parental backstory about the narrator’s unhappy family life and how she runs away from home after receiving a letter from a Mr Roderick, who lives in 1950’s London and wants to employ her as his assistant. After Roderick picks her up at a grimy, post-Blitz railway station, he takes her to his unique home, the “lighthouse”, where they eat oyster stew, and he tells her about his research:

“Did you know that I used a dozen oysters in the preparation of this dish? Well, of course, you couldn’t know. That’s why I’m telling you. Have you eaten oysters before? They’re fresh from the Thames this morning.”
“I haven’t,” I said. That explained the rubbery texture.
[. . . ]
“Oysters. They have a marvellous defence mechanism. When a tiny piece of grit or a parasite slips into their shell they begin to coat it in a substance called nacre. Nacre slowly takes the painful and makes it bearable. More than that, nacre makes it beautiful. It creates a thing of perfection. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Miss Prisman?”
His tone grated on me, I’ll admit. I replied, letting my smart mouth get the better of me, “You’re telling me that you’ve let me, an irritation, into your shell. But you’ll wear me down and change me over time into the perfect assistant.”
To my surprise, he laughed out loud. “No no no! Not at all! What an imagination you have. I’m telling you that I collect and categorise pearls.”

She is then taken to another part of the lighthouse and shown the pearls Roderick has collected. In addition to the usual white ones there are gold, silver, black, blue, pink, and, finally, blood red varieties. Later, after she has been working for Roberick for some time, she learns how he obtains the pearls during a dense and life-threatening London fog. During this, they climb up the lighthouse and turn on a flashing device that Roderick’s uncle invented, and individuals lost in the fog then turn up at their door. Once inside they are provided with air canisters and facemasks to aid their breathing, but lapse into unconsciousness due to a secret anaesthetic. Roderick then tells her (spoiler) to scrub up and help him with an operation:

Roddy opened up the man’s mouth and lowered in his scalpel. I was determined not to wail and scream, and I’m proud to say I didn’t. I watched the whole thing from beginning to end, and even passed Roddy the needle and thread when he asked for it.
But the sewing up was not the exciting part, of course. The best bit was when he said, behind his little white mask, “I can’t quite believe this,” and used a long pair of tongs to reach far into the throat and produce a small red ball that he dropped into the palms of my hands.
I rolled it between my fingers. The colour didn’t come from the blood in which it was coated. It truly was red, as bright and as brilliant a red as I’d ever seen. Just like the ones in the cabinet down in the basement.

The rest of the story eventually telescopes forward in time to a period where London smog is eliminated by the Clean Air Act, and Londoners stop producing pearls. Then Roderick dies. Finally, she notes that red pearls from China have started coming onto the market. . . .
This is an original and entertainingly offbeat story—a genuinely weird idea, but one that is anchored by its convincing narrative voice (she sounds like someone from the 1950s) and historical setting. The only drawbacks are (a) the pearls would presumably also be found in normal post-mortems, and (b) there is a social justice message shoe-horned in right at the end, where she says that they were robbing the poor, just like the city does (“It takes from the poor, and seals their wealth in basements, never to be seen again”). This introduces a discordant note at the end of the story, even though it recalls the mother’s comments at the beginning. Still, not bad, and a pleasure to read something that is written in a British voice for a change (rather than the American or mid-Atlantic tone adopted by so many other Brits).
*** (Good). 6,200 words.

The Monogamy Hormone by Annalee Newitz

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Monogamy Hormone by Annalee Newitz (Entanglements, 2020) opens with the narrator, Edwina, smearing bacterial slime on the wall of a preschool lunchroom: this introduces one of the two pieces of SF decoration in this essentially mainstream story (“twenty years ago, nobody would have believed that smearing germs on the walls of schools could save a whole generation from asthma and irritable bowel syndrome”). The other piece of decoration appears when Edwina discusses her love-life problems with two of her friends at lunch1 (Edwina has two lovers), and they suggest that she take a magic pill (sorry, a “Eternalove” hormone pill) to help her work out which one she truly wants.
Edwina then spends the weekend with her girlfriend Augie and decides she is the one. However, after subsequently spending time with Chester, Edwina realises she is equally in love with him.
Edwina calls her friends for more help, and Alyx puts her right:

Edwina could feel tears in her eyes, and her contacts started to drift off her irises with an annoying string of error messages. She blinked them back into place and used one finger to draw circles on the bar with a blob of water. “I want to have kids. Nobody will let you marry two people and have kids with them.”
Alyx looked more serious than she had ever seen them. “You know that’s bullshit, right? I can’t think of a better place to raise kids than with grownups who love each other.” They drummed their fingers on the bar and seemed lost in thought for a moment. “Marriage is like every other brand that has staying power. Think about YouTube. It used to be part of a private company, and it was full of really bad stuff, like Nazis and crazies talking about rounding up gay people. But then YouTube spun off and became part of the public broadcasting network, and now it’s all educational programs and people gardening and stuff. That was a major rebrand, but it worked. Most people don’t even know that it used to be dangerous for kids to go there.”
“And this is related to my situation how?” Edwina drained her glass.
“Marriage is another changing brand. It used to be only for cis heterosexuals, but now gay people can get married—at least, in a lot of places. People don’t think of marriage the same way anymore. Even in North Carolina, where they have those Family First laws, people are protesting. Here in California, you can create an indie brand marriage. And you know what happens to indie brands, right?” Alyx winked. “They get appropriated by giant megabrands. Pretty soon, ProTox will be marketing a placebo for people who want to fall in love with more than one person. I guarantee it.”2

Fortunately, when Edwina later discusses the matter with Augie and Chester (each of who know about the other), they are both super fine with the arrangement because Edwina can do things with the other person that they don’t want to. And they all lived happily ever after.
This is a modern day relationship story pretending to be an SF one, and the fact that it is also inane and naïve (its view of human relationships reads like something written by a bright 14-year-old that has never had one) makes it even less attractive. It is also, ultimately, dramatically flaccid as it turns out there is no problem to solve here other than the one in Edwina’s head. At least it is breezily written.
* (Mediocre). 5,200 words.

1. A fellow Facebook group member remarked that, in this type of story, none of the characters ever seem to have a particularly demanding job and spend most of their time hanging out.

2. Mmm, I’m not sure YouTube is “full” of Nazis, etc.—I only ever see a lot of very useful clips that help people accomplish all sorts of different things. I also doubt there is a huge pent-up demand for polyamorous relationships.

Stepsister by Leah Cypress

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Stepsister by Leah Cypress (F&SF, May-June 2020) opens with King Ciar’s friend, “Lord” Garrin, telling tales of his youth in a tavern. During this we get a chunk of backstory about his royal castle upbringing and, in particular, the story of how Garrin was once whipped for hitting the prince too hard (they were practise-sparring with wooden posts). We also learn that Garrin is a potential claimant for the throne. Then, towards the end of this scene, he is summoned by King Ciar and told to go and retrieve the Queen’s stepsister.
We don’t actually see Garrin set off on his quest but instead see a twisty plot set in motion, during which we learn that (a) the Queen had a cruel step-family who tortured her, and that she ordered them stoned to death after she got married, (b) the King intervened and ordered Garrin to take one of the step-sisters, Jacinda, far away and hide her from the Queen, and (c) that Garrin once danced with Jacinda after meeting her as she fled from the castle on the night of the Fae Ball:

We all grew up knowing that we shared our world with the fae. They lent magic and wonder to our grinding lives, favored us with the occasional sprinkle of miracle or tragedy, and all they asked in return was for us to dance. Once at midsummer and once at the winter solstice: a grand ball, for royalty and commoners alike, where the dancing gets wilder all through the night and our movements shimmer with beauty and abandon. Nights when the ugly appear beautiful and the beautiful transcendent, when the melancholy turn joyful and the happy go insane, when romance turns into a solid reality and princes fall in love with peasant girls.

I knew her name by then: Jacinda. And I had seen and recognized the token tucked into the bodice of her gown, a lock of golden hair bound with silver thread. Ciar gave one like it to every girl he fancied.
But she had left Ciar and danced with me, and though I knew I should not have allowed it, I was filled with a tender joy. It was the music and the magic strumming through my skin, turning my mind inside out and making me forget the rule my safety was built around: You must never take anything from Ciar.
But she was so fierce and so real, and for the first time in my life, I wanted something so badly I didn’t think about the consequences. (A foolish mood, not a brave one. The consequences, like the morning, would come anyhow.) I reached for her hand and pulled her closer, and her dark eyes watched me, then slowly closed as I bent my head to hers.
Our lips barely touched. She made a small, pained sound and stepped back.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Jacinda subsequently explains that what he is feeling isn’t love but fae magic (she has enchanted her glass slippers with her own “blood and pain, to ensnare a suitor of royal blood”). After she leaves Garrin remains smitten.
All of this, and more that follows, has led many commentators to refer to this as a Cinderella story, but you could change some of the previous details (the step-sisters, the glass slippers, etc.) and you’d pretty much have the same story—one which, if you are looking for literary comparisons, probably has more in common with Game of Thrones given its tale of bastards, royal succession, and palace intrigue.
The rest of the tale (spoiler) further complicates the story, and sees Garrin get a note from Jacinda asking him to stay away, and the Queen’s maid trying to stab him to prevent him going on his journey. Then the Queen tries to get Garrin to betray the King while the latter is in earshot. Garrin manages to avoid this trap, and listens outside the door as the King and Queen argue about her inability to conceive and how they need to go to Jacinda to undo a fae curse.
The last scene sees the King and Queen, Garrin, and Amelie the Queen’s maid go to Jacinda’s cottage (and before they leave Amelie reveals to Garrin that she is fae and tells him how Queen Ella got her own enchanted slippers).
At the cottage they find that Jacinda has a baby boy, which is obviously King Ciar’s child—but Garrin saves the boy’s life by claiming it as his own.
This is a readable piece with well-drawn characters (Garrin’s endless vigilance is particularly well done) and a satisfyingly twisty plot. The fae magic and the Cinderella references are also well integrated into the story and don’t distract from the main thrust of the tale.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 14,000 words.

A Feast of Butterflies by Amanda Hollander

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Feast of Butterflies by Amanda Hollander (F&SF, March-April 2020) opens with a constable, in a far-flung outpost of what seems to be an Asian empire, summoned to see one of the village elders called the “Judge”. When he arrives the constable is told that five boys have gone missing (one of them is the Judge’s grandson), and that a young woman who lives on the other side of the mountain may be responsible.
When the constable later arrives at the village where the boys went missing he speaks to an old woman who subsequently takes him to “the girl who eats butterflies” (a habit she acquired after her brother died in suspicious circumstances, possibly involving roving young men):

The young woman was crouched by a large spider web stretched between whorls in the tree bark. She did not appear to notice them. But could she even see them, he wondered, for butterflies of every color of the rainbow fluttered around her hands and face, some even trying to alight on her eyelashes. They beat the air with light wings. The young woman’s attention, though, was intensely focused on the lines of the spider web. Near the web’s center, a butterfly struggled against the threads that bound it. The young woman’s delicate fingers pulled the creature’s quivering body from the sticky strands. The insect beat its crimson wings furiously as the girl plucked its legs free, one by one. She examined the lines of red and black, glowing in the afternoon sun. Then, as gently as she removed the insect from the web, she folded it into her mouth. Her sharp teeth bit into the butterfly. The wings twitched fiercely, then not at all. Legs crunched and divided between the river stones of her teeth. Antennae hung over her lip. She looked up and saw them watching her. Her tongue slipped out to catch the ends of the legs and swept them into her mouth. She chewed for a moment, then swallowed.

Further developments (spoiler) see the constable (a) read his predecessor’s report about the brother’s death, which indicates there were signs of foul play, (b) surreptitiously observe the woman and see her turn into a spider, (c) get punched in the mouth by the Judge when the latter runs out of patience, and (d) write a letter to the woman (who reads it and then nods to him).
Finally, the Judge, his servants, and the constable go to the woman’s house. When they finally force their way into the building they see five cocooned bodies hanging from the ceiling. The woman vanishes, the servants take the bodies back to the village, and the Judge is bitten by a snake and dies.
The final scene sees the constable kill a rat that he has seen once before in his office:

The constable shifted in his seat. His muscles coiled and he sprang across the room, his teeth sinking into the fur and flesh. Venom quickly stilled the rodent’s twitching. The constable withdrew his fangs and tried to take the paralyzed creature into his mouth. It didn’t fit. He unhinged his jaw and swallowed the animal whole, the tail the last bit to slip past his lips and down his gullet.

This piece gets off to an intriguing start but eventually devolves into a fairly standard were-animal/shapechanger story, and one with an ending that pretty much comes out of nowhere (there are, at best, a couple of vague suggestions that the constable is a were-snake). I also have reservations about were-animal or shape-changer stories that don’t adhere to conservation of mass principles (I know this will sound daft, but I can suspend disbelief if a person turns into a person-sized spider or snake, but not if the creature is much smaller).
** (Average). 6,050 words.