{"id":3019,"date":"2022-03-07T21:32:51","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T21:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3019"},"modified":"2022-03-19T11:30:28","modified_gmt":"2022-03-19T11:30:28","slug":"secrets-of-the-heart-by-charles-l-grant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3019","title":{"rendered":"Secrets of the Heart by Charles L. Grant"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>Secrets of the Heart<\/em><\/strong> by Charles L. Grant (<em>F&amp;SF<\/em>, March 1980) opens with the child narrator all alone in a house (\u201cthe others are gone\u201d, \u201csome of them died\u201d, \u201cit wasn\u2019t my fault though\u201d) when five adults turn up at her door. They have had a car accident and need to use the phone, etc., so the girl invites them in and lets them make a call and asks if they want coffee.<br>This domestic routine continues for a while, but the telegraphing at the start of the story is then fleshed out. First, the girl tells the adults about her \u201crules\u201d, then she makes one of the adults stop breathing, and then none of them are able to open the doors or windows, or leave the house.<br>Later on (spoiler), one of the men asks if she is a telepath or telekinetic before she eventually lets them go (although they do not know she has arranged for a truck to crash into them when they get back to their car). The story ends with her deciding that she will leave the house and make the outside world obey her rules.<br>This reads like a slightly muddled version of Jerome Bixby\u2019s <em>It\u2019s a Good Life<\/em> and, if you have read that story, there won\u2019t be much new for you here.<br>** (Average). 3,600 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Secrets of the Heart by Charles L. Grant (F&amp;SF, March 1980) opens with the child narrator all alone in a house (\u201cthe others are gone\u201d, \u201csome of them died\u201d, \u201cit wasn\u2019t my fault though\u201d) when five adults turn up at her door. They have had a car accident and need to use the phone, etc., [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[743],"tags":[730,17,744,745,25,746,12],"class_list":["post-3019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charles-l-grant","tag-730","tag-17","tag-charles-l-grant","tag-evil-children","tag-fsf","tag-mental-powers","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3019"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3221,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019\/revisions\/3221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}