{"id":5605,"date":"2022-09-17T11:54:24","date_gmt":"2022-09-17T11:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=5605"},"modified":"2022-09-27T12:40:47","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T12:40:47","slug":"that-story-isnt-the-story-by-john-wiswell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=5605","title":{"rendered":"That Story Isn\u2019t the Story by John Wiswell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

That Story Isn\u2019t the Story<\/em><\/strong> by John Wiswell (Uncanny<\/em>, November-December 2021)1<\/sup> opens with Anton leaving a vampire household with the help of an old friend called Grigorii. As they leave the house in Grigorii\u2019s car, Anton sees Mr Bird (the vampire) return:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A black town car trails up the street toward them. Sleek and black, with that short club of a man Walter at the wheel. Mr. Bird\u2019s senior familiar. Anton knows who sits in the tinted windows and the shadows of the rear seats.
From inside the Kia, Grigorii pops the passenger door open. \u201cCome on, man.\u201d
Is blood spotting in Anton\u2019s jeans? He gropes at his thighs, unsure if the moisture is sweat on his palms or if he\u2019s bleeding. The car is getting closer. Mr. Bird definitely sees him. Anton sinks into the car. He clutches his seatbelt until they are doing forty in a twenty mile zone. He\u2019s too worried to turn around, and too afraid not to fixate on the rearview mirror.
The black car stops in the middle of the street. A rear door opens, and a dark thing peers out. There is no seeing any detail of that figure\u2014no detail except for his mouth. It is open and sharp. Distance doesn\u2019t change how clearly Anton sees the teeth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Anton then meets Luis, another stray, at Grigorii\u2019s house, and worries about Mr Bird before examining himself in the toilet to see if the bite wounds in his thighs are still bleeding (these are semi-permanent, and bleed in the presence of Mr Bird). They aren\u2019t, which means that Mr Bird is not nearby, or not yet.
This background feeling of menace and unease pervades most of the rest of the story, and rises and falls as different events play out. To begin with, Luis is attacked on the way back from his job, something Anton thinks may be related to his departure and which causes a fight between the two when Anton tried to inspect Luis for bites. Then Walter, Mr Bird\u2019s familiar, approaches Anton to tell him that he must return, the first of two visits (during the second one Walter tells Anton that the twins, two of the vampire\u2019s other victims, have also run away).
There is never any force or violence used to get Anton to return, oddly enough and, towards the end of the story, the contacts stop and Anton transitions to a normal life. Then, one evening when Anton and a new boyfriend called Julian go out for a meal, Anton sees Walter working in the restaurant and realises that he has left Mr Bird too.
The story closes a few weeks later, when Anton goes out of town with Julian for the weekend and detours past Mr Bird\u2019s house: Anton sees the building is in an obvious state of disrepair and then, while he sketches the house, it collapses.
This has the trappings of a vampire story but is really a mainstream piece about escaping abusive relationships or situations, and one which suggests that people can choose their own destinies\u2014the line \u201cthat story isn\u2019t the story\u201d is used a couple of times:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walter asks, \u201cWhat made you think you could survive without him?\u201d
\u201cThat story is not the story I\u2019m telling today.\u201d [Anton replies.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

[Anton] asks [Grigorii], \u201cWhat happened to your [abusive] mom? Do you ever see her?\u201d
\u201cThat story is not the story I\u2019m telling today, man.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This would have been a reasonably good straight piece, but the story undermines itself somewhat by setting up the vampire menace at the beginning of the piece and then letting it fade away. That said, I realise that the idea of a perceived threat being more perception that reality may be one of the points the story is trying to make.2<\/sup>
** (Average). 9,000 words. Story link<\/a>.

1. This was a 2022 Hugo and Nebula Award novelette finalist, and won the Locus Poll.

2. I subsequently found this comment from Wiswell in a short interview<\/a> in the same issue of Uncanny<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other thing I knew was coming was Anton wouldn\u2019t have a normal ending. No confrontation with Mr. Bird. No fight to the death. No self-sacrifice. No diabolical master plan. Everything that we sometimes dread will happen to us, or our loved ones, because of our trauma? That is partially because we\u2019ve been harmed. It\u2019s also partially an illusion. I wanted to let Anton slowly recognize what was a trauma mirage, while his worthiness of self-respect wasn\u2019t illusory at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t get the self-respect part (if you don\u2019t feel that way by default then maybe perhaps that is more apparent), but the rest makes sense.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That Story Isn\u2019t the Story by John Wiswell (Uncanny, November-December 2021)1 opens with Anton leaving a vampire household with the help of an old friend called Grigorii. As they leave the house in Grigorii\u2019s car, Anton sees Mr Bird (the vampire) return: A black town car trails up the street toward them. Sleek and black, […]<\/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":[1020],"tags":[17,50,1308,1021,7,367,754],"class_list":["post-5605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-wiswell","tag-17","tag-50","tag-abusive-relationships","tag-john-wiswell","tag-novelette","tag-uncanny","tag-vampires"],"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\/5605","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=5605"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5713,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5605\/revisions\/5713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}