Fantasy Magazine Online, November 12-26, 2007

I hadn’t satisfied my fantasy cravings on the web much before I read “Keeping Lilly” by Michael Obilade in Prime Books’ free online periodical, Fantasy Magazine. Stella and Jack are orphans who live in a cabin next to a lake. Their parents, Jon and Huda, died in a car accident near an unnamed ocean; Stella’s account suggests that they had premonitions of their demise. Stella fishes and Jack hunts, but neither of them is willing to kill, so they buy food in town, and Stella has neurological problems which manifest in seizures and hallucinations. One day, while fishing, Stella meets Lilly, an elemental, selkie-like girl who comes from the ocean but spends time in the lake. Lilly’s appearance causes tension between Stella and her brother, whose views of life conflict, and the resolution of their difficulties is uncertain.

Where this story is strongest, it is emotionally realistic and powerful—as in Jack and Stella’s arguments and Stella’s closing dream. It is at its weakest during the interludes about Jon and Huda and in other moments of emotional abstraction when peoples’ actions don’t make sense, or the narrator goes on a tangent. Stylistically, “Keeping Lilly”’s primary weaknesses are overwrought language and syntactical awkwardness. One particularly noticeable tangent, which also suffers from overwrought language, is the story Stella tells Lilly about her parents’ death:

“So I told her about my parents, and about the accident, and how they’d died, one after the other, like kamikaze moths mating beside a candle. I told her how the silk wings smelled, how they crinkled like old leaves underfoot.”

The reader needs to be given more connective tissue and more context before he or she can find emotional honesty in the poetic conflation of moths wings and grief. This story’s evocative imagery is a strength it could build on, however, and arguably the best passage in the entire piece is Stella’s closing dream:

“I held my father’s hand. We shut ourselves inside as all the water in the world crashed down upon us.”

Another November offering at Fantasy Magazine, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Shedding Her Own Skin,” set during the Mexican Civil War, is the haunting and violent story of a a thieving nahual (were-fox, in this case), a fifteen-year-old tomboy named Teresa, and her family. While Asuncion, her love-besotted sister, is busy mooning over romances or a boy named Ramon, Teresa’s busy guarding the chicken coop and hunting with their brothers. Nonetheless, she doesn’t shoot the nahual or refuse his first gift of a gold religious medallion when he appears, although she never asks his name and threatens or tells him to go away every time she sees him. Moreno-Garcia handles her protagonist’s emotions subtly and with skill:

When the nahual appeared, thinner it seemed, she rushed forward to hit the man, not embrace him. “What happened to you?” she asked.

This is a strong if simple story which compares well with the other pieces on the site. Minor grammatical errors do little to obscure its multidimensional characters (especially the protagonist) and realistically drawn setting, or to sever its appropriate connection to history. Like Judith Berman’s Bear Daughter, this story is more than the sum of its narrative; it is built on a psychological foundation which poetically encodes something fundamental about growing up and coming to understand oneself and one’s desires; it might even be said that it does what the best fiction does: teach the reader something about life which otherwise might only be learned from living. Moreno-Garcia’s nahual, like that of Castañeda, is a spiritual guide which leads other people into new (and in this case, suppressed) areas of consciousness:

“My mother wouldn’t like me running outside at nights with a man.”

“I’ll show you how to shed your skin and that way you won’t be a woman and I won’t be a man. There is an animal inside all of us wanting to be free.”

Teresa frowned, looking at her embroidery. “That’s a lie.”

The ending of “Shedding Her Own Skin” leaves room for a sequel, just as Ben Peek’s “Possession” begs for a novel or collection’s space within which to thoroughly unfurl its darkly glittering, vaguely steampunk, magico-futurist vision. Eliana is a reclusive botanist helping to regenerate the soil of a dangerous cleft in the Earth’s crust where nothing grows. One day, after a particularly thick ash-fall from the factories above, she finds a half-shattered female cyborg:

The girl made from bronze, the Returned, since she was not a real girl, this artificial girl had a loud, irregular moan in her chest: a broken machine whine that announced itself in a grinding of gears…

Peek’s rich, descriptive language suffers from syntactic awkwardness at times, but the religious and social structures he sketches around his characters make his narrative vivid and intriguing. His futuristic setting is an environmentally damaged area, and his cyborg is an indentured sex worker who had to sell her organs as well as sexual services to survive:

I had a hole in my heart…I was so afraid. I didn’t see endless service as a problem. I thought, “What’s so different about that to the life I currently live?”…I once had lungs. A liver. I had all my organs, and they worked—but now?…I can’t afford real livers, real replacements. I have fakes. I have simulations for sensations.

This story encourages its readers to re-vision the world they live in as only the best sci-fi and fantasy does, and its depth is rewarding. A woman whose history is written on her flesh meets a woman whose history parted her from her body in a damaged vulvic place where lava reputedly scarred the landscape. A broken heart stays broken, even when it is replaced with one made of metal. A planet’s grave shaft serves as a grave also for a woman whose body was as exploited as it was.

The last story posted this month, “Firing the Dead” by Celia Marsh, surprised me because its author turned out to be a new co-worker of mine. I don’t know her very well yet, but this unique and engaging story certainly makes me wish I knew her better. It opens at an odd yet poignant funeral:

The pots are arranged by size at the front of the church, grey dabs on the bright white of the altar cloth, with a smoked-glass urn standing at the back of the altar to hold Sophie’s ashes. Somewhere out of sight, a half-full slip bucket waits for her ashes to be added to the family clay at the conclusion of the service.

Our nameless narrator is fenced in by her roles as if she were a pot caught between shaping fingers: she is the dead Matriarch Sophie’s grand-niece; a survivor of her older sister, Tori; a former journeyman coroner (a type of sacramental ceramicist); and now her family’s heir. Evocative, even sensual language is one of this original and intriguing story’s strengths:

I close my eyes when we rise to sing, picturing clay on a wheel, feeling it writhe under my fingers, smooth and slick, thinning between my thumbs and forefingers as I draw it up, shape it.

The conflict between private aspiration and public duty has become tired in fantasy (and innumerable biopics of British royals). This story revivifies it with details and characters which feel realistic and familiar without being dull, and an unusual setting that blends interestingly with quotidian moments, like a young man struggling with a corsage pin. Aside from a few small missteps in phrasing, this is a well-crafted and tantalizing glimpse of what I suspect may be a longer work in which the deaths alluded to in this story are explained, the social structures and intriguing religion of our protagonist’s society are elucidated, and where we get to know more about Tori’s sister. I’m pleased with what I’ve read in Fantasy Magazine, and I look forward to perusing its December offerings.