Shimmer, Vol 2, Issue 4, “The Art Issue”

Entitled “The Art Issue,” this issue of Shimmer begins with a Letter From the Art Director in place of the usual Letter From the Editor. The Art Director, Mary Robinette Kowal, explains the reasoning behind the issue: “we started with the art and ask writers to create their stories from these triggers.”

Save for the first story, which was written based on the cover illustration, the art and the stories they inspired are printed together. Unfortunately, this means the art is printed in black and white on plain paper stock, often resized to accommodate text on the same page and apparently printed with a standard printer. Given the detailed linework that features in so many of the pieces, this isn’t the best approach. Images are blurred and details are lost, and while this is likely the result of budget constraints, when the art is the purpose of the publication, it can’t help but have a negative impact. Only the illustration on the cover, “Penny’s Grave” by John Picacio, is printed on heavier paper stock, sized so that the details are fully visible.

“Penny’s Grave” inspired “Penny Wise” by Kurt Kirchmeier, the story of Ellsy Marcucci, a penny mage. As implied in the name, coin mages are those who can interact with coins to create small, brief magical effects. It’s rumored, however, that quarter mages can do love spells, and Ellsy’s friend, Harkyn, claims to be a quarter mage. She wants him to do a love spell for her parents, who are fighting, and doesn’t understand why he keeps refusing.

Ellsy’s an engaging character, and “Penny Wise” is full of vivid details that draw on the dark childhood imagery of “Penny’s Grave.” However, the plot doesn’t quite coalesce into a satisfying ending. While the elements are there, the narrative fails to bring them together smoothly, a choice perhaps meant to echo the ambiguity and messiness of the human relationships involved. The result is jarring, the momentum of the story undercut rather than building to a strong resolution.

Following “Penny Wise” is a brief interview with Picacio, providing an interesting insight into the artist whose work graces the issues cover.

The next story in the issue is “A Very Young Boy With Largely Clipped Wings” by Michael Livingston, inspired by the art piece “Cherub” by Sandro Castelli and riffing off of Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” In fact, the story starts with a quote from the García Márquez, setting up an expectation of magic realism that is not disappointed. Walking home one day, Pelayo encounters a child laying in the mud, a child with the stumps of wings protruding from his back. Pelayo takes the child home to his wife, Elisenda. There, they bathe the child and reveal yet more strangeness, namely his too-wide mouth and too-round head. At first, they keep him in the house, but when his attempts to fly shake the floor and threaten to send an oil lamp spilling, they move him to their shed, where they’re already keeping an old man they’d found years earlier, an old man with wings of his own.

“A Very Young Boy With Largely Clipped Wings” is a story rich with detail, taking the evocative central image of “Cherub” and spinning it into a tale of the rediscovery of hope. The titular boy is determined to fly, and his attempts re-awaken the dreams of those who live with him. Lyrically understated, Livingston’s writing nonetheless conjures fully realized characters and a strong sense of place. Crab nets and chickens, mud and brooms, are elements that ground the story even as they are each imbued with magical possibilities by the events of the plot.

“Within the City of the Swan” by Aliette de Bodard is the next tale in the issue, inspired by the piece “Conceptions of the Mind” by Fatima Azimova. Azimova’s art appears to suffer the most by the printing choice for this issue; full of intricate linework, both the size and lack of color make details difficult to discern. Nonetheless, the accompanying story hints at the richness the reader misses in the image. Invaders from Karwick, the City of Steel, have come to conquer Vareia, the City of the Swan. They’ve also come to hunt Jaya, the last of the Prophet’s line, whose blood is the key to the maze at the center of the city in which the Swan shelters. Analea, a healer of the city, is taken prisoner because Jaya was staying with her, and she is soon forced into the maze along with her captors, following Jaya’s trail. What lies at its heart is nothing any of them expect.

“Within the City of the Swan” builds a vivid alternate world peopled with interesting, complex characters. It also makes excellent use of alternating viewpoints in its first half, Analea telling her story in first-person past tense, and Jaya’s story told in a more distant third-person present tense. The last part, however, is all from Analea’s point of view, a distracting choice that feels lacking in perspective after the two viewpoints of earlier in the story. Even so, Bodard writes with a deft touch, and the lack is only because her characters and world are so engaging. The climax of the piece can be favorably compared to work by Patricia A. McKillip, and while this story is resolved satisfactorily, there’s a sense that both the characters and the world could support further stories, and they too would be well worth the reading.

Following Bodard’s story is “Even Songbirds Are Kept in Cages” by Josh Vogt, one of two non-art inspired stories in this issue. An unnamed first-person narrator recounts how his father buys a “mockingbird lady,” part bird and part human woman, and locks her up in the attic to sing for the family. The narrator, a young boy with a kind heart, determines to free her, despite his fear of his father and his concerns over what became of his mother.

The relationship between missing mother and forbidding father is actually the main weak point of “Even Songbirds Are Kept in Cages.” Contradictory hints are dropped, and the narrator’s father never quite gels as a character. The narrator, his brother, and the mockingbird lady, on the other hand, are all vividly written, and the narrator’s relationship with the mockingbird lady is affecting. He comes up with an interesting plan to free her, and the ending of the piece indicates he might have freed his family from the weight of their past as well. That part of the resolution might be stronger if that past weren’t quite so vague.

The second story not inspired by a work of art, Daniel A. Rabuzzi’s “Monologue with Birds and Burin,” is the story of the deconstructor, a mysterious woman who lives alone in a workshop near the sea. Each morning, she receives packaged birds in wooden boxes via a dumbwaiter, and she spends the day testing the birds to see if they can fly out over the sea, and perhaps catch up with those who “left her.” When the birds fail, she breaks them, types up the results of her work, places the reports in the boxes, and places the boxes back in the dumbwaiter to send to the constructor.

The particular day on which the story takes place is the deconstructor’s birthday, and she is delighted to find that one of the birds sent to her is a female swan, of whom she has high hopes. None of the birds succeed in her testing, however, and she ends the day hoping the next batch will do better.

It’s clear from the start of the story that the deconstructor is at least slightly mad, and both her madness and loneliness, as well as her manic joy in the birds, are conveyed through rich and formal language. The details of her workshop—the ignored insects, the broken gears and ancient filing cabinets—give a sense of great age and neglect, which feed into the deconstructor’s moments of intense and acknowledged loneliness. Most of the time, that loneliness remains unacknowledged, as though the deconstructor has had to draw away from it in order to function. This is an effective way to convey the depth of that loneliness, as the short passages in which the deconstructor absentmindedly digs for tools in her smock are effective indications of her disconnectedness from the reality surrounding her. While the ending is not exactly unexpected, it is poignant and lingering.

“Dresses, Three” by Angela Slatter is inspired by Chrissy Ellsworth’s “My Career as a Fashion Designer,” a full-page piece that nonetheless would have benefited from color printing. Slatter makes good use of the image’s motifs of birds, wings, and words in this fairy-tale inspired story. Young Finn’s mother, Cerridwen, is a Welsh seamstress, working for high society women in nineteenth-century England. Her latest patroness is Aurora De Freitas, seventeen and about to embark on her Season in England. Aurora is the ward of her uncle, Justin De Freitas, who has a past with Cerridwen and an unhealthy interest in his niece. It is Justin’s interest that drives Aurora’s request for three unusual dresses, the first of peacock feathers, the second of butterfly wings, and the third of words. In exchange for these dresses, she’ll give Cerridwen her freedom: a house, money, and the means to live without ever needing to sew again.

This is both a rich and delicate re-imagining of the fairy tale most often known as “Donkeyskin” or “Tattercoats,” and the choice to tell it from the viewpoint of the son of the seamstress who makes the wondrous dresses casts interesting light on the central incestuous relationship in that tale. Here, however, the central relationships are those between mother and son, seamstress and customer, and that shift makes this story highly engaging in its own right. Both Cerridwen and Aurora as seen through Finn’s eyes are beautiful, vulnerable, and dangerous, and Justin is terrifying, yet somehow small and petty. Finn understands just enough about class difference to feel intimidated by both Justin and Aurora, yet that’s as much force of personality as his sense of their power over himself and his mother due to their rank. As a result, the story doesn’t bog down in points of etiquette, no matter how interesting, and keeps the focus on the relationships, and on Cerridwen’s magical talent for making clothes out of almost anything.

The one misstep is that it is bookended at beginning and end with a few first-person paragraphs from the point of view of a much-aged Finn, paragraphs which also muddy the story’s tense. While important information is relayed in these sections, such information could have easily been imparted in a less jarring way.

The final story is “Flying and Falling” by Kuzhali Manickavel. Manickavel takes the startling imagery of Carrie Ann Baade’s untitled piece featuring a hawk headed infant and spins it into the story of Muhil, a girl born with odd knobs on her shoulders. The knobs worry her father, Ilango, and he grows even more worried as Muhil starts tipping herself off of things and trying to scratch off the skin on her back. Then he has a dream in which a tiny Muhil flies, and with her next attempt to throw herself out of his lap, she manages to hover for a moment, something shifting under the skin of her shoulders. At last, Ilango thinks he understands what his daughter is trying to do, and he decides to help her, to the alarm of family and neighbors.

Though very short, “Flying and Falling” is a story with strong impact. Ilango loves his child, but her alienness engenders fear as well as worry, and his choice to help her reads as a choice of the love over the fear. Of course, those who didn’t witness Muhil’s short flight view the situation very differently, and while the story is in Ilango’s point of view, still Manickavel manages to convey the other characters’ concern clearly enough to make even the reader wonder if Ilango perhaps isn’t deluding himself. That extra layer of doubt takes a beautiful magic realist story and gives it extra bite, a perfect note on which to end an issue with such strong themes of hope and the loss of it.

Despite the formatting problems with the featured art, this is a solid example of good fantastical short fiction, and an issue of Shimmer well worth acquiring.