Quick Sips - Uncanny #26 [February stuff]

Art by Julie Dillon

It’s a full February at Uncanny Magazine, with two poems, two short stories, and a novelette to round out this shortest month of the year. The fiction is broken situations. People who have been abused and are looking for a place to belong. And yet finding that place isn’t always easy—often what might seem safe could be a new abuse in disguise, a sort of pitcher plant designed to lure in the desperate. For those who can avoid the traps, though, the pieces also focus on the joy that can be found in finding a place, and a people, who make you feel at home. With a purpose that rings true and the ability to live, even if it will always be tempered by the ways the world is broken or corrupt. So let’s get to the reviews!

Stories:

“Willows” by Delilah S. Dawson (8092 words)

No Spoilers: April and O’Leary have retreated to the O’Leary family estate, the Willows, presumably to write a new album. Only ever since arriving at the estate, the two have been acting differently. Strangely. For April, it means being steeped in a past that she doesn’t have the strongest connection to but can feel the yearning for in her bones. For O’Leary, he seems almost a different person, completely changed from the man he was. For both of them, it means trouble, as their new album is coming due and their money is running out. It’s a story that feels full of a Southern Gothic, where the past is a tangible force and not one that seems to have these people’s best interests at heart. And it’s a draining, horror-tinged read that mixes a lightly speculative story-line with a heavy mood and poignant weirdness.

Keywords: Music, Houses, Ghosts, Family, CW- Pregnancy, Horses, Marriage

Review: This is a strange sort of ghost story, where it’s not necessarily a specific ghost or ghosts that are haunting the couple. It’s a place. A house that has seen so much life and death. And it’s trying to get them to fit into its mold. To shape them so that they can be truly “of the family” in a way that doesn’t allow for resistance or rebellion. Which isn’t an easy task, given that these are two musicians, free spirits. At the same time, they are also dealing with April being pregnant, something that doesn’t fit with what the house wants. With what the O’Learys are. And I like the way that the story strips O’Leary of his first name early on, making him less an individual and more the entire family, living and dead. He is a part of the Willows, caught as soon as they arrived, and April is left with only strands of herself to cling to. Her music. Her hopes. Her fears. Her child. Which I feel is a big part of the story, for me, the push and pull that both of them have because she’s pregnant. Where O’Leary falls back on the lies of his family, the injustices and cruelties of it, because he’s not willing to face the idea of children, of marriage. Where April has hopes that they can still have a storybook romance, while O’Leary is browsing the horror section instead. The house is hungry, though, and as the story progresses I like how it moves in, isolating April from the outside world and trapping her in this place where she doesn’t really know the rules, but she’s still held to them. It’s gripping and dark and full of an oppressive atmosphere that builds to a creepy and unsettling ending. And it’s definitely a strange piece, haunting and difficult at times, but it’s definitely worth spending some time with! A fine read!

“Dustdaughter” by Inda Lauryn (5977 words)

No Spoilers: Dust (full name Dustdaughter) has been dropped off with a woman with stars for eyes. A woman who can introduce her to a world that her mother never wanted her to be a part of. But, following an incident at her grandmother’s funeral, she can no longer be denied. The piece explores the loss that Dust has suffered, the kind of abuse that comes from a parent afraid for her safety and for her soul. Who has spent every moment trying to get Dust to internalize her mother’s distrust and disdain for the natural world and it’s strange, dangerous magic. It’s something that makes for a complicated mother-daughter relationship but also sets up the beauty of the piece, the realization and blooming of the feelings that Dust has always had but has never had language or guidance for. It’s a story about stepping out of a protective shadow and into a power that is hers by birthright.

Keywords: Covens, Magic, Family, Ancestors, Death, CW- Abuse

Review: I love how the story sets up Dust’s journey, her movement from being afraid of everything her mother taught her to be afraid of to being able to trust herself when it comes to her own intuition and feelings. And it seems so real to me how her mother tried to shelter and isolate her from things that weren’t civilized, because she viewed those things as attracting the “wrong kind of attention.” As “asking for trouble” and other victim-blaming bs that parents often buy into because it’s either play along or try and reconcile the fact that society blames victims. That to be a black girl means to live by different standards, and if she learns that those standards are wrong, she’ll want to fight back against them. Which many terrible people will want to punish. But in trying to manipulate Dust into “being safe” they are also burdening her, trying to take away her childhood and her joy, her right to know herself and to decide her own future. And I love that Dust here is finally able to start to come into her own, to be treated like she’s a person and allowed a say over what she does and what risks she takes. Because as dangerous as it might be, there’s also something immensely powerful about finding kin, about finding family, about having a support network that can work magic. Because as much as it doesn’t mean there isn’t danger in the world, it does mean that there is guidance, and care, and people fighting together to push for a better world where no one has to hide or hate themselves or live always in fear. And it’s a beautiful story captured through the gaze of a child and exposes all the hypocrisy of adults who think that being older gives them the right to decide the fates of the young. A wonderful read!

“The Thing, With Feathers” by Marissa Lingen (5989 words)

No Spoilers: Val is a lighthouse keeper in a world that has changed, where many of the birds have become...something else. Where people have magic that they can use for various reasons but most of all they need it for defense, because ever since the change humans don’t seem the most dominant force on the planet. And Val has given up a life in the city for one spent in along a lake that’s seeing less and less human traffic, and more and more strange and twisted things rising from the waters. Even so, it’s an isolated, quiet, solitary life that she leads. Until, of course, a man arrives like an echo from her old life, with a request she doesn’t want to think about. The piece is all about isolation, and the loss of hope, and maybe, just maybe, the reversal of both of those.

Keywords: Magic, Lighthouses, Birds, Transformations, Pollution, Healing

Review: I really like how this story takes on isolation. I very much hesitate to say that it deals with loneliness, because Val for me never really comes off as lonely. She’s dedicated to what she’s doing, and she’s content. So I don’t really read her as lonely. But I do definitely see her as isolated. So when Lucian comes along, with his own quiet and his own patience and his questions and his willingness to listen, it’s this very tender surprise. Because he doesn’t treat himself like he’s there to save her from loneliness. He doesn’t leverage himself in a way that seems coercive or manipulative. Yes, he wants his magic healed so that he can do more again, but he’s there very honestly and always offering things without strings. He doesn’t offer to help because he hopes to trick Val into healing him. He offers to help because he wants to, because he can, and he doesn’t hold back. Even so I also love that it’s not perfect. That in many ways Val likes being on her own, and certainly likes being removed from the cities and their concerns, and their vulnerabilities. She wants to be where she is, and she has to consider if she wants to invite Lucian into that. They take things slow, and there’s such a lovely build to their relationship. In some ways it would be easy to imagine them rushing together in passion and desperation, but I like that they’re not desperate despite the danger and the circumstances. It’s not release or distraction that they need from each other. It’s control, and assistance, and...hope. And it’s a beautifully rendered and weird and creepy story about a world that has been broken, but maybe not beyond healing. About people finding something rare and wonderful in each other, and slowly building it up, with patience and respect and, maybe with time, love. And ahhh, you should just go read it already!

Poetry:

“Steeped in Stars” by Hal Y. Zhang

This story speaks to me of traditions, of culture, of family that reaches out from one world toward the inky voice of space, finding somewhere in all that dark to light with the fires transplanted from home. To take some bit of that, a kind of passing of the torch into someplace new. In order to make that trip bearable. To make whatever future awaits on that distant world hold the tastes and feel of home, the tastes and the sights and the smells. Not just to reproduce the past, but not to lose sight of it across the light years. The poem, which is long and thin, a sort of tower or trunk, is interrupted at times by entreaties not to go. And yet the voice of the piece is very much pointed outward, headed forth. And I like that the lines in italics are things not that the narrator rejects, but things that they decide to handle in different ways. The lines remind the narrator about tradition, about family, about obligation. Yet the narrator is thinking in different ways, not moving in cycles, not just reproducing the past, but moving it forward into the future. Ensuring that the family will keep going, adapting to each new challenge and still reaching forward. Holding onto those things that are important, the history and the things that hold the family’s identity. The things that get passed down—recipes and stories, habits and memories. So that even when the narrator is on a different world, they are still linked back to those that they left behind. That they are still connected, still whole, even when so distant. And it’s a great piece about travel and about distance and about forces more powerful than space. A great read!

“Red Berries” by Jennifer Crow

This poem seems incredibly fitting for the season, at least the one that I’m having here, with a heavy and consuming winter. And yet it’s not a piece that seems oppressive. The winter depicted, though, is certainly a force. One full of power and force that is here choosing to be gentle. To be tender. To reach out in such a way that it can embrace this person who the narrator is speaking to. And for me there’s a sense of longing that comes through form the narrator, asking these things of a person who might be a friend, who might be a lover. For me it seems like the narrator is wondering after this connection that this person has with the winter. With this force that the narrator themself might not fully appreciate or grasp. But who can see through the eyes of this other person—from the way they relate to the winter, leaning into it, embracing it—something beautiful and mysterious and dangerous. And it’s a beautiful piece, contained and relatively short but full all the same of this feeling of winter. Which i have to admit I have had my fill of the season at this point but there is a haunting beauty and grace to it, that feeling that at any point it might sweep in and destroy everything, and yet there’s that striking image of a bit of bright red after the color has drained out of everything else. And standing in sight of that contrast, wondering if it is the touch of the divine, is a wonderful thing to focus on, and does make me want to know what the winter whispered. And even for those who maybe are tired of the cold and snow, it’s a vivid and moving poem that’s very much worth checking out!

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