Today, I’m thinking about women. Maybe it’s because I just sent off my mom after her monthlong trip here to the U.S. We have a fraught, fierce love. Think LadyBird.
Here are three short stories about girls and women: supporting each other (conditionally), motherhood, and going through puberty.
To die or not to die? Making do with the absurdity of life
You know that meme where the dog is sitting in a burning house and says, with a smile, “This is Fine?” That’s Alexis Jamilee Carter’s short story “You’ve Left a Candle Burning, and It Seeks Revenge” in Atlas and Alice magazine. I love the sardonic, resigned voice of the piece. A woman runs into her burning home and a takes a minute to breathe in the smoke; fire fighters turn a blind eye because they’re “busy across town anyway”; a neighbor, Mrs. Balinsky, pokes in to offer help but gladly leaves when Henrietta, the main character, says she’s okay.
There’s also a subtext of women having to be the ones who help women — but only when it suits us: when the firemen refuse to acknowledge the problem, Mrs. Balinsky steps up to bail out Henrietta, but only because “this fire is really outside the guidelines of the Homeowner’s Association.”
In her room, the bed is aflame. Henrietta tries to think of a joke about passion and how it heats the sheets, but she must acknowledge that now is not the time — Alexis Jamilee Carter, “You’ve Left a Candle Burning, and It Seeks Revenge”
What are any of us doing here? How do we go on pretending, or perhaps admitting(?), that everything’s just fine. I have a short story called “Fine” that was inspired by same meme I refer to above, and have started another short story of a woman biking to work when a chance encounter with an ex makes her question why the world is literally on fire (she’s biking along beams across an open conflagration). Carter’s story feels like a that stranger who’s already a friend when you meet them.
Pregnancy tests used to be really fucked up; when future dystopia looks like the past
This heart-rending sci-fi story follows a young girl in the near future as she navigates pregnancy, abortion, and keeping it from her mom — in a near-future dystopia where your parents can track your hormones and more through a biochip implant. “Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills for Uncanny Magazine is a particular flavor of sci-fi that serves as a testament to the oft-derided genre’s strengths. Terse and punchy, he story holds a mirror up to our current sociopolitical climate and reflects back to us where we might be headed. “Rabbit Test” is also a collection of essays documenting our actual history of the pregnancy tests, birth control, and childbirth. As that one song goes, it turns out “nothing’s new.”
It is 2092, and Grace is a disappointment to her mother.
“Breathe,” says the nurse.
Grace is breathing. She’s also crying. She read what she could find about childbirth but nothing prepared her for the reality. — Samantha Mills, “Rabbit Test”
Puberty sucks but was exciting; what it’s like to be a girl in America
Why is it we all have that one boy who seemed to hate us but was also part of our sexual coming-of-age? In “Self-Portrait” by Kate Finegan for Driftwood Press, we get to follow Jennifer as she navigates adolescence with her friend Shea and Shea’s brother, Colin. One moment they’re being kids ogling over hagfish that have spilled out across the highway; the next, Colin is goading Jennifer into making out with one of the slimy eel-like creatures. Then Jennifer and Shea are back to tending to roadkill again (a possum, this time), hoping the babies of the mother survived.
The four-page story is organized into three sections, each one an unbroken paragraph. The author jumps between time fluidly, flashing back and forth to different incidents or periods that illuminate not so much the current plot but moreso the current mindset of the main character. In an interview for Driftwood, Finegan says she wanted to capture how childhood memories seem to all blend together in retrospect and as we experience them. She has some fun language where she’ll omit a comma to emphasize rhythm over strict grammatical correctness. Overall, the story evokes that dreamlike haze of puberty where terror, anticipation, and wonder swim together.
And why’d I go to Colin and the hagfish, after what he’d made me do that morning? That’s what Shea asked later, just before we found the possum. I couldn’t tell her how Colin had this pull on me, somewhere in my gut and sweaty palms and thighs. — Kate Finegan, “Self-Portrait”
