Some Stories I Liked

I enjoyed the hell out of Sofia Samatar’s two novels, A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, so I have no idea why it took me so long to get to her short story collection Tender.  And the collection didn’t disappoint; there are a number of stories here that I won’t be forgetting any time soon.

“Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” for example.  A lot of selkie stories deal with the spouse who is left behind.  I don’t know of any stories about the selkie’s child, who has to live the rest of their life with the grief of abandonment and a lot of unanswered questions.

“Walkdog” starts off as a high-school student’s paper on “Know Your Environment.”  (A lot of these stories are shape-shifters, like the characters themselves: “Ogres of East Africa” is a list of, well, ogres of East Africa, given to the narrator by a local informant; “Olimpia’s Ghost” is a series of letters.) The student, Yolanda Price, writes about Walkdog, an animal whose traces she finds everywhere: in an old blues song, a newspaper article, a “conjure mat” that had belonged to the grandmother of her friend Andy Bookman.  What she’s really writing about, though, is Andy.  We find out that “the cloud of nerd gas surrounding Andy is so strong it could make your eyes water.”  That Andy was more than just a friend, but that she tried not to be seen with him in public, not wanting to draw the attention of the bullies who attacked him.  Her report slowly becomes an anguished cry, about how she should have treated Andy, about all the things she doesn’t understand.

Then there’s “Honey Bear,” which should have won every award going.  I could just devolve into superlatives about it, so I’ll try to give a summary instead.  Dave and Karen are taking their daughter Honey Bear on a trip to the beach.  Things are wrong with this world, though.  At first we only see small differences; there are sheets of some polluting substance called “slick,” and Karen needs to take medication at exact hours of the day.  “Will it be fairyland, when I’m grown up?” Honey Bear asks, and her mother answers, “Yes.”

“Honey Bear” turns out to be, among other things, about an alien invasion.  It’s sad and nostalgic, like all stories where humans have been booted out of the top spot on Earth, but it’s also deeply, viscerally chilling; it posits a form of conquest I’ve never seen anywhere else.  I said I won’t forget some of these stories, but I don’t think I can forget the last line of this one.

Dave has more or less given up, but Karen, the narrator, still has hope.  “You always say yes… You say yes to what comes, because you belong to the future, whatever it is, and you’re sure as hell not going to be left behind in the past.”

These stories are about everyone and come from everywhere: a Persian princess, the overseer of a plantation in Africa, a clockwork statue.  “How to Get Back to the Forest” starts with the nostalgic tone of girls remembering a summer at camp together.  Then we find out that it isn’t a summer camp at all, that the girls have to live there until they’re adults, and the story changes to one of rebellion, against the camp and the world that created it.

Several of these stories deal with rebellion, or with acceptance.  Some of them are as ephemeral as dreams.  Some of them reminded me of Borges, and “Walkdog” reminded me of “If You Were a Dinosaur My Love.”  I didn’t like a few of them — too ephemeral, maybe — but the good ones shine brilliantly enough to more than make up for them.