Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.
Recently on Facebook, I commented that Beth Cato is one of those authors who expertly breaks this reader’s heart on a regular basis, and yet I constantly go back for me. This was precipitated by reading two of Cato’s stories almost back-to-back, one a recent publication and one a reprint. Both stories are about struggling with the impending loss of a loved one, making hard decisions about whether it’s better to try to delay the inevitable or give in to it, and about what good may come, in time, from such a loss.
“Perilous Blooms” (Daily Science Fiction, May 26, 2020) takes place in a world where super-abilities are just common enough to be taken advantage of by a government that only wishes to remain in power. People who develop these extra abilities are corralled up, shipped off to war off-planet. The narrator of the story, a grandmother now, lost her own mother in such a way. We realize very quickly that she has reason to fear losing her very young grand-daughter the same way. Mother and grand-daughter are both struggling with the impending death of the woman who connects them. Grand-daughter thinks she can heal her mother, keep her from dying. Part of grandmother wishes this could be true, but most of her hopes her grand-daughter is just imagining the ability as a way of coping with the fact that her mother is dying. I won’t spoil the outcome, as I think the spooling out of what is true and what is imagined is part of what makes the story so heartbreaking. Cato keeps the POV very tight, gives us no more world-building than is absolutely necessary to understand the narrator’s quandary and the threat to the grand-daughter in a world where even pretending to have a super-ability is enough to get you snatched up by the authorities.
“The Sweetness of Bitter” first appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show’s September 2013 issue and will be reprinted in an upcoming anthology I had the pleasure of proofreading. The setting is post-apocalyptic: what the apocalypse was is vague, but there’s little in the way of electricity, communities are barren, and what people the main character encounters are distrustful of strangers. The main character, Margo, and her daughter, Tara, are making their way towards a facility Margo hopes will stop her daughter from dying a second death. Second, because we learn very quickly that this daughter is a “sim,” an android recreation of the daughter she’s already lost once to leukemia. In the days before the collapse of society, repairing sims was fairly easy. But now, Margo’s only hope is a headquarters of the company that made the sims in the first place. The signs of Tara’s impending system failure become more apparent as the story progresses and the two encounter unexpected roadblocks. Those roadblocks made the story even more poignant to me, made me feel Margo’s anguish at yet another delay in healing her daughter. Backstory (where is Tara’s father? what else has Margo tried before getting to this point) are sketched in as the story progresses as well.
Back in December 2004 through February 2005, I was primary caregiver for my mother, who was slowly finally succumbing to the cancer she’d been fighting for the previous four years. In restrospect, the end was more apparent in December and even early January than I wanted to see – in fact, it was probably more apparent months earlier than any of us, even her doctors, wanted to admit. I see that struggle of mine to accept the inevitable, to make peace with it and start deciding what positives could come from her passing (for instance, we caught my own colon cancer just seven months later thanks in part to me “listening to my body” in a way my parents hadn’t), reflected in the main characters of these two stories. Neither of them wants their daughter to die. Neither of them wants the world to be the way it is. But both also find strength, to do what needs to be done (for me, that need was to acquiesce to my mother’s wishes to die at home surrounded by loved ones instead of in a hospital). There is hope even in their despondency.
And that is why I say that Beth Cato, especially in her short fiction, has the ability to rip a reader’s heart out and yet keep us coming back for more. In the past few years, largely due to her Blood of Earth trilogy, she has become one of my favorite writers.