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.
Even promising myself to read a short story per day (or at least to hit that average by the end of each calendar year), there’s still way more short genre fiction being published than I can keep up with. Occasionally, it will occur to me that I haven’t read an issue of a particular magazine in ages, or that a particular anthology has been sitting on one of my shelves for far longer than I’d realized, or that I haven’t popped over to a particular website in a while to read anything. So today – two recent reads from Tor.com! If you follow me on Twitter (I’m @talekyn over there, if you’re interested), you already know these two pieces (one a short story, one a novella or perhaps novelette) moved me greatly. Now, let’s talk about why.
K.M. Szpara’s “We’re Here, We’re Here” delves into our endless fascination with “boy bands” – all-male vocal groups – and I think the group at the center of this story is loosely inspired by One Direction. The guys in the band sing – but they don’t do over-stuffed choreography (the way earlier boy-bands like ‘NSync and the Backstreet Boys did so famously). In fact, they don’t do much choreography at all around their planned on-stage interactions. For Back 2 Back, and for our narrator Tyler, it’s all about the vocals. Tyler is the wholesome “good boy” in a four-man group that also includes the unpredictable boy (Zeke, who silly-strings his bandmates and the audience), the brooding boy (Jasper) and the guitar-playing boy (Aiden). When Tyler and Jasper share a deep, romantic kiss on stage, their management goes crazy – the boys are supposed to appear attainable to their female fans, not into each other. Their manager will do just about anything to prevent Tyler, previously the tow-the-line reliable one who is just glad to be in the band, from making the situation “worse.” As the story plays out, Szpara gives us an interesting view of the limits of acceptability in pop culture. All of the band’s fans know Tyler is a transgender male, and their management has no problem with it – provided Tyler appears accessible to those all-important fans. With the rise of K-Pop boy and girl vocal groups (and even going back to the halcyon days of ‘NSync, Backstreet Boys), fans have been known to “ship” bandmates regardless of their true sexual identities, and Szpara slyly comments on the real vs. imagined nature of those relationships. Interestingly, we never really get to see what the Back 2 Back fan-base really thinks of a possible “Jasler” relationship. The SFnal element of this near-future tale is that the guys have manager-controlled vocal implants that modulate their voices to make them sound perfect on stage, and the manager uses this to control Tyler in a way contracts and threats alone might not successfully do. This drives the band closer together, leading to a final scene that I am not ashamed to admit made me tear up (but which I’ll leave you to discover on your own).
Sarah Pinkser’s “Two Truths and a Lie” is also a modern-day tale, but fantasy rather than SF. After the death of a childhood friend’s older brother, Stella agrees to help clean out the brother’s house. But she hasn’t seen these friends in a long time, and her adult habit of making up stories about her history is a hard thing to resist. Early in the story, she tells the friend a total lie about her life in Chicago, inventing a divorce and a son … not because she’s ashamed of her true life, but simply because lying is a habit now. A few pages later, Stella asks Mark if he remembers a local access cable television show she is convinced she made up – but he not only remembers it, his brother has the old VHS tapes of episodes the neighborhood kids appeared on. Including his older brother and Stella. The fantasy element builds as Stella tries to track down the truth of the television show, discovering its host had a knack for telling stories about the kids around him that eventually came true. Stella realizes that part of her has been controlled by an outside source for most of her life. The question is: what will she, or what can she, do about it? I love the way Pinsker builds the mysteries of the story: Why did Mark’s older brother become an awkward teenager and then a life-long hoarder? Why doesn’t Stella remember the show when everyone else does? Is what Stella perceives about the host of the show true or is she projecting fantasy onto real life tragedies? Again, I won’t spoil the ending, but like the Szpara story, it hit my heart in just the right way.
I find it interesting that I unintentionally chose two Tor.com stories that share themes of young people losing some amount of control over their own lives thanks to the entertainment industry (the manager in “We’re Here” and the kids-show host in “Two Truths”). We’ve all read the stories about predators in the entertainment world taking advantage of the youth under their care, and both of these stories are clear about the repercussions of that. Tyler and Stella make very different decisions on their way to reclaiming their own identities and regaining control over their own lives, as befits the tone of the stories being told about them. Pinsker’s story also has a trans character in a minor role, strengthening the connection between these two stories in which the genre element takes a secondary role to the very real emotions and internal conflicts of the characters.