I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. I’ve considered promising to review a short story every day, but that’s a lot of pressure. And while no one will fault me if I miss days, I’ll feel guilty, which will lead to not posting at all. So better to stick to a weekly post highlighting a couple/three stories, as I’ve done in the past.
2021 saw the release of what will hopefully be many volumes to come of The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. The inaugural volume includes stories by twenty-five authors from across the breadth of the African diaspora. The stories are, as one would expect, all top-notch. Here are my thoughts on just a few:
“Egoli” by T.L. Huchu features an old village woman on a sometimes precarious pre-sunrise walk, reminiscing about how much technology has changed since she was a little girl, when it was unusual for a village to have even a wireless radio to listen to news. Now there are smart phones and people not only leaving village life behind but leaving the entire planet behind. She’s out and about because her grandson has told her to watch the southern sky around dawn to see something remarkable. I don’t want to spoil what that something is or why it matters, but it is tied up in what makes the story at turns wistful, nostalgic, lonely, and almost elegiac. I’ve commented many times in the past about how I’m usually not a fan of “second person” narrative, where “you” are the character (I find it creepy most of the time), but Huchu is such a deft touch with emotional and sensory elements that I found myself invested in the story and not creeped out at all.
Pemi Aguda’s “Things Boys Do” focuses on three quite different men about to become fathers, and the fear and loss they experience upon the arrival of their sons. Wives get sick, die, or just leave; friends and family drift away; jobs are lost. It turns out the three men have a common past although they have not seen or thought of each other in years, and that past is haunting them. The story is obviously horror from the start, but the creepiness of the small details bio-accumulates – you notice them at first but they don’t seem so “horrific” until they start to add up. Aguda’s interspersing of each man’s travails in the present with a slow reveal of their shared past is perfectly paced. Even if you figure out early on where the story is going (and I don’t think I’ve spoiled anything big in this description), the path is twisty and will leave you thinking.
In “The Thought Box” by Tlotlo Tsamaase, a woman in an emotionally abusive relationship with a man who takes advantage of her begins to learn the depths of his control and infidelity after he brings home a “thought box” so that they can review each others’ thoughts and thus have “total trust” in each other. The truth of her situation is so much worse than she, or the reader, initially suspects. The SFnal element (a box that records and plays back thoughts) is just the wedge into what is really a psychological horror story. Tsamaaase slowly moves the main character from being concerned she’s just paranoid and overworked to the recognition she’s been gaslit, and it is masterfully done; I believed every turn in the main character’s emotional state. This is one of those stories where the final twist is a brutal gut-punch that the author has absolutely earned.