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.
I haven’t read all of Kaleidotrope’s Winter 2022 issue yet, but the first two stories in the issue are absolutely stand-outs.
Scott Edelman’s “And Behold, It Was Very Good” is a slightly comedic and very topical story about what “really” went on in the Garden of Eden between Adam, Eve, God, and the Snake. Edelman posits that there were multiple trees of knowledge throughout the Garden, each a different type of knowledge, and that the First Man and First Woman had access to all of them and experimented a lot. He’s not the first to suggest that Adam and Eve eating fruit of the one tree they were forbidden from eating was part of God’s ineffable plan all along, but he puts a fun and thought-provoking spin on the idea. He also never names the characters the way I have: they are “The Man,” “The Woman,” “The Voice,” and “Snake” because Adam and Eve don’t know themselves yet and therefore have not named themselves, nor do they know anything about the Voice other than what He commands. Of course, Adam was in charge of naming everything, so it makes sense Snake would be the only one with a “name.” I have somehow managed to discuss this story without spoiling anything important about the way the story twists.
“The Skin Inside” by Richard E. Gropp starts off with a scene reminiscent of the pre-credits scene of a murder mystery or horror flick: one man wheedles information out of another man regarding a mysterious set of masks and then things take a turn for the gruesome. But the majority of the story is not as action-packed and is in fact a wonderful slow burn as we find out why the man (Winston) was questioning the other man and then follow him on his quest to find the current owner of the masks and deal with the threat they pose. The story feels in many ways like a Victorian or pulp supernatural mystery. The masks are powerful and easily misused, the people who possess them selfish and yes, rich. The shift in pacing and tone are totally appropriate for the story being told, and Winston’s reasons for doing what he does are full of rich emotional detail that made me want to know where his life goes after this story is over.