Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Cast of Wonders, Lightspeed, and Hexagon

Cast of Wonders 2/29/24, 3/3/24
Lightspeed 3/24, 4/24
Hexagon 3/24

March’s Cast of Wonders features Megan Ng’s “Fording the Milky Way”, which is told from the point of view of a child living with her mother and father on a ranch the father owns but doesn’t really care about. The parents are incredibly different – the father brash, interested only in himself, while the mother is a storyteller, preferring folktales to anything that would reveal much about herself. Except, the child learns, that’s not exactly true, as one particular story about celestial lovers kept apart by the wide waters of the Milky Way, allowed to see each other only on one night of the year, turns out to have more than a shred of truth to it. I deeply appreciate the layered narrative Ng man­ages, the daughter a witness and storyteller herself as she relates to the reader the incredible events of one special night. It’s a wonderful experience.

Shingai Njeri Kagunda leads off the March Lightspeed with “Let the Star Explode”, a strange and rather poetic story about an Earth visited by Star People who can help humans to jump into unknown space to commune with gods or the universe. The story covers both the experiences of Karu, a young woman wanting to try star jumping, and the history of this world – how the Star People almost left the planet behind, unconvinced that humanity was worth the effort until they came across a single person who changed their minds. The piece feels very much about scope and care, accepting that there are things well beyond human imagining but that the journey of life can still be filled with compassion and wonder and magic. Kagunda does a great job not getting lost in the details, rather embracing the mysteries and find­ing in them joy and meaning. Sharang Biswas makes a return to the publication with “Season of Weddings”, casting Death himself in the form of Thanatos (called Nate) experiencing a series of weddings – which twists the knife somewhat following his split with his lover, Thor. Yet in the progression of weddings (some of which he at­tends on the job to see to certain tragedies that unfold) there is also a chance for him to confront his past, his desires, and the possibilities still in front of him. And as Nate keeps bumping into a certain mortal, Biswas keeps the tone and feel of the story flirty and fun, and painting an interest­ing picture of a shared and expansive collection of pantheons all interacting, being messy, and, for all their immortality, very human. It’s delightful!

The April Lightspeed features Mitchell Shank­lin’s moving “a testament to indirection, an enigma, the sun above”, which finds a narrator freezing up at the thought of having to rewrite their partner’s life poem, a text that is written at birth and embedded into a person’s brain and that helps to shape their person and their personality. But for this partner, the text has always been a bur­den, a prison, and with the narrator they managed to raise the funds to get the poem altered through surgery. But with the moment at hand, it turns out it’s more complex than anticipated, and the narrator is left with the full weight of what might go wrong. Shanklin captures the desperation and yearning so well, the need for change pushing against the fear that it won’t be enough, or it will somehow backfire, or something else will go ter­ribly wrong. It’s an emotionally resonating read. The issue closes with Vandana Singh’s “Traveler’s Tales from the Ends of the World”, which is a lovely exercise in storytelling, inviting readers to peer into a loom and see, and listen, and follow the threads. The thread of an immigrant to America who loses himself in a moment of joy, in the move­ment of his own body, in running. The thread of a woman dying in a ditch in India because her dreams intersected with those of a violent man. The thread of a tiger who as a cub drank human milk. All these threads are bound together by the characters’ abilities to Travel through worlds, to try and nudge timelines towards a better future for the world and the people living in it, not just the wealthy who dream of other planets, but those that would be left behind by those dreams. And the framing – the storyteller and the loom – breaks down the walls between reader and story, bringing readers into the very real and present struggle going on for the future, for our future. Singh manages an intriguing and magical worldbuilding that becomes a mirror for readers to see themselves and the world around them in perhaps new ways. It’s brilliant!

The latest from Hexagon features a new story from Avra Margariti. “If You Wake” opens with Nayla, a young woman, awakened far too early on a long journey she’s supposed to spend in cryogenic freeze with her family. It’s not a trip she wanted to take, but rather a kind of punishment and exile her parents orchestrated to remove Nayla from the temptation and sin of “witchcraft” and queerness that she had started to explore on their previous world. Told she has a demon in her, Nayla starts to believe it when she hears snakelike whispers that urge her to save herself before it’s too late. Margariti crafts a claustrophobic tale defined by abuse, fear, and doubt – and yet through the haunting, tense, and brutal atmosphere there are signs that not everything is doom and gloom, and that the voice Nayla is so terrified to listen to isn’t the evil she’s convinced herself it is. It’s an unsettling but excellent story.

Recommended Stories
“Fording the Milky Way”, Megan Ng (Cast of Wonders 3/24)
“Season of Weddings”, Sharang Biswas (Lightspeed 3/24)
“If You Wake”, Avra Margariti (Hexagon 3/24)

This review and more like it in the May 2024 issue of Locus.

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