Three more novelettes, these ones by Caroline M. Yoachim, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and John Wiswell, and I can safely say that these are quite a bit darker in tone than the first three. We’ve got a dreamlike trip through time as seen by the eyes of an immortal painter (immortality in this case granted by a variant of vampirism), an outcast teenager trying to make a life for himself after running away from what can only be described as a cult (said cult run by someone who definitely sounds like a vampire), and a story centered around a cage match where the loser dies and the winner gets enough oxygen to keep breathing.
That Story Isn’t the Story – John Wiswell
“How does it feel to stalk and scare gay boys into coming back to work so they can replace you, Walter? Does it make you think anything is going to hurt less?”
Having to live homeless as a gay teenager is a horrifying situation all on its own. Finding what you thought was a safe haven and having it turn into a hell of control and physical abuse is worse. Having the main abuser be a vampire? Literally nothing sexy about it. Fortunately for anyone who might be triggered by graphic abuse, John Wiswell’s novelette starts at the very moment that Anton has had enough, and runs out the door with the family friend who cared enough to drop everything and muscle his way fearlessly into the house to get Anton to safety.
“I’m double parked, dude. Let’s hit the road.”
(Grigorii is a bad-ass, and wins the award for Most Chill Hero And Best Friend.)
A lot of stories would actually end here, but people forget that while you can choose to leave an abusive situation once, you then have to keep deciding every single day to not go back. Anton is terrified of the shadowy Mr. Bird’s anger (something that makes his bite wounds bleed), and of Mr. Bird’s henchmen who also happen to be the victims of Mr. Bird who are scared enough of their master to bully and threaten Anton to come back, but not scared enough to run away. Yet.
This story is a promise of “it gets better”. But that “getting better”, isn’t “the people who hurt you will say sorry and love you they way they were supposed to in the first place”. This is more of a “you will find people with their own trauma who will show you how they moved through it.” And it’s also a story of the mundane heaven of a okay job, a couch to sleep on, an unexpected relationship, evenings playing video games, and a satisfying realization that abusers need their victims far more than their victims will ever need them.
O2 Arena – Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
What was our daily reality? You had to pay to breathe. Since the global warming crisis had affected phytoplankton and hampered the production of breathable air, our lives were our own to maintain at the requisite cost.
The worst fears of climate change are realized in Ekpeki’s dystopian Nigeria where being”successful” means living in an area of the country where the wealthy have access to filtered air and the poor scrape together oxygen canisters so they can keep breathing when the power goes out at night.
The story highlights the dangerous reality that while wealthy countries talk about carbon credits and green power, it’s the poorer nations that are going to bear the brunt of climate disasters. But Ekpeki makes sure Nigeria’s government gets a good portion of the blame, where rampant corruption just makes the difference between wealthy and poor that much worse.
Our nameless narrator doesn’t have any illusions of morality, using gang contacts and a liberal dose of cheating and grift to secure a spot in a brutally tough academy that will at least give him a chance of earning enough oxygen to live off of. He’s not a bad dude for all of that; cheerfully amoral and willing to pretend he’s not head-over-heels in love with his best friend Ovoke since he knows she’s going through enough that what she needs is honest friendship rather than lust or pity.
He would have skated through the rest of his life like this if something hadn’t happened to make entering a life-or-death cage match a necessity.
There’s a lot of rage here at the unfairness of a system that keeps the wealthy in power and the poor barely scraping by. But what I sensed from the narrator more than that was how at his very core he’s mostly heartbroken at how good people (women especially) are treated in a country where healthcare is a wish rather than a guarantee. And there’s a warning here too, that trying to keep people distracted by the struggle of day to day life is only going to work until they realize that dying fighting the system isn’t any worse than dying when the system fails you.
Colors of the Immortal Palette – Caroline M. Yoachim
I am invisible, even as my naked form hangs upon the wall. As a model I am a footnote in the story of the artist, and as a painter I cannot win over the Salon jury. What I want most of all is to be remembered, but I cannot even manage to be seen.
Caroline Yoachim’s story is less gritty and dystopian than the previous two novelettes, but just as hard-hitting and, in places, tragic. Mariko the model and aspiring artist already has to deal with being a part of two cultures while being accepted by neither. But what she really wants to do is be welcomed by the art world that’s run by people who see women as just “playing” at being an artist. Trying to do that in mid-1800’s Paris is going to take time, more than a mortal lifespan. Fortunately Mariko’s latest client is an artist who’s been painting since at least the Renaissance and might be able to make that happen.
Unfortunately what Mariko finds out is that removing oneself from the normal concerns of humanity can also take away all the reasons you had for wanting to create art in the first place.
The story is told in an almost dreamlike progression through the decades, with each chapter named after a color of paint, with the themes of each section (and the history that Marikio is moving through) echoing that color: “Viridian Green”, “Cadmium Yellow”, “Zinc White”. Mariko’s loves, and frustrations, and tragedies are all poured out in her paintings or in the fashions of the age, from a spangled flapper-dress to a wedding gown beautifully made from a silk army parachute.
It’s a standard trope that immortal beings have to face the fact that letting yourself love means signing up for all the pain that comes with watching the ones you love die again. And again. And again. Yoachim manages to turn this into something meditative and peaceful, with Mariko learning to transform herself into someone that can survive and thrive in a span of time where paintings have to be restored so many times there’s nothing left of the original paint.