Short Stories 366:178 — “Sapling,” by Craig Laurance Gidney

Oh wow, this story. We have a young woman raised by a suddenly-religious mother who believes prayer is the reason the daughter came out of a coma, and the young woman trying to navigate her city world to include some forms of freedom outside her mother's demands. And then the magic comes. "Sapling," like all …

Short Stories 366:177 — “Shepherd,” by Bryan Washington

The notion of a singular "coming out" is something I try to push back against whenever I see it happen, and I kept thinking about that while I was reading "Shepherd." Found in Bryan Washington's Lot: Stories, "Shepherd" is very much a story about a young man figuring out his own desires, and the ways …

Short Stories 366:176 — “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU,” by Carmen Maria Machado

Okay, before I start talking about this particular story from Her Body and Other Parties, I need to explain I've never watched Law & Order. I've never liked police procedurals to begin with, and so the spin-off, SVU, never got on my radar either. Basically, I walked into this story with that strike against me. …

Short Stories 366:175 — “Perfectly You,” by David A. Robertson

Imagine, if you will, a technology that allows you to run a kind of simulation of potential choices. You hook yourself up, close your eyes, and have a dream to find out if you and someone you're crushing out on could actually work things out together—or even just so you can consider them without spoiling …

Short Stories 366:174 — “You Deserve,” by Alex Jeffers

When it comes to Alex Jeffers, I usually settle in for a story with some fabulism or other flavour of the speculative (see the brilliant collection That Door is a Mischief), beautiful prose, and a rich emotionality. In Not Here. Not Now. Stories and Novellas, however, "You Deserve" delivers a slow-building tension instead of some …

Short Stories 366:173 — “Daughter of Kings,” by Ana Mardoll

Oh, how I loved this one. It's basically a shifted/adjusted re-telling of a sword-in-the-stone tale, but where the prophecy states it will be a woman heir to a particular family line, and, as always, Mardoll's take on this fantasy trope is through a trasngender or nonbinary lens, and this time, "Daughter of Kings," (found in …