#361 Red Sultan’s Big Boy- Chuck Palahniuk

#361 Red Sultan’s Big Boy- Chuck Palahniuk

Randall was divorced and lived on his family’s land. He was divorced and had a thirteen year-old daughter he would do anything to make happy. What made her happy, were horses. Her last horse suddenly died, so Lisa and her father bought a new horse she had seen on the internet called Red Sultan’s Big Boy.

Randall didn’t see the horse on this internet, he would prefer if the Internet didn’t exist, at least for his young daughter, he desperately was trying to keep from growing up.

“…lousy Internet access wasn’t tragic, not when a single keystroke could bring all the filth and degradation of the world into a person’s peaceful, bright kitchen. These days it took real effort to keep purity in a child’s life.”

The horse bought, Lisa happy, Randall was barraged by phone calls from neighbors. They warned him that the new horse was not allowed on their property and as long as it was on his, no neighbor would be coming to visit. They called the seemingly docile horse a murderer. Confused by this turn of events, he learned that there was a viral video of Red Sultan making the rounds. After getting several calls for unheard of offers for the horse, he decided to watch this video for himself. Bad idea…some things cannot be unseen.

It was “…like watching Mother Nature get revenge for all the global warming the white patriarchy had inflicted on the environment.”

And like the subtitle of this collection of stories states, this is a story you can’t unread. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read this, I’m just saying…you know…not every story about a horse it like the Black Stallion.

Rating: 9-8-9-7 Total= 33

#360 The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees- E. Lily Yu

#360 The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees- E. Lily Yu

Printed in the a Nebula Awards Showcase, this piece was named one of the best science fiction or fantasy stories of 2013. It is a political science lesson played out in apiary terms. A colony of wasps are forced from their home, so they strike out for new territory. Once they found it, they looked to conquer:

“Ours is a race of explorers and scientists, cartographers and philosophers, and to rest and grow slothful is to die. Once we are established here, we will expand.”

And expand they did, taking control of the indigenous bee population, one that far outnumbered the wasps but were less sophisticated or practiced in the arts of war and aggression.

One day “By the sheerest of accidents, one of the bees trained as a cartographer’s assistant was an anarchists.” The mutation stuck and slowly took root among the oppressed colony of bees.

“Anarchism being a heritable trait in bees, a number of the daughters of the new queen found themselves questioning the purpose of the monarchy…A perfect society needs no rulers…knowledge and authority ought to be held in common. In order to imagine a new existence, we must free ourselves from the structures of both our failed government and the new unjustifiable hegemony of the wasp nest.”

What followed is chaos, death, insurrection, and revolution, not in that order. Mistakes are made, but among the smart, they are only made once, pass it along!

Rating: 8-10-10-9 Total= 37

#359 Deer- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

#359 Deer- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

Conchita and Susy work at McDonalds. Today, when they showed up for work, the place was surrounded by a police line and a crowd of people. Conchita tells Susy that there is a bear inside, and they can’t get it out.

While they are waiting, and the police are preparing, and the protestors try to save the bear, we learn a little about these two woman, Susy only in this country a year, and Conchita here a bit longer just lost her son. There is a little theme about not having control over your life, things just being the way they are. But, other than that, this is juts about a bear stuck in a McDonalds.

Rating: 6-6-5-5 Total= 22

#358 The Whistle- Eudora Welty

#358 The Whistle- Eudora Welty

Sara and Jason Morton were in a cold marriage; not loveless or resentful, juts cold and growing darker by the years. “The darkness was thin, like some sleazy dress that has been worn and worn for many winters and always lets the cold through to the bones.”

As they lie in their cold bed at night, thinking about warmer times, the town whistle blows. It’s a whistle that warns the town about the coming freeze. Like John Donne’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” (or Hemmingway’s if you prefer…not Metallica’s though, heh) the couple listens and waits for their own end.

“Every night they lay trembling with cold, but no more communicative in their misery than a pair of window shutters beaten by a storm.”

This is the first Welty story of the batch I truly enjoyed. Perhaps it’s the lack of dialogue, which I have found trouble connecting with in her other stories. The descriptive writing here is pretty spectacular, and the mood like something out of a Chekhov story.

Rating: 9-7-8-8 Total= 32

#357 Never Was- David Dante Trout

#357 Never Was- David Dante Trout

Booby Hall had a gun, a pearl-handled automatic, that he carried around everywhere. “He had the gun because it was the thing that says, I am.” He was also patriotic, so when his brother went off to war, he also wanted to serve.

It was “A war so large it refitted every tool, swallowed all belief, threatened to change the tomorrow of a continent, or the yesterday of a country.”

“If you can bear arms against your enemy in Europe, you can protect yourself against your enemy anywhere.”

But black men weren’t wholly welcome to serve in combat, apparently not good enough to die for their country. But bobby got a job working for the military auxiliary services. It didn’t get him to Europe but let him do his part, and let him proudly walk around in a uniform.

Of course, the sight of black men in a uniform set many up in arms, and seeing one such as Bobby, strong willed, and carrying a gun just wasn’t going to be tolerated. So, they faked an ordinance and a warrant, and took Bobby’s gun away. The battle in Europe was far away, but there was a second battle at home, juts as important, that one was for freedom as well. Unfortunately for Bobby, the side with the biggest guns usually wins.

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#356 Adventure Story- Neil Gaiman

#356 Adventure Story- Neil Gaiman

This is a fun little piece. The narrator’s mother seems a bit addled, or maybe just extremely naïve. For her, going down the wrong aisle in the super market and running into an old friend would constitute a “full-blown adventure.”

So when her son asks her about his deceased father’s curious trophy he brought back from the war, the tale she tells seem like much more than any grocery-store run-in. Of course the story includes Pterodactyls, Aztecs, a tony race of men and a kidnapped princess, it all seems too fantastical to be real.

Don’t worry about it, just sit back and drink your tea.

Rating: 7-7-7-6 Total= 27