Welcome to another Words for Thought! This time around, I’m looking at stories about complicated relationships—to people, places, and to the self. As always, there may be some spoilers ahead, so beware!
“Between Home and a House on Fire” by A.T. Greenblatt, published in Reactor, looks at the aftermath of a portal fantasy adventure, exploring the protagonist’s relationship with her past and the world she helped to save.
Her composure unnerves you. Were you ever this self-assured when you were in her shoes? Especially after whatever disaster she looks like she fought before coming here? Maybe, you don’t remember. Those are not the details you held on to from your old life.
Jen, or Jenna as she was known at the time, was a hero in the In-Between, a world that always seems to be on the brink of disaster. But her heroism left her with scars, and the people she knew in that other life have since ghosted her. Now, all she wants is to live quietly in the existence she’s built for herself, away from floods and fire and magic and people who need saving. But when a young woman named Selene, who reminds Jen of who she used to be, shows up asking her to help save the In-Between again, she feels the pull to return and be a hero once more.
The story does a lovely job of considering what happens after a grand and epic battle to save a portal fantasy world. Most often, the genre sees the fantasy world saved, the protagonist celebrated, and then returning to their regular life as their adventures fade into a dream. But what happens when saving that world once isn’t enough, and how does one go on to live a “normal” life after traveling to another world? What happens when the world you visited leaves you with physical and emotional scars and not with gratitude and the sense of having made a real difference, but only the sense of work left unfinished and guilt at the people left behind?
Greenblatt effectively explores the idea of a chosen one, and in particular, a chosen one’s relationship to the place that chose them. Even though the In-Between is only briefly glimpsed within the story, it is a character in its own right, with weight and a pull that it exerts on Jen. The relationship between Jen and the In-Between is almost a toxic one. How much does Jen owe to a place she once cared for, but which seemingly has given her very little in return? Does she owe the In-Between saving, or at some point, does she have to recognize that it can’t be saved and simply walk away, thereby saving herself?
“Joanna's Bodies” by Eugenia Triantafyllou, published in Psychopomp, asks similar questions as it looks at the relationship between best friends Eleni and Joanna.
Joanna died at seventeen, hit by a car on a night when Eleni was out with a group of new friends, on the verge of leaving Joanna behind lest Joanna leave her behind first. After Joanna’s death, in a moment of grief, Eleni impulsively calls Joanna’s spirit back, thinking she will inhabit Eleni’s mirror and give her a chance to say goodbye. Joanna ends up inhabiting Eleni’s mother instead, refusing to leave her body until it begins to fail, and until Eleni promises to find her someone new to inhabit.
Joanna’s telling the truth. It’s hard for her to do anything when the body she inhabits starts breaking down. Looking at her, Eleni figures it’s not too long now. They’ve got maybe another week before she needs to evacuate. And that’s being generous.
Ever since that night, Eleni and Joanna have been on the run together, Eleni finding new bodies for Joanna and doing her best not to think about what happens to the women once Joanna is done with them. Triantafyllou does a wonderful job portraying the tangled and complicated relationship between the two. Eleni feels immense guilt and Joanna uses that to manipulate Eleni into continuing to help her, even though Eleni wants out. But it isn’t simply guilt that keeps them tied together—there is genuine loss and grief there too. Even though they’d begun to drift apart before Joanna died, and even though there is a toxic element to their relationship now, Eleni did genuinely love Joanna once upon a time; she misses the best friend she had, and she isn’t entirely ready to let go of that, even with what Joanna has become.
Like Greenblatt’s story, Triantafyllou asks what, if anything, one character owes to another, and there are no simple answers. Eleni isn’t responsible for what happened to Joanna, but she can’t help feel that sense of responsibility nonetheless. True, what happened to Joanna wasn’t fair, but what does that mean for Eleni? How much of herself—and of other people—must she give and can it ever be enough? Is Joanna, like the In-Between in Greenblatt’s story, always going to demand more?
“Creature” by Kelsea Yu, published in Kaleidotrope, also explores the complicated nature of guilt, and how it can demand everything of a person, making them feel as if they deserve to suffer. After a miscarriage, Esther begins seeing a strange creature everywhere she goes, taunting her, tormenting her, and physically attacking her.
It stared hard at Esther. She stared hard back. Its claw snapped, the sound startling her. Had it always had a pincer? It seemed bigger now; too large to fit on her plate. A trick of the diner lighting, surely.
When the creature bites her hard enough to draw blood, Esther is placed on suicide watch. She insists she’s fine, even when her mother tries to share her own experience with a stillbirth, telling Esther it’s okay to feel whatever she’s feeling. Esther continues to deny that she feels loss or guilt, or anything beyond mild annoyance at the situation. The creature continues to follow her, refusing to be ignored, and finally forces her to reckon with the feelings she’s determined to push aside.
Guilt, pain, and trauma are not simple things, and everyone’s relationship to them is different. There is no right or wrong way to feel after a loss—even a loss that doesn’t initially feel like a loss—and knowing rationally that there’s no reason to feel guilt over something doesn’t necessarily keep the guilt away. Yu does a wonderful job of showing how complex and messy emotions are, allowing Esther to process events in her own way and define a new relationship with herself and her feelings on her own terms.
“The Fisherman’s Wife’s Son” by Matthew Finn, published in Bourbon Penn, is a surreal and occasionally dream-like exploration of the protagonist’s relationship with himself and with what society considers normal.
He stops drawing but does not look up. “You’re not the monster in this story.” He shakes another cigarette from the pack and lights it. “Remember that.”
The protagonist has genitals that are something like an octopus, prehensile and seemingly-sentient, with a mind of their own. His neighbor, Taka, a shut-in who filters his experiences through the manga he draws, imagines a superhero life for the protagonist, with an origin story relating to the woodblock print “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” by Hokusai, positing him as the union between a human woman and an octopus. Reality and fantasy bleed into each other throughout the story, Taka’s manga version of the protagonist often informing his actions in real life, and vice versa.
There are doctors who think he is an abnormality, who want to perform surgery on him, but what are their true motives? There are a number of complex relationships at play in the story—the protagonist’s relationship with Taka, with his murdered lover, Miu, with the doctors intent on operating, and the nurse who risks herself to try to warn him about the potential danger of letting them do so, and perhaps most critically, the protagonist’s relationship with himself.
The story doesn’t provide any definitive answers as to how the protagonist came to be the way he is, and that isn’t the point. What matters is how he chooses to define himself going forward. Is he monstrous, or is he a hero? Is he something in-between? What does he even want to be? At the start of the story, he seems determined to go through with surgery, and even before that, he initially met Miu on a forum where people help each other plan their suicides. The story is a process of exploration, self-discovery, and reframing and redefining relationships, and it’s delightfully weird in the best of ways.
