The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily‘s editors.
“Irreversible Dad” by Kenton K. Yee, Brain Harvest
Brain Harvest is usually good for a good story, but this one is bang-out fantastic. I don’t want to connect it to any theology or philosophy or whatever. Just imagine your father getting smaller and smaller until you can’t see him anymore. The heartpang comes fast.
“Impossibly Blue” by Zdravka Evtimova, Cafe Irreal
There’s more of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Eyes of a Blue Dog” in this story than the blue in the title and tulip, I promise. A frustrated writer is consumed with a “barely audible tapping” behind her stationery where (she insists) a terrific amount of ocean slops to and fro. Some shrieking gulls are involved. Does not the title “Eyes of a Blue Dog” instantly evoke the image of blue eyes, whereas nothing really is known about the animal’s eyes, only that the dog itself is blue? In fact, the dog’s eyes are probably anything but blue, the very contrast of blue, or they’d be indistinguishable from the animal’s body and therefore unremarkable, certainly not worthy of a story all to themselves.This delayed recognition of the title’s literal value swings the reader from one side of the mirror to its opposite, just as its characters exist, powerless, on either end of reality and dream (if memory serves me), just as Evtimova’s pseudo-lovers endeavor to make contact through the page in her notebook, just as her author-character labors after some elusive ideal beyond the mass of every writer’s familiar blockage, her own innate limits as an artist. What this does is it raises questions. This “ice cream social” at my place of work today, is there some catch? Am I walking into some kind of ambush? Which weighs more, the Good Humor Chocolate Eclair Bar or the Fat Boy Ice Cream Sandwich? Etc.
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