Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams by Sunny Moraine
My rating: 3/5 cats
The story goes that the dead girl palmed blood out of her eyes and looked down at her sticky fingers, as if considering them carefully—in their context, in their implications. In the slick undeniability of what was still flowing out of her, like inside her was a blood reservoir which would take thousands of years to run dry. Like she was a thing made only to bleed.
i always thought that the free short stories available on tor.com were divided into two categories—original fiction and reprinted fiction, in which the original fiction consisted of stories commissioned exclusively for tor.com, and the reprinted stories came out of already-published collections or had appeared elsewhere online. this story is tagged as original fiction. but if you scroll down to the comments section (because i always read the comments on these stories, as i always read the acknowledgment pages in books), there are many links explaining the story’s context and what it is railing against, including a link to a blog post in december 2015 breaking down and reviewing this story. so, what gives?
this story is…fine. it’s strong on imagery and emotion—the rage that inspired the writing of this supernatural revenge-fantasy is palpable, and there are some good lines in it, but it’s not really successful as a story, using the broadest criteria of “does this piece of writing tell a story?”
it doesn’t. it chronicles a phenomenon, in which refrigerators appear suddenly all over the world, from which female characters murdered casually in tv and film and whatnot emerge and wander around brokenly, silently staring, and forcing their creators and people who support their creators to acknowledge their presence in the laziest form of haunting there is. but there’s no impetus, no cause, no effect, no conclusion. it’s a litany of dead girls—here are dead girls, there are dead girls, with special attention paid to joss whedon, who is apparently no longer considered to be the friend to feminism he was sold to me as.
i came late to buffy, with all manner of kicking and screaming and shouting THAT’S NOT KRISTY SWANSON! (#notmybuffy)
but watch it i did, when connor made me watch every episode, even dovetailing it with angel so i wouldn’t miss any crossover delight. and it was fine—i didn’t hate all of it, but i rolled my eyes a lot, and i never enjoyed the humor and i never enjoyed buffy herself, and do not even get me started on faith. but i never understood why buffy was considered to be this feminist icon when she was always mooning over some guy or another and her only girl power attribute was that she could kick pretty good. and that last episode, but that was a long journey to get to. so while i’m glad to have my bewilderment of whedon as feminist symbol validated here, and while i thought some of the writing was memorable, it’s more an expression of outrage or a finger-pointing call to arms than a story. and i think it knows that, and i think the line at the end:
That might or might not be enough.
is a winky little reference to the story itself. is it enough satisfaction or triumph to stand before the one who killed you, silently accusing them? is it proactive enough to call attention to the situation through storytelling? are descriptions of events enough to call something a story?
i dunno. i am a simple person who wants a board game to have all its pieces and a story to be more than words. and when so many paragraphs open with, “The story goes,” forcing me to accept that there is an agreed-upon story somewhere, but basically telling me “shhh, don’t ask questions, just roll with it” by plopping this down in the middle:
This is how the story goes. But the story also goes that no one was present at the time, in the first days, so no one is entirely sure how the story got to be there at all. Or at least how it got to be something everyone accepts as truth, which they do.
that pisses me off as a reader, cuz it’s just a lazy way of avoiding writing the hard parts and focusing on the sensationalist candy of the situation—look, reader—dead girls! don’t ask questions, just join in the acceptance ‘cuz i told you to.
meh.
i also didn’t realize until i started writing this that it was written by the same woman that wrote another recently posted tor short, Shape Without Form, Shade Without Color , which left me with a similar feeling—admiration for certain language and imagery skills without there being enough story to hook me.
i need to find another really great free tor short—my recent choices have been very medium.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2017/06/14/eyes-i-…
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