The Weather by Caighlan Smith
My rating: 3/5 cats
Lolly doesn’t feel anxious, for herself or her mother or the storm. She knows staying home will give her a stomachache, because she’ll sit around smelling Granny Ma’s rotting flesh and rotting ointment and the house will creak and squeak with every breath of air. But when her mother’s face and shoulders are covered in smears of burn cream that haven’t been rubbed in properly, Lolly knows she’ll cave to the smallest request, because her mother doesn’t even take the time to check and see if the cream’s rubbed in, and Lolly won’t bother to tell her it isn’t.
this tor short was a bit disappointing to me. i’m generally a fan of unusual apocalypse/winding-down stories, especially when they’re set in impoverished smalltown locales. this story had a promising start, with a girl named lolly who lives in one of these impoverished smalltown locales with her mother and her unwell granny ma where they are awaiting the arrival of a storm while others in their already-dwindling town are choosing to flee instead. the nature of the storm is unspecified, but tension is built up around its previous appearances, where details and consequences are hinted at in a pretty satisfyingly teasing manner, the grandmother’s physical and mental symptoms are described in an equally teasing and vague manner, and there are flashes of tech-allusions familiar to readers but less so for our lolly, who interprets her granny ma’s mumblings about “followers” and “rebooting” as madness: It’s normal, nonsensical Granny Ma talk and Lolly pays it no mind.
the problem is, teasing is only fun for a while. eventually you want more than just vague hints, and this story never delivers the goods on that.
which fact is made even more frustrating by the sheer amount of detail we are given in utterly inconsequential matters:
He puts a candy bar on the counter and Lolly waves it under the bar-code scanner once, twice, staring blindly at the image of milk chocolate pieces with white chocolate centers. A streak of fluorescent light catches across the metallic candy wrapper, cutting the chocolate image in half and blurring the bar’s name.
i would love some of that detail brought to, say, the larger themes of the story, not just this one candy bar.
it’s a shame, because there’s some good writing here; good descriptions and mood-setting atmosphere, but it just didn’t cohere into a proper story for me. i need more than just a few scattered anecdotes from questionable sources mythologizing the town’s history within the context of the larger broken-down world. i need cause/effect/words/an ending way more than i need painstaking description of the bitchy lady betrothed to lolly’s convenience store-owner boss who doesn’t like lolly because she tried to charge her for her purchases at the store that one time.
maybe this was an authorial choice, to focus so tightly on the quotidian instead of the fantasy elements, but it didn’t work for me. every time there was something interesting, she backed off from it to focus on more wacky granny ma utterances, which became tedious: Granny Ma is muttering something either vulgar or about a poodle.
there’s a solid kernel here; it just got covered over in meh.
as it is, it’s probably a 2.5 for me.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2016/03/23/the-wea…
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