Skeleton Song by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 5/5 cats
WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the SEVENTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your annual reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
GR has deleted the pages for several of the stories i’ve read in previous years without warning, leaving me with a bunch of missing reviews and broken links, which makes me feel shitty. i have tried to restore the ones i could, but my to-do list is already a ball of nightmares, so that’s still a work-in-progress. however, because i don’t have a lot of time to waste, and because my brain has felt scraped clean ever since my bout with covid, i’m not going to bother writing much in the way of reviews for these, in case GR decides to scrap ’em again.
i am doing my best.
merry merry.
DECEMBER 2
ohhhhhhh blessed new wayward children content, and i am all a-swoon. i was always a fan of mariposa, and had hoped for a full-length story set there, so if this is a teaser of that happening, excellent news, but even if this is all we’re getting, i will be content. i will happily go wherever s mcg wants to take me, always.
“Good evening, Christopher,” she said, voice delicate as a wind chime. “How did you sleep?”
“Well,” he said, and his own voice was a heavier thing, rendered more substantial by the mechanisms of his breath, which was used to keep him alive, not just to speak. “I went to the meadow and slept in the sun for a while. It was nice.”
“I’d like to sleep in the sun,” she said, somewhat wistfully.
“You could,” he said. “I could carry your bones to the hill and let you sleep with me for a while. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all. You’re light as anything.”
“But skeletons don’t sleep in the sun,” she said. “We sleep in beds of flowers, or in the cool of the catacombs, away from sunlight. That’s how it is in Mariposa.”
2022:
DECEMBER 1: PORGEE’S BOAR – JONATHAN CARROLL
FROM THE BEFORETIMES:
2016 short story advent calendar
2017 short story advent calendar
2018 short story advent calendar
2019 short story advent calendar
2020 short story advent calendar
2021 short story advent calendar
read my book reviews on goodreads
