The Pigeon Summer by Brit Mandelo
My rating: 3/5 cats
Dear ghost,
I would know if you were C., and you’re not. I guess you’re my roommate now.
I’m writing because I don’t want to hear the sound of my own voice.
Hope you don’t mind.
J.
i gotta admit, this story irritated me. and, yes, part of it had to do with me stumbling over the gender neutral pronouns si and hir. it’s an objection i have on a purely linguistic level—if you know me, you know this and if you don’t—welcome to me: i don’t care what your plumbing looks like, what the plumbing of the people you kiss looks like, how the plumbing you were born with corresponds to your gender identity or expression or what bathroom you wanna use.
and maybe we do need a gender-neutral pronoun for those instances in which the ones we already have are inexact, but people can’t just be tossing neologisms out into the world like noodles, hoping they’ll stick. there are already so many gender-neutral options out there, and nobody’s convening to standardize their usage, and honestly—they’re all pretty shitty, as far as words go. ne and ve and ey and ze and xe and here, si, with many others, i’m sure, trying to win the day. there’s a whole chapter in Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen about this, or rather about ‘he’ being used as the default pronoun, which is a similarly fraught topic.
for the record, i am absolutely fine with “he” as the pronoun used for unspecified people with unspecified plumbing because that’s one of those luxury arguments you take on when you don’t have any real problems, and there are probably better ways to spend one’s time.
anyway, back to this story. i have problems with it apart from its usage of the gender-neutral third-person singular object pronoun. and its relatives.
there’s something very smirky about the story, as though it was intended to provoke and enrage some puppies somewhere both with its freewheeling pronounery and its refusal to be sci fi or fantasy or speculative fiction, which is the kind of thing other stories get barked at for when they win awards in that particular community.
i’m a little turned off by smirky and nose-thumbing in general (and i might be way off base interpreting this as that), but my real problems with the story are actually centered in the story; primarily in its awkward word choices.
In the space of held breath the weight of quiet was suffocating, until the gentle burble of a bird’s call broke the tableau.
i’m sure that sentence sounded poetic and all, and there is such a thing as an aural tableau (although it’s much less-commonly evoked than a visual tableau), but can an aural tableau be defined by silence, by an absence of sound? i’m genuinely asking here, because i stumbled over that sentence, and i want to know if it’s just me.
i found the writing affected, like that first overwritten draft in a writing workshop class before it gets pared down and its awkward bits smoothed:
On the table, the notebook wasn’t open.
instead of just saying ‘closed’ like a normal person.
or
As the sun crept down, taking with it the bird’s soft, continual communication,
where communication implies another entity, and there isn’t one in the scene (although it’s a bird, so i suppose it’s understood that the second party is satan or one of the other demons of the underworld)
and this:
Maybe I don’t need answers. Maybe I just need to man up and make a decision.
is there no gender neutral equivalent to the expression “man up?” again—i’m genuinely curious.
but this made me want to grab a red pen and risk ruining my monitor:
Nerveless fingers scrolled through a handful of unread texts from people whose desperation could not touch hir. Si had nothing for them—no answers, no apologies—any more than si had for hirself. The thought of opening one, of facing the blinking cursor and a blank box into which si had to compress some sort of rational answer, was unfathomable.
i understand this is a story about grief, and grief is one of those things that turns us all into weeping adolescents filled with emo poetry and powerful emotions, but yeesh.
however, at least si realizes it:
J. spread hir hand over the words, pressing them down. Si had been so ready; they both had been, full of strategies and tactics. The world an oyster, a peach, a sun-hot raspberry from the bushes behind C.’s parents’ house—and now husk, pit, bitter. No plans. Instead, the dedicated free fall of a life with the bottom torn out.
Goddamn, I am so melodramatic.
what’s funny is that i’ve read a tor short by this author before, only i didn’t realize it when i chose this one for my weekly tor-read, and then afterwards, when i was looking to see what else she’d written, i saw my mediocre three-star cat review for the writ of years, in which i vowed to look for more of her contributions in this free tor short project.
and now i have. and it’s still meh.
but i give everyone three chances to make me love their writing, so we’ll see…
2.5 rounded up.
BE AWARE: this is NOT a horror story about birds (or anything), despite being tagged as “dark fantasy” and “horror,” so i am sulking a little because i thought i was going to get to put another book on my oh no biiiiiiirds shelf.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2016/05/11/the-pig…
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