The Shortlist: February 21, 2025

My dad used to tell me a story about his younger brother winning a bike by knowing the most yo-yo tricks. There was no actual contest, he’d never even used a yo-yo — he just wrote in with a list of tricks and was declared the winner.

Clare Reddaway’s story about a couple of young friends who desperately want hula hoops when they were a fad reminded me of that story.

Oh, the rapture the first time we touched those thin bands of plastic. Mine was orange as a lolly. Angharad’s was the bright green of arsenic.

So, let me tell you what it feels like when you hoool your hoop.

‘Housemom’ is an excellent title for this story. The narrator’s mother is dying of cancer and the place will literally fall apart without her.

Gregory’s characters feel like a real family — they love each other but maybe don’t like each other much. Things unravel in a sad, comic and very human way.

Robbie is a directionless, non-tenure-track lecturer of Marxist history at a small liberal arts college two hours away. His wife, Samantha, is a “consultant” who specializes in “asset oversight” for “troubled municipalities” at a “Big Four.” Other than a respect for each other’s bitterness, what they love about each other baffles me.

Greene’s very meta short story plays with language and contains some real surprises, I read it three times in a once I figured out what she was doing with it.

 There’s an epiphany, an acceptance, a glint of hope or resistance somewhere, because that’s how stories should finish, so they say.  A crock of gold twinkling at the end of the narrative arc is one way to think of it. Or a crock of shit.

This is the first I’ve read from Nitkey (it won’t be the last, he’s published a lot). In ‘Life on Earth’, the narrator’s partner is dying while scientists are discovering life on other planets. I’ve been reading a lot of Ted Chiang recently, and the humanity and emotion in this story remind me of some of his writing. It starts like this:

They discover life on Mars the same day the doctors tell us Willmae is dying. Tiny cryostatic frozen extremophiles that look like microscopic jellyfish are both alive and not-alive deep inside the Martian ice-caps. The doctors still don’t know what’s wrong with her. Their best guess is that it’s some kind of gram-negative antibiotic resistant bacteria. 

A nurse joins us in the examination room and adds a medicine we’ve never heard of to her regime. “Did you guys hear the news?” she asks. 

“We’re not alone,” Willmae replies with a beaming smile. 

It doesn’t feel that way.  

‘Millions of Seashells’ is a time travel story, sure, but it’s about regrets and second-guessing decisions. Phano is a new publication (started January 2025) and I think there’s gonna be more from that pub as well as O’Leary around here.

One last ditch effort at redemption thirty years after the worst decision of my life. The decision that brought me here to California…

“You are seeking a permit….” he scrolls on his tablet. “To send an object back in time…”

“Correct.”