The Shortlist: February 28, 2025

It’s a time travel story, but the author has a lot to say about AI and the value and nature of art and creativity.

I needed proof that it wasn’t sickness, it wasn’t folly, there was something real and human in me, something that all the reason in the world couldn’t reason away.

But that wasn’t how anyone saw it.  

Lucy signs up to be a tester for a personal android. This story is an exploration of human loneliness, connection and the unintended consequences of the ‘move fast and break things’ approach. Heuler’s writing is so absorbing, the story grabbed me right away.

It felt a little like a prequel to Annie Bot.

I spent the next week describing things to Eliot. I showed him how to open windows and how to recognize keys. I took him to pet shops and explained about dogs and cats and birds and fish. I took him to supermarkets and clothing stores and pharmacies. He said there was a lot of maintenance involved with being human and I agreed, after a pensive moment.

He was tiring me out with his remoteness. I came home and he wanted to enlarge his understanding. He wanted to watch TV so I could explain it to him. I began to dread his questions. Why couldn’t I just come home, grab a glass of wine, and relax? Why was he so much work? And then I noticed that when I was away from him I kept thinking of him. He was in my head.

A very short story about a grandmother’s legacy with a surprising premise:

After the funeral, my father sends me a one-minute timer, the small, plastic kind used in board games, only it’s not filled with fine, white sand but lumpy flecks of gray. Her idea, the note reads.

A short ghost story that left me a mess.

My dad mowed the lawn every Saturday morning—weather permitting—for seventy-two years. Vacations were scheduled around it, plans turned down, brunches skipped, because that lawn wasn’t gonna mow itself. When his heart started acting up, and I said maybe he could think about getting someone else to do it, maybe he could take a break, enjoy retirement, he looked at me like I’d suggested he take a bath with some morays, just for the thrill.

So, in retrospect, I don’t know why I expected death to be the thing that stopped him.

The narrator of Wilson’s story is a lonely, depressed college student who attempted suicide when he was younger and has stopped taking his meds. That doesn’t sound like the setup for a touching and memorable story, but this is one.

One night, while I pretended to be asleep, facing the cinderblock wall of my dorm, my roommate and two of his friends were talking about me. “Your roommate, dude,” one of the guys said, “looks exactly like fucking Mr. Bean.” His name was Wynn Banks, and he already looked like he was in his forties; he always wore pastel shorts, even in the winter. He had a maid clean his dorm room every week. “He looks like fucking Mr. Bean,” Wynn said again.

“I mean, kind of?” my roommate said.

“You hearing this, Bean?” Wynn asked, but I still pretended I was asleep. When he was certain that I wasn’t going to respond, he said, “I’d kill myself if I looked like that.”

I read this last week and chose not to share it as I felt kind of overwhelmed by it (when you read it, you’ll see why).

But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since, so here it is. Hinson’s story is a dystopian one where the protagonist’s last resort to make ends meet are as grim as it gets:

After an hour in the waiting room with other women all looking a little poor and a lot bored, they called her back in, sat her at a metal desk and slid across a stack of paperwork bigger than when her mom cosigned her car. The offered figure, there in ink at the bottom of the heap, made her giddy. But things too good to be true usually aren’t true at all, according to her mother.