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Cul de Sac Stories
Conversation Pieces #92
by Tamara Kaye Sellman
Aquduct Press, $12.00, 136pp
Published: July 2024

This is the ninety-second in Aqueduct Press's 'Conversation Series' of short volumes of feminist sf and it's one of my favourites thus far. I'm still waiting for one to outdo the gorgeous prose of Sofia Rhei's 'Everything is Made of Letters', but this is likely the deepest set of short stories the series has brought me. There are eight of them, the last being little more than a prose poem, a glimpse at something, but even that one has depth and the others far more. Every one of them has layers and I'm pretty sure that, as much as I got out of a first time through, I'll get more out of a second.

I found myself asking questions immediately, starting with the title of the first story, 'April 9'. It's an odd title and I wanted to know why. It turns out to be the publication date of an interview with the man who toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in Baghdad in 2003. The story is about a sort of mediaeval village kingdom whose men wage war against the trees in the forest while the women remain and wonder why. The obvious take is conversation, but it's very feminist so there are surely layers and metaphor. Is it just about the damage men cause through war or is it about how pointless it all is, how easily that pointlessness is forgotten and how victory isn't the end?

'Madam's Curse' is just as deep, even though it's told in the form of a set of interviews between a fake medium, Estelle Irene Hochhalter, and a freelance reporter. It's relatively short, twenty-two pages in all, but it covers a heck of a lot of ground. In a way, it feels like a fairy tale, designed for a moral message about greed, but it trawls in revenge, redemption and colonisation, so once again there are layers to peel away and explore.

'The Spinster' is a more personal story, again an obvious metaphor but this time a literary one. It's about a debut novelist called Ludmila, whose agent, Mr. Baum, is about to visit. On the surface, it speaks to procrastination, the enemy of every writer, because Ludmila isn't remotely ready for the visit and struggles to prepare for it. However, there's romance here, wish fulfilment and a danger of reading far more than is there, which is the enemy of every critic, something exquisitely right to bring up in a review of this collection where every story feels like it's about a dozen things beyond the obvious one.

Jumping out of order, 'Since That First Night of Lit Halls' is a perfect example. It's a poetic story in which unnamed characters, surely deliberately, within a family connect or don't in odd ways. It's a story tying motherhood and the loss of career together, which seems obvious enough, but also the bond between mother and daughter, here manifested in shared dreams about a witch, and gender disparity, given how dad remains blissfully oblivious of everything going on, as tends to be our way. He isn't a bad character, merely one who remains entirely on the periphery of something that's of incredible importance to his wife and daughter because he simply hasn't got a clue.

Coninuing both those themes but in a very different way,  'The Rosaries of Raggedy Ann' is easily the most adult story here, starting with date rape and murder and then adding  a child molester, but the lead character is a twelve-year-old girl who doesn't understand the importance of any of it. The most telling line in this entire book is when she notes that "At the time, I didn't know to be more afraid of Neighbor Karl than Oma", the latter being her grandma and main authority figure given that her father left long ago and her mother spends most of the story passed out drunk on the couch. It's a powerful story, but all the more so because of the sheer innocence of its lead.

With acknowledgement here for 'Shrapnel Over Chicago: August 1989', the prose poem that closes out the collection, not merely a glimpse but a cycle, a way to show how place changes people, I'll jump back to my two favourite pieces, both of which feel astonishingly topical, given that one was first published in 2008 and the other in 2011. The acknowledgements do list "a version of" each of these stories "first appeared in" whatever and whenever, so I'm guessing that Sellman did revise them for publication here, but I don't know how substantially.

The first is 'Blood Tunnel', which returns us to wartime, with unintended consequences causing the fallout of the story as much as the more obvious meaning of that word. It's a story about religious extremism that's as full of irony as it is desperation. There may never be anything more American than commercialising a morality war. It's the longest and most substantial story here and it's one of my favourite pieces, but it's outweighed by the other, much shorter piece, 'The Third Way', only eight pages long and told in reverse, but massively impactful and frustratingly topical.

This one starts with escape, a mother driving her daughters in an SUV over floating platforms, but we don't know what they're escaping from, so we leap backwards for increasingly large periods of time to learn why. Each section answers the question posed by the one before it, but raises a new one for the next to answer and so on. And so we learn about libs and the Brotherhood, liberation and moral crackdown, why dad isn't in the story as it begins. I am astounded at how much this says in only eight pages, but it's all the more powerful for how economical it is. It's so lean that there's nothing that could be cut further but it doesn't need another word. It's a warning of a story, that explains how we can get from comfortable now to an OMG future quickly and efficiently and, even though it calls out nothing specific in contemporary politics, it's impossible not to read it that way in 2024.

I've enjoyed all the 'Conversation Series' volumes I've read thus far and I think I'm up to nine, but this is surely the one I'm mostly likely to return to in the future. Each of these stories was written at a particular time for a particular reason in response to a particular something, but quite a few, especially 'Blood Tunnel' and 'The Third Way', feel achingly like they're about now. I just hope that they don't in five years time and ten and twenty. Sadly, it's very possible that they will. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles in the Conversation Pieces series click here

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