Beneath Ceaseless Skies #396, November 30th, 2023

“On the Day When She Can Run No More” by Aimee Ogden

“What Will Bring You Home” by Jenny Rae Rappaport

Reviewed by Geoff Houghton

“On the Day When She Can Run No More” by Aimee Ogden opens this issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies #396. This elegantly written piece treads the borderline between fantasy and folklore with the tale of a human child raised by a wolf in a time and place when human settlements were few and a wolf pack could roam freely through hundreds of acres of woods and across miles of wild, untended moors.

The story is told in the third person but observed from the unusual foster mother’s point of view. Initially, it is as anthropomorphic as Watership Down and raises the same compelling feeling that this is what a wolf’s point of view should feel like, even if, in reality it doesn’t. Only towards the end does it drift into true fantasy with a metaphysical intervention from the only logical source applicable to wolves. Each reader must decide for themselves if this offers a fascinating explanation of the origin of a common fantasy trope regarding the relationship between humans and wolves, or is something else entirely.

The second story is “What Will Bring You Home” by Jenny Rae Rappaport. This is essentially a quest story in which a courageous mother attempts the rescue of her thoughtless daughter from deadly peril in a fantasy world where sparsely spread human settlements are plagued by powerful and not particularly lovable fairies. These wayward fey appear to find it amusing, or possibly necessary for some esoteric fairyesque reason, to exchange human children or adolescents for substitute “changelings.”

Due to the rules imposed by some unspecified authority, the fairies are constrained to have the consent of either parent or an adolescent before the trade can be completed, although in the finest traditions of untrammelled capitalism, the exchange offered need not be either fair or equal. Our protagonist’s daughter has completely fallen for their blandishments and it is her mother’s burden to save her daughter from her own heedless mistakes, no matter what the cost.

Any reader with a teenage daughter is likely to nod knowingly in response and say “except for the fairies – yes!”

Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.