Aurealis #90, May 2016“The Beasts and the Birthday” by Marlee Jane Ward
Reviewed by Brandon Nolta
It was the end of the world as they knew it, but the survivors feel anything but fine in Marlee Jane Ward’s “The Beasts and the Birthday.” The protagonist, Georgia, is one of a large brood of kids scrabbling out a tough existence in the wake of an invasion of “the beasts,” parasitic invaders that did their best to winnow humanity. The invasion failed, but civilization is holding on precariously, and day-to-day life is a trudge of misery and pain. Only Nanny, Georgia’s grandmother, remembers the past with any sort of warmth, and Georgia’s parents are ghosts in their own lives, laid low by injury and the horrors of the march, the beasts’ attempt to enslave and rule. Despite this trauma, Georgia decides that there must be something more to being alive, and when her older sister Polly’s birthday comes around, she chooses to celebrate the occasion, even though her mother looks at birthdays as reminders of the march’s horrors.
In focusing her tale on a single family and their various methods of coping with the aftermath of the march, Ward avoids the clichés of many post-apocalyptic tales, grounding the characters and the setting through the prism of post-traumatic stress. Georgia’s voice and interactions with her family members are rendered believably, and although there is the occasional strain for effect—Georgia’s vocabulary veers haphazardly between sophisticated and simplistic, with the simplistic bits seemingly rendered to highlight her lack of formal schooling—the tale generally unfolds with a clarity and directness that befits the setting.
In “Death and Mildred,” Nick Nedeljkovic tips his hat to Ingmar Bergman with a wink and a rueful smile. Mildred, a bright but lonely six-year-old, meets Death on a warm day, when he tells her he’s come to claim her guinea pig, Chuckie. This does not delight Mildred, who informs Death she won’t be putting Chuckie down any time soon. Amused, Death offers Mildred a best two-out-of-three challenge for Chuckie’s life, which Mildred accepts. However, while Death plays fair, he’s not always truthful about his motives or his purposes. Nedeljkovic treads lightly with his subject matter, underlining the essentially warm and kindly nature of Mildred and Death’s interactions; through careful shading of the background material, it becomes clear that Mildred’s happiness is due to her own qualities and certainly not her home or family circumstances. As a result, the ending manages to achieve a certain positive tone that the events themselves might not necessarily support for some readers, and the overall story treads a lightly comic line without tipping over.
Finding new purpose out of the end of an old one is not solely a human trait, as Alex Hardison demonstrates with “Drift.” Told from the perspective of a repair drone on a nameless ship, the story follows the robot as a catastrophe sends it hurling into space, through the wreckage of what is clearly a large-scale, long-term war (at one point, the robot mentions that it was adrift for nearly 99 years). Alone, seemingly without purpose, the drone keeps on keeping on until it encounters a group of heretofore unknown space-faring creatures the size of the ships the drone once worked on. By chance, the drone crashes into one of the creatures, and discovers how it can be useful once again. Hardison masterfully demonstrates a sense of the cosmic through the drone’s limited perspective, suggesting a larger universe without exceeding the bounds of what the drone could think or experience. More to the point, through Hardison’s measured prose, a believably full range of emotions are suggested by the drone’s observations without tilting into incredulity, and the tale resolves into a well-earned upbeat ending.