Shimmer #19, May/June 2014
Reviewed by Charles Payseur
Shimmer has shifted, transformed itself into something slightly different than it was before. Reorganizing as an online magazine, Shimmer hopes its new direction will help better reach its audience, and better serve the writers it publishes. Paying five cents a word and publishing a story online every two weeks, to be compiled in six bi-monthly electronic issues a year and one annual print volume, the magazine kicks off with a collection of four stories that circle around love and loss.
Some things just won’t stay buried in “The Earth and Everything Under,” a contemporary fantasy by K. M. Ferebee. After Peter is put to death for practicing the forbidden art of witchcraft, a plague of birds begins to crawl out from the Earth, each one a sort of message to the witch he left behind, to Elyse, who remains to pull the written missives from the gullets of the birds. In the notes Peter relates his time in the afterlife below, and Elyse struggles with the constant reminders, the constant pressures not to move on with her life. A moving tale of loss and grief, the story brings Elyse through the waning tide of messenger birds and to a place beyond, where she might finally begin to heal. Lyrically told, and with a resonance that gives weight and power to the tale, the story succeeds at capturing the feel of being left behind, and the strength it takes to keep going.
A woman who may or may not be a fortune teller finds difficulty with a client and her own past in Tara Isabella Burton‘s contemporary fantasy “Methods of Divination.” The fortune teller, who never gives her full name, is completely ready to take Michael’s money and feed him lies when he comes in asking after his lost love. But in his story the fortune teller finds a reflection of her own, and the similarities seem to cast doubt on her belief that prophecies are for fools. Both characters have lost a great love, and neither can quite get over it, and the fortune teller must decide what to tell Michael, and by doing so what she will tell herself. It’s a striking piece of prose, but I found the stylistic flourishes made the actual story a bit difficult to navigate, clouding the narrative with asides that sounded fine but did little to strengthen the story.
An EMT named Jane finds herself at the center of an outbreak of the walking dead in the appropriately named “Jane,” a contemporary horror by Margaret Dunlap. Bitten by a strange man she saved in her ambulance, Jane begins to be accosted by the undead while dealing with her own personal issues as well as life in general, which she seems to find herself ill-equipped to handle. Indeed, the outbreak seems to be just one more thing in Jane’s life that doesn’t quite work out, though she seems tied to it, with the uncanny ability to re-kill the walking dead with her touch. Along with her blind dog, Conrad, she sets out on a vague mission to atone for her part in the spread of the undead contagion. At turns humorous and heartfelt, the story suffers a bit from its inability to focus and deliver on any of the threads it picks up. The voice of the story, of Jane, is fun, but I was left feeling there was an element missing to make for a cohesive whole.
“List of Items in Leather Valise Found on Welby Crescent” by Rachel Acks is just that, a list of items which together form something of a contemporary fantasy. The items hint at a relationship between the valise’s owner, a man, and an escaped carnival sideshow, a winged woman. Not much is given as to what happened, or why the items were found as they were, or who found them, and the list seems more for the readers to draw their own stories from, their own frames around. And there are some interesting possibilities, but I’m not sure it worked for me, and I wasn’t quite satisfied with the list as a story.
Charles Payseur lives with his partner and their growing herd of cats in the icy reaches of Wisconsin, where companionship, books, and craft beer get him through the long winters. His fiction has appeared at Perihelion Science Fiction, Every Day Fiction, Dragon’s Roost Press, and is forthcoming from Wily Writers Audible Fiction.