Fantasy “Schroedinger’s Kitten Falls In Love” by Bidisha Banerjee
“Eat” by Melissa A. Watkins
“Things Handed Down” by Kim M. Munsamy
“What Passes For Eyes In Dreams And Death” by Daniel Ausema
Reviewed by Mina
“Schroedinger’s Kitten Falls In Love” by Bidisha Banerjee follows the brief and lethal love affair between two quantum cats. The prose is beautiful and playful: “I tried to suggest this with my half-here half-there glance when I caught them half-looking half-hither at me.”
“Eat” by Melissa A. Watkins is an intriguing tale. It weaves Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Giant Beanstalk into something new. Greta is told by her stepmother to take her brother Jack into the woods and leave him there, as they cannot afford to feed him. They come across and climb a giant (edible) tower with giants living at the top of it. Too late, Greta understands her stepmother’s warning. It could also work well as an allegory or cautionary tale—sometimes those we love, but who are driven by their own desires only, will destroy us if we remain blind to their true nature. A delicious story with a sting in its candy tail.
In “Things Handed Down” by Kim M. Munsamy, Waseefa forces her son-in-law to help her look through their home in the process of being destroyed by floods to find a jewellery box. Inside is a simple, wooden bracelet that has protected her from an Ifrit for most of her life; a protection she must pass on to her granddaughter, Nadia. Nobody around her understands—the young seem no longer aware of how to fight the monsters lurking in the dark, or even that they are there. A story about soon-to-be-forgotten wisdom.
“What Passes For Eyes In Dreams And Death” by Daniel Ausema is beautifully written but, at least for this reviewer, doesn’t really tell a story. It would have worked better as a poem about what may haunt or inhabit other dimensions in a funeral home.
Mina was on an island yesterday and misses the sea already.