"Tetrarchs" by Alan DeNiro

I looked up the title of Strange Horizons's latest offering, "Tetrarchs" in the dictionary.  A tetrarch is the ruler of one quarter of a territory.  Fittingly, Alan DeNiro divided the work into four separate, but connected, vignettes.  In each, the protagonist gives a first-hand account of his abstract and nonsensical world filled with oranges, jazz saxophone lilts and four-sided props.  The hero's female counterpart, who appears in different forms in each snippet, brings the man some comfort, if only because she arrives and he somehow knows that's the right place for her to be at that moment.  

The prose is awkward, but it's meant to be, as our hero struggles to make sense of a world that cannot hold together.  I found myself struggling to stay afloat in the chaos at times, but then DeNiro would throw me a life line and I would land solidly back into the cyclical nature of the message.  His imagery, from the flying swan-woman in My Favorite Things, to the double moons over conjoined twin musicians in Every Time We Say Goodbye, to the singing trees in Summertime, to the black-and-white, fedora-wearing feel in But Not for Me, swept me away to amazing places with limitless horizons.

An analytical review cannot do the piece justice, for each reader will draw a distinctive image in their own mind of the alternate realities.  I do believe that Carole Carmen did an admirable job of illustrating the story.