SSW: "Mosaic" by Mariah Rigg, BALTIMORE REVIEW Winter 2022, edited by Barbara Westwood Diehl; "Gershwin's Ghost" by Jerome Charyn; "Simone de Beauvoir is Living on Mars" by Mary Grimm; ALASKA QUARTERLY REVIEW, Winter/Spring 2024, edited by Ronald Spatz: Short Story Wednesday

these can be read  gratis at these links:

"Mosaic" by Mariah Rigg 

"Gershwin's Ghost" by Jerome Charyn

"Simone de Beauvoir is Living on Mars" by Mary Grimm

(sadly, the two AQR pieces at this hour have slightly distracting transcription typos as posted, though not so much that one can't enjoy the work as apparently intended.)

Part of what's interesting about these three stories, chosen not quite at random from two magazines I've read on occasion over their years, is that the Rigg and the Charyn are both about children more or less abandoned by one of their parents/replacement parent, and how that affected both the child/eventual adult and parent errant. The Grimm is a story of apparatus (one could consider it a poem), a series of numbered lines/bullet points about de Beauvoir's latter-day career on an international Mars colony, where she is a much (though not universally)-respected teacher, and perhaps also a parental or certainly a mentoring figure to some extent.

Mariah Rigg is a relatively young writer, still, with notable credits artistically and academically, whom I was put onto as she is very rooted in the Hawaii of her birth, though much of her career seems to have been spent in the contiguous states. In "Mosaic," her protagonist might not be patterned too closely on herself, but is a tile artist who has married a man whose first wife had died suddenly, leaving both him and their then-infant daughter. The story is mostly about the tension of events as she realizes the depth of the bond she's formed with her still-young stepdaughter, even as the marriage can be considered cooling, and how things can and will go if she leaves them. A meditation on how we can change the lives of others, even if against our will and desire to be better for them, as best we can.

Jerome Charyn takes up a slightly less Felt, slightly more humorous (but only slightly) approach to the son of a bohemian writer, who left his socialite wife and his then very young son to return to the environs of his early family life, near his parents. The son, who has just reached his 21yo Majority for purposes of trust funds, seeks him out to see how he is doing, and to get some answers, while dropping off a big check just to help him along (as the father is assumed to be in relatively tight straits, and was in early middle age when the son was born). Things are not quite as dire as the son assumed, he learns when they meet, and the young man does get a number of his questions answered, some surprisingly.

Mary Grimm's story isn't quite a surreal joke, even if the 156yo de Beauvoir, suddenly discovered some years ago at the opening to be still alive and interested in taking a teaching position in the schools of the well-established internationally-collaborative Martian colony, could be and is to some extent the basis of one (clearly, some U.S. presidents less contentious than Trump have been able to work together fruitfully with other world leaders, even if the Martian colonists do feel some tension with what they always refer to in all-caps as EARTH). It mixes no few details of SdB's life as reported along with such quotidian matters as the former French instructor at the colony school who felt a bit stiff about being replaced by the legendary writer in that task; the footnotes are very amusing, in toto.

I can cheerfully recommend all three.

For more of today's stories, as nearly always delivered more promptly overnight Tuesday/early Wednesday, please see Patti Abbott's blog.