Michelle West Short Stories/Novellas

A short story of 10k words, originally published in Tarot Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Lawrence Schimel. Shelagh was a mother, living in a small home, on the edge of the rest of her life with a husband she adored. Now, she lives alone. Her husband remains convalescent in a care facility, wordless and unable to walk. All of the promise of life, of future, is gone, and she wants no reminders of the past—but she finds one: a pack of carefully hand-crafted Tarot Cards that she made for him on a long-ago day when the future seemed to matter. Those cards are one of the few remaining things that bind them together—but to what end?

A short story of 9.5k words, originally published in Elf Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Larry Segriff An elderly woman walking the old ways comes to the Faerie circles to die—so that the child she carries, the last of her kin, might live. With her life as the payment, the Fey take the newborn infant into the court of their Queen, to watch her grow, age, and die—for mortality fascinates those whom age does not change. But the child is mortal and human, and what a child wants or needs is not what immortals do. The lands are changing; the old ways are dying. The time is coming when the Fey must reckon with the Law of Man.

A short story of a 7k words, original published in Return of the Dinosaurs, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. A fossil—a bone—arrives in Peter’s mail. He understands what this means: The father from whom he’s been estranged since childhood has died. He’s never understood why his father deserted his family, and attending to his inheritance is one way of attempting to understand it. His wife is worried. His mother is very, very worried. Peter himself is not. He knows what his father did to his family, and he has no intention of ever doing the same thing to his own wife and child. But what he finds is not what he expected, and he is caught—as his father was caught—by the compelling voice of a past he has never experienced until now…