What Red Lights Mean

Another two issues of Caitlin R. Kiernan's Sirenia Digest were in my inbox yesterday, issues 185 and 191. They're both good but 191 is by far the superior.

191 features a story called "Metamorphosis D (Imago)" and it's about a couple who have conflicting memories about a possibly extraterrestrial encounter in the woods. The interesting thing is how this leads to an argument between the two and it becomes a nice illustration of how two people can be misled down paths of reasoning by invoking knowledge and experience that aren't precisely appropriate. But they may be imprecisely appropriate, or related on some fundamental level of human conception. Which makes misunderstanding more likely--because they're compelling rabbit holes.

One character says something in her sleep which the other misinterprets. The first interprets anger in the other as the prelude to physical violence. It may not be, or maybe she's picking up on a frequency in itself that is as irrational as physical violence. This is part of a story that also includes the narrator's perception of physical transformation and two distinct recollections for the same period of time. It's great--it's one thing to have a story about conflicting perceptions, it's another thing to have one that makes it so intimate.

185 featured another of Caitlin's stories with a narrator using futuristic dialect, another nice, poetic experiment in language craft. The story about sinister mannequins is not bad, though maybe not the most interesting one I've ever seen in the Digest.