Short Reports are a miniature version of my Read Reports: brief thoughts about small—often tiny—stories.
The Voice I Kept
by Juno Guadalupe
(Anomaly SF)
At 138 words, this is not quite drabble-length, so it needs to hit hard and fast. It’s a story about the loss of someone loved, with the sci-fi element being their replacement by an artificial duplicate.
The opening is a metaphor unfurling: salt as grief. The end is a callback to the title. Great structural choices for micro-fiction.
The mix of italics and quotes is something I’ve done myself, but it’s dangerously ambiguous. Is the robot speaking non-verbally? Is it the protagonist’s internal voice of their lost loved one? Any lack of clarity can be catastrophic in a story so short.
The theme is imminently relatable; we’ve all experienced loss of a loved one, by death or lesser proxy. I don’t quite get that gut-punch emotional reaction I want from a short story, but that’s always the biggest challenge of micro-fiction, where you are fighting for every word.
Words Deferred 