My science fiction short story “The Things You Can Maintain Yourself” is free online for all to read today in issue 159 (August 2023) of Lightspeed Magazine! I’ve wanted to publish in Lightspeed for my whole writing career, so I’m excited to appear on their table of contents alongside so many other excellent stories.
“The Things You Can Maintain Yourself” is a flash-length story about car repair, individualism, and a post-post-climate-change world (in a good way). The self-reliant call of the open road is fundamental to the American mythos, but some things you can maintain yourself, and other things take a community.
Jill wiped xylem from her gloves and closed her car’s leafy hood. She’d kept Snapdragon on the road for almost twenty years, and if the world would leave her alone, she could keep him alive for five more, easy.
It wouldn’t, and she couldn’t. No amount of repairs today would spare Snapdragon from the weeding, or her from the pain of uprooting a thing she loved.
You can read my story for free online, or buy the issue 159 as an ebook for $3.99 from the publisher, BN.com, Amazon, Kobo, or Weightless Books; or get an annual subscription to Lightspeed – with twelve months of story-packed issues like this one – for $35.88
More notes (with spoilers) below the fold.
I first wrote this story in a 2021, to a writing challenge based around images. This is the image that called to me, and became the seed of TTYCMY:
This art appealed to me for two reasons: the burst of plants and flowers out of a drab outfit and concrete wall, and the hammer in the figure’s hands. It looks to me like, in the art, the person is freeing themselves, knocking a hole in the wall to free their vibrant spirit. For this story, I interpreted the two parts separately: a bloom of overflowing life, and the burden of a dripping hammer.
Destruction is often a part of life, but that doesn’t make the price feel any less.