Challenge 196

Just Desserts

At the end of Rachel Parsons’ “One Beast That Cannot Be Tamed,” Rhiannon has to do a lot of explaining to wrap up the story. That’s not ncessarily bad, but in such cases it’s a good idea to check whether some details could have been “planted” earlier to avoid surprising the reader with crucial, unrevealed facts.

It helps to know that Rhiannon has led her world in a war against Terran colonizers, but that’s alluded to early on. Otherwise, could Rhiannon’s concluding summary be shortened in any way? Could it be supported by some foreshadowing? Maybe; or maybe it’s best the way it is. You decide.
John Vieczorek’s “The Hole” has three characters, each with his own story. Agnes is a slattern, Otis is a psychopath, and the Hole guardian seems to have problems of his own.

Agnes and Otis may have good reasons to think of each other as they do, but the guardian is right: Otis’ dumping Agnes into the Hole is a bit over the top and Agnes is the one who’d have been justified in resorting to murder. But that’s not why the guardian consigns Otis to an eon-long spell in what amounts to Purgatory.
1. What do you think of the retributive justice in “The Hole”?
2. How might you condense the guardian’s lengthy sermon to Otis?
The title of Robert L. Sellers Jr.’s “The Exodus Effect” indicates that the Amish prohibit making “graven images,” including photographs. And yet the Amish seem to have invented a magical flash gun to go with a pinhole camera.
1. Does the nature of the camera mechanism suffice to allow the Amish to circumvent their own laws and make images? Or is an Amish camera an insurmountable contradiction in terms?
2. Is it even necessary to cite the Amish as the source of the flash gun? What if the attachment had arrived as a mistaken delivery from a mail-order house that deals in magical items?
3. The story is basically an extended news report: it recounts the discovery of a new method of crime scene photography. How might you focus the story on the flash attachment itself? For example, what if it were not as reliable as the photographers think at first, and it added ghostly figures that were not guilty parties?
Could Mary B. McArdle’s poem “Illusion” be titled “Disillusion”? Why or why not?

Responses welcome!