Another entry in the Tor collection that is an intriguing enough vignette, but isn't really a story. Three generations of women live in a house in some sub-optimal future, the world and society sketched as the kind of rough-and-ready, everyday harshness of an existence so many people in history have learned to live with, without ever filling in the details - perhaps somewhere between 1930s Dustbowl, Gibsonian sprawl and Mad Max outback. Mother and daughter are securing the house against a coming Storm ( although it is not the ecological disaster we expect ) while Granny Ma wanders around in her dementia, reciting social media references from her youth that may as well be Aramaic to her grand daughter. ( )

That was deeply disturbing and sad, the way all zombie stories are--spoiler alert, the incoming "storm" is actually a rambling zombie hoard. It's clear pretty early on that the story's world is some sort of post-apocalyptic setting, but it wasn't until the very last scene that I understood how. There was no indication until then that the weather referenced and fretted over was anything but some kind of actual weather. Admittedly, I assumed it was some sort of unnatural weather--I spent most of the story wondering if it had something to do with nuclear fallout--but weather all the same.

It's short enough that I don't feel robbed by spending so much of my reading time confused, but that ending really made up for a lot. Christ, that ending. That was perfect and shattering. ( )

The story felt disjointed and incomplete to me. ( )