Weird, and a little disgusting, plus a little strange on the writing style. ( )

I don't want to be like the harpy. But I don't want to be me any more, either. I'm stuck living with myself.

Half of me loves this and half of me hates it. It's beautifully written; the writing just disappears and it unfolds around the reader. Elizabeth Bear has a talent for writing things that make me very uncomfortable; the decisions her characters make are at times really hard for me to take. (Not hard to believe. Not at all. Just hard to live with.) Possibly her themes just hit too close to home. Clearly I need to read a lot more from this lady. ( )

“'Mama Alice would say that God never gives us any burdens we can’t carry.'
The harpy says, Does she look you in the eye when she says that?"

Beautiful cover photo. Beautiful story. Striking and original.

"Wouldn’t it be awful to have wings that didn’t work? Wouldn’t it be worse to have wings that do work, and not be able to use them?" ( )

Imagine if you will, the inherent difficulty of being an orphaned teenage girl in foster care. Imagine going your whole life wearing clothes from charity bins. Imagine being an orphaned teenage girl of color, marred by disfiguring syndromes that are effects of having been born HIV+, of being reliant on hideously expensive drugs that you know you probably won't be able to afford in a few months when you turn eighteen, lose your coverage, and have to rely on dead-end, minimum wage jobs just to survive. Imagine feeling so ugly and wrong that you feel in your bones that you will ever know love much less marry and have a family.

If you can imagine that, you can imagine Desiree's life, you can imagine the hopelessness that has become so pervasive that it feels normal. And then try to imagine that girl, whose life would probably have been better if she'd died young the way everyone expected her to, meeting a harpy in the alley. Imagine her watching this mythical bird who survives on people's garbage, turning dead rats and maggoty meat into gleaming bronze feathers. Imagine her seeing an image of her own pain and ugliness in something so powerful and transcendent.

Imagine you're that girl. What would you do? ( )

I liked this short story but it wasn't as good as a lot of the shorts I have read. ( )