Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten is the author’s debut short fiction collection, which will be published by Stillhouse Press in October. I’ve been a fan of Kristina’s short fiction for a while, and it was wonderful getting to experience so many stories all together, discovering many for the first time and seeing the thematic threads that connect them. It’s a gorgeous-looking collection as well. The cover and jacket design are by Camille Koslo who did a fantastic job giving it a subtly eerie vibe, which perfectly suits the stories inside.
“The Dizzy Room” was one of the few stories I’d read before, and it pairs nicely with “The Curing”, which immediately follows it in the collection. Both stories explore the uneasy space of childhood and the struggle to define oneself, especially as a child of immigrant parents and an ESL learner. “The Dizzy Room” focuses on the protagonist using language learning games to catch up with the rest of the class, only the Dizzy Game seems intent on teaching her another language entirely, bringing in a nice hint of cosmic horror. “The Curing” follows a group of middle school students who don’t fit into any of the other cliques, who learn to make copies of themselves by applying glue to their skin and then peeling it off when it dries. The copies, which they refer to as spirit people, take on lives of their own, eventually becoming better-liked and smoother versions of the originals, touching on themes of erasing oneself in order to assimilate.
“Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod” carries forward the idea of children’s games, specifically fortune telling devices and counting games that are meant to predict the name of the person you will marry. Ten does a wonderful job of suggesting horror around the edges of the story, with the need to repopulate after a devastating war, and the story’s ending underscoring that darkness even further as Sofia finally learns about her destined mate. “Bunny Ears” is another unsettling story that starts out relatively innocently and leans increasingly into its darkness as it progresses. Hannah’s parents send her to a sleepaway camp for a week where she overhears a story about the bunny-ear kids who were abandoned by their parents, went feral, and still live in the surrounding woods.
Liminality, transformation, and body horror – particularly as it relates to women, standards of beauty, and reproductive rights – are all themes that echo throughout the second half of the collection. “Last Letter First” is a story of two women bonding on an intergalactic bus ride as they travel to get modifications that are illegal on Earth – one to have an abortion and one to have her uterus removed. The story occurs in the liminal space of a bus between the stars, while also centering on a temporary friendship as the women share bits of themselves along the way. Each anticipates an act of transformation at the end of their journey, which will give them a great measure of control over their bodies, though ultimately it is a different act of transformation that occurs.
“Mel for Melissa” is framed as a confessional narrative as Kat writes letters to her therapist that circle around the horror of what happened to her friend Mel when they were in high school. Their volleyball coach obsessively tracked each players’ weight, causing them all to torture themselves with diet and exercise, while re-exerting control over their lives with risky behavior, and cutting and burning themselves, all before Mel takes things to an even greater extreme. The story does a wonderful job in its exploration of trauma, the way women’s bodies are viewed, and the brutality athletes endure for the sake of winning. “The Flood, the Tumble, the Talons, the Trick” blends body horror and fantasy. When a dragon washes up in a man’s basement during a flood, he takes her captive and forces cards beneath her scales in order to cheat his friends during their regular poker games. The story is brutal, but also full of gorgeous writing and striking imagery as it explores the idea of beauty as useful, and women as commodities and property existing for the benefit of others, rather than beings in an of themselves.
“The Advocate” makes a woman’s battle against doctors into a literal joust, with information as her armor, taking on the idea of doctors dismissing women’s pain specifically and not listening to their patients in general. “Adjective” plays with form, using a Mad Libs style narrative to tell the story of an immigrant dealing with microaggressions at work. The format highlights depressing commonalities – anyone could slot in the specifics of their own experience with microaggressions – but there are also character-specific details that make the story personal.
Overall, the collection is lovely and the thought and care put into the order of the stories, considering the way they speak to each other, shines through. The exploration of liminal states and liminal spaces is effective, and it resonates in the characters, themes, settings, and tone. There’s a perfect blend of literary and speculative fiction across the tales, and Ten does a wonderful job of pacing, adding new depth and layers of darkness as each story unfolds, making the stories themselves into shifting things that transform even as the reader experiences them. Similarly, the characters populating the stories are people who don’t fit in, kids of immigrant families who don’t belong fully to either world, and pre-teens who are between ages, all making choices to control their own destiny but often in eerie and unsettling ways that set them further apart from those around them. This is definitely a collection to put on your radar. Keep an eye out for it when it comes out in October, or better yet, pre-order it now.
