Reading Tomorrow

“Echo” by Elizabeth Hand
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2005
Nebula Award nominee for Best Short Story

From an isolated island in Maine, a woman calls out to a lost lover, wondering plaintively where he is and what has happened to him.  Her days are full of simple survival, long walks with her wolfhound Finn, references to Greek mythology, and memories of the time she spent with him. Something terrible seems to have happened in the world outside her remote island enclave, but all she cares about are the infrequent messages from her loved one.

Another plaintive, lonely short story, continuing the trend of downers in this year’s Nebula-nominated short stories. It was very poetic, but more than a little frustrating. The language is beautiful, and the way Hand uses her words to evoke a palpable, primal sense of loss and longing is quite remarkable. Still, I ended the story no wiser than I was at the beginning, in terms of knowing who this narrator is, what has happened to the world, and what, really, she had and then lost with her unnamed addressee. So I’ll think of this one like a prose poem, a picture of melancholy and the passage of time in a place that is untouched by external catastrophe. Still, I’d like to have known what that catastrophe was, and the tantalizing but unfulfilled hints left me ultimately unsatisfied.