Short Stories by Jennifer Hudak

Echo Syndrome is a sci-fi story about a condition that causes people to split into multiples. I won’t write more because the weirdness is part of the allure. I loved this story:

When my daughter climbs in the car, there’s three of her. They shouldn’t all fit in the passenger seat, but they overlap each other to save space. Together they reach for the seatbelt, their movements almost in unison but not quite; their asynchrony makes me slightly nauseous, and I swallow hard before putting the car into gear and inching out of the school parking lot.

Hudak’s story is tender and moving, especially for a story that’s told from the perspective of an inanimate object. It also sent me to learning a bunch about the Erie Canal:

When machinery cleaved rock and stone, I was born. When steel scraped against soil, creating open space where there had been only darkness, the earth whispered, Look!

I came into being then: a furrow in the ground. A trench. A pathway opened to the chill blue sky. The earth shifted and sighed around me, and named all that I was seeing, which had not existed in the darkness before my birth. Air, it whispered. And birds, and clouds. And then, soon after, water.

On some planet in the future, society is struggling to keep the last remaining trees alive. Narrator Leslie’s friend Xander is a rebel with a big idea.

This is a perfect science fiction story — adventure and wonder, strange landscapes, but themes and ideas that are all about the here and now.

…the trees look so sturdy, so real—so permanent—that you could forgive someone for believing that they’d grow forever.

But the trees here want something we can’t give them—some murmur of information, an arboreal greeting, the plant equivalent of a rough hug and a shouted Hello! Good to see you! They’re waiting for something that will never happen.

Just like us.

The narrator of this story sees a legendary figure propped up at a watering hole – the only survivor of some terrifying incident. This story isn’t only about space exploration and aliens though — Hudak is writing about humankind’s relationship with nature from the beginning:

You have to understand, there was nothing on that planet when we arrived. Nothing. Anything we wanted, we had to build for ourselves. None of it came easy, and the stress could just about kill you if you let it. We all did what we needed to find respite. For Etan, that was Silver.

That’s what he called her—Silver—because she didn’t have a name, and because it suited her. Like the rest of the Champignon, she sprouted from the ground like a mushroom, delicate and smooth. 

This story has followed me around since I read it: Gladys begins life as a wolf, but turns into a human in a fantastic, melancholy and thoughtful use of metaphor:

Gladys was approaching her first heat when she shed her fur and lost her tail. The transformation was unintentional, and unwanted. When she awoke in her new form, smelling of skin and sweat, she wailed for her pack in a voice that scraped her throat raw. 

A funny and compelling take on the zombie apocalypse, as a boy learns to provide for the survivors. There are so many questions after this story:

Lace up your boots, son, and grab your gloves. It’s time I took you out to the garden. Those green beans you’re eating right now? They didn’t come from nowhere. It takes lots of hard work to grow our food. You’re old enough to help.

Zombies? Well, yes, there are zombies. That’s part of the hard work I was talking about. But I’m going to teach you how we handle them.

This 2022 story about a spirit who inhabits the mind and body of a woman with an eating disorder is devastating. I was in tears by the end. If you read one story by Hudak, make it this one:

Elizabeth is the first person to notice I’m inside her.

“Tell me how to do it,” she whispers.

It’s a shock. No one has spoken to me directly in ages. I’m nothing more than a whisper when I slip beneath her skin. I’m less than a breath. I should be undetectable, but somehow, I’m not.

This is a weird little fable, and Hudak’s language is so visual – horrifying and lovely in equal amounts. I would love to see this turned into a short film, I think it would translate beautifully.

…her father wrested the phone from her and hurled it across the living room, where it hit Lisa in the back of the head. The pain was abrupt and shocking. Almost immediately, a patch of dandelions erupted from the center of the emerging welt, pushing through Lisa’s hair and blossoming sunny yellow before rapidly disintegrating into white tufts. Her parents stood, stunned into silence. Her mother held out a hand to catch one of the floating seed pods and burst out crying.

“I’m sorry,” her father said, his voice shaking. “I’m so sorry.”

This story is a metaphor that can be parsed a bunch of different ways. Since I read it I’ve thought of it as an allegory for womanhood, but also for the difficulty of leaving home, and the pull that a small town has on those who get out. At any rate, it’s haunting and will echo around in your head for days:

By the time Lacey was born, I’d long since left this place in my rearview. In the years since, I’d managed to convince myself that the creek was just a creek, and that everything I thought I’d felt was nothing more than an adolescent delusion. I swore up and down I’d never come back, but my mother can no longer manage alone, and she stubbornly refuses to move out of her house.

“You know I can’t,” she said when I asked. “You of all people.”