Short stories are a lot like sex. There are only so many variations of what you can do, writer tops reader, reader comes hungry to bottom. But every angle seems inventive, every person brings their own art to both writing and reading that it feels new every time. We can write in teams and read in groups; threesomes and orgies and the sly pass of a story from one person to be enjoyed by the next. The indulgence is undeniable—it isn’t a novel. A novel is a long-term relationship. A short story is as quick and satisfying as a handjob and takes about the same length of time to complete once the parts come together. A friend once sent me a story with the caveat that she was so obsessed with it, so shamefully entranced, that she felt as though by asking me to read it she was suggesting that I smell her fingers.
Unsurprising, then, that some of the best short stories are about sex. In speculative fiction, that sex can take many tentacled forms, assume many literary positions. Despite the richness and humanity that sex brings to stories, all too many publishers and editors are squeamish about erotic content. Don’t bring us your horny stories, their guidelines whisper, just below the part where they tell you not to be a Nazi or a pedophile. No graphic sexual stories. All sexual content must be plot-relevant. No open-door scenes. No spice, please. All stories must be PG-13.
Guidelines like these make writers worry. Makes us think about our mothers reading our stories, our children. Makes us consider the real threat of our work being challenged for obscenity, which is a word school boards use when they don’t want their kids to know the word queer.
But we’re all still horny, aren’t we? Horny to write, horny to read, horny to lube up and slide sex into the narratives that take us to the stars, to the haunted house, to the enchanted forest. We seek out satisfaction, and the best and bravest publishers are still busting it wide open for us. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to read stories that don’t contain sex; a lot of great ones have not a lick of eroticism present! But sex is part of the human experience, and it as vital to both the expression and appreciation of our art as grief, as loss, as any emotion we treat with greater gravity and respect than the quintessential quality of eroticism. Deeper than that, it exists on a level of need more akin to hunger or thirst, and it is as unwise and unkind to deny.
Deny yourself nothing, horny reader. Open wide for some recent strokes of horny genius.
Phoenix Alexander’s “One Day I Will” is the novella in the September/October 2022 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and it hooks a finger into the reader right from the get-go. Queer astronauts orbit a planet that makes an ongoing erotic plea like a cat yowling in heat. This planet has got to have it, and when it gets what it wants it’s weirder than anything I’ve seen offered on OnlyFans—and those folks do it all.
“The Binding of Isaac” by Tochi Onyebuchi looks a little more like familiar horny content: pain and pleasure, freedom and erotic bondage, and this gem: “That’s the whole point of kink, Jeryd. It isn’t kink without the bite of shame.” What follows comes on fast and dangerous, like a welcome hand around your throat that darkens the edges of your vision. Onyebuchi wrestles the reader close to the line of pain and penitence, makes us look up and say the name of the thing we really want, forbidden though it is. This story will catch you in the middle of your yes yes yes and remind you of the real power of no.
When I first read “Dick Pig,” the text had me yelling yes sir right out loud. Ian Muneshwar has the dirty daring to let a character admit the thing we all know is true but struggle to communicate: “there’s a want inside me that I don’t understand.” The story fuses the erotic longing that gets us on to Grindr in the middle of the night to the compulsion to go into the hidden spaces and forbidden passages in a house we know is haunted. All houses are haunted, all ghosts are horny for the mortal plane. We long to come inside, we are spooky little dick pigs, and we don’t want to wear protection.
There is no protection when the craving is for blood and bone, as in Nadia Shammas’s “First Kiss.” There is no relief from the erotic tension between good and evil, between service and submission, as in Izzy Wasserstein’s “A Hench Helps Her Villain No Matter What.” There is no escaping the cycle of life when everything fucks just as much as we do. Nibedita Sen’s “The Love Song of M. Religiosa” has the unmissable distinction of being a story that can make the reader horny for bugs, hungry for bugs, believing that the best way to attract a mate is to rub their musical legs together and pray for the lover to rip their head off at the moment of climax. Sen is a horny genius par excellence.
Sex is a lot like a short story; sometimes you just wanna go back to that one time when it was so, so good and reminisce. Vina Jie-Min Prasad gave us an unforgettable ride in “Pistol Grip,” with the phrase “spit-and-shit sticky,” which is a lexical composition that I never want to shower off. “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” by Kellan Szpara was a Hugo finalist and it’s clear the minute it begins how deliciously horny it is. Szpara boldly intertwines gender transition and becoming a vampire so that they aid and frustrate one another in a 69 of narrative tension and elegiac eroticism. Jae Steinbacher manages to instill a cyborg story with all the fresh unsanctioned lewdness of teenage sex in “Inter-Exo,” a story that evokes the intense desire and frustration we feel when we wonder what we’re allowed to do, with whom, and where. It takes the question of what is safe and what is prohibited and rubs our trans-humanist faces in it.
There are two that I can never get away from, that never fail to do it for me no matter how long it has been. Vonda N. McIntyre manages to tangle sex and loss and what we carry with us when we’ve mingled our fluids and untied the knot in “Little Faces.” This absolute banger comes to me when horniness seems contraindicated: aroused at a funeral, turned on even though the news is bad and the right person or persons are not present. McIntyre writes a mode of fucking that doesn’t trifle with anything so insignificant as propriety. This is a story where we sleep off our heartbreak for a thousand years and still cry about it shamelessly to our next lover. No shame because it’s kin; not kink.
“Ganger (Ball Lightning)” by Nalo Hopkinson is kin and kink, sin and skin. It’s in her collection Skin Folk from all the way back in 2001, and it was for so many readers the first story they read wherein two people swap bodies, swap genitals, swap experiences in the act of penetrative sex. This story is as re-readable as any electrifying fantasy is re-playable. It runs parallel to Kate Bush in her perennial popularity: if I only could/ I’d make a deal with god/ and I’d get him to swap our places. Read it and you can hear the eggshell of gender identity cracking all around you: what if the person you’re literally fucking right now is having a completely different experience from you? What would it mean to swap these underlying conditions? Can the kind of sex you have and the roles you take within it really change who you are? Hopkinson is our horny GOAT; greatest of all time, capable of biting through anything.
You came. You came to your screen wanting something, though you did not know its name. These stories have got what your horny body needs.
© 2022 Meg Elison
