Imperfect Commentaries

1It Is a Tree of LifeThe land of Tikanu spread from Dinah’s garden along with the wild mint. Neighbors on either side kept it in check with their pesticides, but it crept up the back porch and into the kitchen. After work, she would come home and bake bread, leaving crumbs by the anthill in exchange for tiny jewels.Miriam begged for a cutting from the garden. She loved the lights that flickered in the dusk, the blue and silver wings that embraced the house on Friday nights. Dinah warned her three times, as the law required, then instructed her in the ways of magic.Miriam took the seedling to her home by the ocean, and planted it in the backyard. Soon strange footprints appeared in the dunes, and a tree grew by the doorstop: perfectly symmetrical, young twigs curling in intricate fractals. Mint grew around the base. Within a year, garrisons of dolphins began to mass just beyond the sandbar. Miriam’s husband found books in the attic, musty and leather-bound. He made careful notes, and at low tide the children brought them to the dolphins. So they learned together how to defeat Leviathan.When Miriam’s company closed their local offices, the family had to move. They sold the house, at a loss, to a family they knew would care for the tree and treat the dolphins with respect. In the city, they could only afford a small apartment, cramped and lacking a yard, let alone an ocean—but on the balcony, in a little pot, they planted a sprig of mint. Sympathy with the sea, with the weird, and with monsters fills the stories of Imperfect Commentaries. Ruthanna Emrys's collection offers readers fantastical feminist and #ownvoices Neo-Lovecraftian fiction, anthropological science fiction, and fantasies of belonging, plus miscellaneous deleted scenes, poems, and secret story origins. Readers familiar with her novels (Winter Tide and Deep Roots) will see the first appearance Aphra Marsh, an Innsmouth survivor, still recovering from her losses and making a life for herself in late-1940s San Francisco in "The Litany of Earth." "Author Ruthanna Emrys is known for providing a feminist and #ownvoice spin to Lovecraftian fiction. Imperfect Commentaries collects old and new short stories by Emrys that explore what it is to be human, to be monstrous, to be afloat in the imagination of a gifted storyteller"-- Provided by publisher