‘The Healer’ by Aimee Bender

One girl has a hand of fire, one girl has a hand of ice, everything is as literal as you would think. This is another straight fable, like Sterling’s ‘The Little Magic Shop’ it is essentially a modern fairytale. This would fit very nicely in a collection called, oh, I don’t know, The New Wave Fabulists but this is because it plugs into a much older tradition than slipstream, it doesn’t make you feel very strange in the way living in the late Twentieth Century does because it could have been written any time in the last 500 years.

Quality: **
Slipperiness: **

Part of Feeling Very Strange