Short Story: The Truth and All Its Ugly by Kylie Minor

If you had told me yesterday that I would be recommending a short story set in 2024 with impossible science-fictionesque assumptions and which features a father who encourages his son on his first experience with drugs, I would have laughed at the improbability.

But today is different. The Truth and All Its Ugly by Kylie Minor, published at Fifty-Two Stories is a wonderful wonderful read. The full text is available online here.

An excerpt to pique your interest:

It was pure joy, watching him lift that axe and drive it into that piano. Up until then his head was always in books or that damn computer. Dead trees, I’d tell him, got not one thing on milkweed and sumac, horsemint and sweet William. But now I wasn’t so sure, and now he’d caught on. “It’s what you do with the dead trees,” he said, like he was reading my mind.