INTRODUCTION
ARIANNE “TEX” THOMPSON
IT’S NOT EASY BEING A TOILET GNOME. Sure, you can rattle the pipes, burn the washing, maybe flood the upstairs bedroom if you’re really aggrieved—but none of that is going to bring back the nice old lady who took such good care of you.
It’s hard to be a new author, too. You pour your heart out onto every page and flog yourself senseless trying to get the world to notice your work—but most of the attention is still going to the bigshots with decades-long series and hit TV adaptations, and fantasy feels kind of frivolous right now anyway. It’s hard to make a big deal of anything fictional in an era of huge, epic, borderline apocalyptic real-world current events.
Enter Beth Cato, champion of the small.
We debuted around the same time, and her Clockwork Dagger novels quickly become a breakout hit. (Read them and you will understand why!) But Beth has long been a fount of literary wonders, showering forth a novella, short stories, poems, essays, articles, flash fiction, and more—right down to her recipe for Cadbury Egg Brownies in Ad Astra: The 50th Anniversary SFWA Cookbook. And even as accolades, new projects, and fresh deadlines pile up, Beth continues to pour tremendous love into tiny vessels. She brings home-baked goodies to her readings, and gives out the recipes online. She carves out the time to read and review books by new authors. She shares her life so generously—her writing, her baking, her family, her travels—and still takes a deep and authentic interest in the lives of others.
So I am thrilled that we finally get a book which so well represents Beth herself: an irresistible abundance of bite-sized delights. You won’t find any epic quests in these stories. No world-ending apocalypses—or rather, none that we can do anything about. And no huge hidden realms or portentous magical secrets either. Those “Toilet Gnomes at War,” the ones currently shrieking through the plumbing? They’re as common as backyard beagles—and likewise, if you don’t get yours to quiet down on the quick side, the neighbors are going to complain. Just so, it’s common knowledge among the Confederate soldiers in “The Souls of Horses” that the spirits of dying horses can be transferred into artificial bodies—for them, the only novelty is the new features on the latest mechanical model. And “Minor Hockey Gods of Barstow Station” is much less concerned with the gods than the hockey. It all adds up to something unexpectedly fresh: since the supernatural elements seem ordinary to the characters, 100% of the marvel and surprise is reserved for you, the reader. I am prepared to call that an act of authorial generosity.
So what is fantasy without the big quest, the monomythic hero, the world-shaking consequence? How much imagination can you really pack into ten pages, in a genre that’s more comfortable with ten thousand?
Quite a lot, as it turns out. The stories and poems in this book are overwhelmingly devoted to ordinary people striving for tiny victories. Maybe you can’t change what was done to you under that gnarly old oak (“The Cartography of Shattered Trees”)—but if you pull yourself together and mind your manners, you might be able to talk with her. Grandma is dead, and her soul is leaking out of that enchanted vase like helium from a leftover birthday balloon (“Blue Tag Sale”)—but there’s still a little of her left, and it would be a shame to waste that on sadness. And at the end of it all, when the doomsday clock is counting down its final hours, you might as well bake some cookies and enjoy a day at the playground (“A Dance to End Our Final Day”).
And that’s what I think we’ve been missing so desperately in our age of unbearable superlatives. Yes, it is cathartic to read stories about small people rising to greatness, overcoming impossible odds to save the world. But we also need stories about small people who triumph even in their smallness. Who find agency within themselves. Whose greatest quest is to rescue themselves, or each other—to change their own point of view, even when they can change nothing else.
These stories showcase rural children and Confederate slaves, elderly widows and struggling caregivers, mothers and veterans and survivors of every kind. It’s no accident that they are overwhelmingly girls and women, most of them occupying profoundly underrepresented roles, and most of them unflinchingly generous in empathy. Yes, there are moments when it’s kill or be killed—but you can still feel sorry for that poor dumb son-of-a-bitch as you bury him (“La Rosa Still in Bloom”). You can still love your hissing cockroach grandma, even if she’s too far gone to love you back (“An Echo in the Shell”).
And if the characters in these stories can hold fast to their humanity even in the strangest and most extreme circumstances, I have to believe that we can do likewise in ours. This is the special genius of fantasy, the moment when it grows beyond novelty and escapism. In holding our reality up to the funhouse mirror, we can marvel at what changes—and in doing so discover what doesn’t. What shouldn’t.
I hope that you enjoy this collection as much as I have. I hope you esteem the author as much as I do. And as the trials of our times pass over and through us, I hope that Beth Cato’s work will stand at the beginning of a greater turn back to smallness, to kindness, to the tiny miracles within the human heart, and that our apocalyptic age will prove to be merely the wall-shaking cacophony of deprived toilet gnomes: a transient sound and fury that dissolves the moment we rediscover our shared humanity over a fresh pot of coffee and a plate of Cadbury Egg Brownies.