Sweetheart

by Abbey Mei Otis, Greg Ruth (Illustrator)

Paxton and the neighbor's kid are inseparable—sweethearts...

Genres: Short Stories, Science Fiction, Aliens, Fiction, Speculative Fiction

5 pages, ebook

First published December 8, 2010

About the author

Abbey Mei Otis is a writer, a teaching artist, a mongrel trash robot, an anarchist, a storyteller and a firestarter, raised in the woods of North Carolina. She loves people and art forms on the margins. Her story collection, Alien Virus Love Disaster (Small Beer 2018) was a finalist for the Philip K Dick Award. She has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers, the MacDowell Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center. She has survived in many American cities, and right now is experimenting with the idea of home in Minneapolis, MN. She is at work on a novel of climate catastrophe and post-mass-incarceration, This Is Not a Wasteland.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

You buy them hotdogs and try not to be disgusted when Sweetheart pincers hers into bits and tucks them into pouches on her sides. Pax trumps her by mashing his entire dog into his cheeks and opening his mouth to display it.

They whisper to each other the whole bus ride home. You realize you don’t even know if Sweetheart is a girl.

back in 2010, before these newfangled novelettes started being all the rage, tor shorts were actually wicked short! short but bittersweet, as they say, and this one in particular manages to pack quite a wallop into just a few paragraphs. yes, some backstory is sacrificed, and other events are more suggested or hinted at than spelled right out, but all the parts you need to know to fall for this story are right there on the (half a) page. the concept of a mother's protective impulses kicking in regardless of the implications for the larger world, and despite making her tacitly complicit in horrible things is universal, and needs no additional padding.

it's so much harder to deliver emotional impact and clarity in a shortshort story than in one where there's more room to sprawl out and develop every little detail and this story wins bonus points for being in second person because who even does that? "you" do, apparently.

it will honestly take you less time to go read this story yourself than for me to try to convince you to with my words, so go on and read something well-written instead of this garbagetown review.



read it for yourself here: http://www.tor.com/2010/12/08/sweethe...

come to my blog!

[La Coccinelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

That was really disturbing.

So, basically, by rounding up/detaining/killing(?) the "other", we can have peace, which is more important even than love.

No. Take your second-person, no-quotation-mark, pretentious sanctimony and shove it.

In other words, I don't recommend this.

[Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Appearing on tor.com in 2010, "Sweetheart" is a short story that left me chilled. Written in second person, the story centres on a young boy and his childhood sweetheart, the neighbour, an alien child. I found this story disturbing and thought provoking- a discussion and reflection of the way one culture can dominate and distort another.

Read it for free here:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/12/sweetheart

[Angharad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty decent, in theory, but not strong enough in practice. There's not enough here to really latch on to it.

The premise could make for a better short novel, but this took me probably a grand total of five minutes to read. It's hard to call this a story, a blurb maybe. The literary equivalent of a doodle.

The writing's okay. the premise is okay. Worth five minutes I guess?

[Maggie Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sweetheart the alien is the best friend of Paxton, a five year old human boy. Paxton's mother looks on and thinks the two are rather cute, but when humanity turns against aliens, she believes that Paxton's friendship is a worthy sacrifice for the peace humans will get in return. On one hand, the story is rather chilling in the way that humanity uses what are, at least to the reader, innocent entities to foster a global sense of "human pride". However, the story is a bit too short to really have that much emotional appeal, so the fascinating idea isn't really explored all that well.

[Netanella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a disturbing, second-person perspective story of a parent who believes she loves her young child enough to shield him from the obvious racism and destruction of the "other" - here, an alien child, rather than a human who's been marginalized and cast off. In many ways, and possibly because of the cover, I'm reminded of the South African SF movie "District 9."

[Warlou Joyce Antonio · Rating 3 out of 5]

She brings him marbles that hum and lets him position her antennae into funny shapes. He has a lisp that the speech therapist has given up on, and she has clicking mandibles, but in their invented language of coos and giggles they are both poets.

Too short for my liking but the concept is good and quite thought provoking.

[rixx · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Sweatheart](https://www.tor.com/2018/08/14/read-a...) is a well-written very short story by *Abbey Mei Otis* that is first sweet and then chilling in the path the story takes – nothing too special either, just a perfectly fine scifi short.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written short available here . Definitely make you think.

[May Dinneen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"He has a lisp that the speech therapist has given up on, and she has clicking mandibles, but in their invented language of coos and giggles they are both poets."

Lovely and heartbreaking.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

This felt eerily similar to watching the news.

[Danyel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the writing and the premise but I was left a bit confused about the author's intensions for the story, given the ending. Since the story is narrated in second person it was hard to tell.

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm on the fence with this one. I agree with others saying this is disturbing and the message (if there even is one) is odd and unsettling. But I wonder if that's the point? It's hard to get a grasp on what the author was trying to convey.

Were they trying to make you uneasy with the conclusion and with the fact that people can make justifications for all types of heinous behaviour? Or that as adults, we tend to lose the ability to go blindly into things with nothing but good intentions and to fight even when we know we should because we also know the consequences that may arise if we were to do so?

There is a lot to unpack in such a short story and in that sense it's successful. While I'm uneasy with the idea of 'extermination' as it were, the story, and author, succeed in giving you a lot to think about, and force you to consider what you would do in a similar situation. This is reinforced even more by the use of the second person narration. We all like to think that we would fight and resist, but when faced with difficult circumstances, would we? Do we?

If you want a story that will make you think, and feel uncomfortable, this is it.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's literally taking me longer to write this review than it took for me to read (and then re-read) this story. That's the beauty of an effective short read. For me, Sweetheart burst onto the page, stopped as suddenly as it started, and then lingered. Poked. Prodded. I was compelled to go back and read it again.

With few words, Otis has masterfully sketched out an improbable friendship and innocent relationship between 6-yr old human child Paxton and his first love, the alien next door named Sweetheart. We see them together through the eyes of his mother (who is YOU, the reader).

We don't know how or when aliens came to be your neighbors, or what Sweetheart's gender is, or really much about the aliens in general. It's not by chance that Sweetheart isn't given a voice. As the tide turns for aliens in your community, "you" begin to act in ways that might (and should) make *real you* feel pretty uncomfortable.

Abbey Mei Otis’ “Sweetheart" was originally published on Tor.com in December 2010 and can be read online for free.

https://www.tor.com/2018/08/14/read-a...

[Marco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting deeply allegorical and unfortunately timely story, set in a near future where extra terrestrial sentient being have come to live with us on Earth. Not surprisingly racism takes route quite quickly, and things escalates. As Wiesenthal famously said, for evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing. This very short story is very disturbing: it very adroitly shows how (unfortunately) easy it is to rationalize and to dismiss what is happening in those situations, how easy is to do nothing without feeling any guilt, or spending any thoughts of it.

[Kieran McAndrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little boy falls in love with the alien next door, but when fear and hatred take over the planet, he is left bewildered when Swetheart disappears.

A chilling story, with warnings about fascism and fear of immigration. Very apt in this current climate.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars! Review to come.

[Alex Sarll]

A little vignette about intolerance and how children don't understand the sins of their elders, which doesn't really need to be science fiction, but is. Would that it had become less relevant in the eight years since first publication.