Today I deliberately made the number singular on this weekly blog feature of mine. Usually, I'll read a few entries from an anthology and then briefly review each story. But this week as I was reading through Gardner Dozois' sci-fi anthology series, specifically The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection, I ran across a pretty lengthy novella. Dozois has always had a penchant for inserting long stories like this one, not quite at novel-size, into his series. So, here's my reaction to that novella...
MELODIES OF THE HEART by Michael F. Flynn
As Gardner Dozois intimated in his intro to this story, it's a time-travel piece, but in a special sense. A physician has been assigned duty caring for elderly people at a facility while his little daughter is suffering from progeria, which causes her to rapidly age to a premature death. He treats what he has been told is a 100-year-old woman who has been complaining of old songs loudly playing in her head. Her cantankerous demeanor ruffles him...he's already developed a cynical view of the elderly, most likely in light of what is happening to his little girl. The story develops as the woman's songs recede decade by decade into her past until the good doctor begins to question how old she truly is...and he begins to connect her plight with that of his daughter. There is a subplot about his distant, obsessive-compulsive wife and the nurse hired to care for their stricken daughter. It's a very sad story, but one I'd recommend if you have the time to spend on it...if only for the wealth of old songs with their time of popularity pinpointed as well as some lyrics that were changed over the years: political correctness isn't just a recent phenomenon...
So, there you have it for this week's feature. Maybe I'll come up with some actual "short" stories next time around from 1994...
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