Traitor by M. Rickert

This story is like a piece of broken glass. It’s beautiful, it’s written with great clarity, and it has an edge to it. Still, it is a fragment.

The focus of the story is a mother and daughter. (Spoilers ahead.) The mother, we learn, has used the daughter to deliver bombs, and now the mother has prepared her to be a suicide bomber. The focus is so tight on the mother and daughter it’s like a photograph with no depth of field. The background of the story is completely fuzzy. There is no context, no moral judgment. The story has power, yet I find myself expecting something more.

"Traitor" by M. Rickert originally appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2008
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