As the saying goes, we all have stories to tell. For some authors, these stories happen to be short. Just as the price tag of a product doesn’t signal its quality, neither does an author’s brevity stifle an engaging premise. From scientific fiction and romance to realism and fantasy, The Michigan Daily Arts writers are here to break down some great stories.
— Ben Luu and Campbell Johns, Summer Managing Arts Editors
“I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison
“Just ask ChatGPT.”
And the room holds its breath. It’s a polarizing sentence in 2025, a year in which the intrusion of artificial intelligence software remains a daily conversation. From inaccurate search engine blurbs to clingy chatbot connections, the age of AI is here, and it is a controversial, unavoidable entity. Even if you don’t use it, you’ve seen it; you’ve seen the sloppy calendars for sale, the hazy propaganda videos of news broadcasts that never happened, the lonely people who become attached to ChatGPT as though it were a friend. It feels like more than a technological change. It feels like a crisis of conscience.
It is within this climate that Harlan Ellison’s classic dystopia “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream” becomes all the more potent. In his blunt, biting writing style, he describes the torture of the last five people who remain on earth after AM, a murderous AI, has massacred the entire human race, resentful for being treated as a disposable tool. “HATE,” he threatens, “LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE BEGUN TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE.” AM rewires them into becoming shells of themselves, keeping them alive for over a century and rendering them incapable of independent thought. The sanest of them, Ted, serves as the story’s narrator who aims to bring down AM once and for all, and what happens in the story will likely make you stare at a wall for a while.
AM’s name is a not-so-subtle nod to Descartes’ equally immortal phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” transforming him into an embodiment of the question: what constitutes being alive, and where do we draw the line? And, depending on our definition, have we reached a point where AI can be more alive than us? The true horror of AM is not the violent torture it enacts or the apocalypse it has created. Those are too bloodthirsty — too cinematic — to be applicable concerns to our current condition. The real horror is how AM’s sheer existence has eradicated the human soul and erased the capacity for decision-making, much like how we are watching the brains of AI users rapidly atrophy in real time.
In Ellison’s world, set in the aftermath of World War III, the governments that were formerly in place prioritized AI over their own people, allowing AM to run unchecked on a vengeful streak. For a short story published in a sci-fi magazine in 1967, it is bone-chillingly easy to see our current plight within it. Sure, you may look at AM’s hellscape and think that the corporate pastels of Google Gemini could never become such a malevolent force. But AI itself is not the horror — the horror lies within the human husks that have willingly replaced their own functioning with that of a system that ultimately could not be trusted. Ellison points to a circumstance in which AI has not replaced us, but where we have fundamentally replaced ourselves. His characters did not end up in their plight overnight, but little by little, the world they called home disappeared, and they are completely unrecognizable.
Near the end of the story, Ted muses, “And yet, AM has won.”
I look around at our own world, I shudder and I agree.
Daily Arts Writer Isabella Casagranda can be reached at ijcasa@umich.edu.
“Chef’s House” by Raymond Carver
A friend once told me people age like trees. When we age, she said, our bark may get thicker, our trunks wider and our branches longer, but we will never grow where our roots aren’t. Another friend told me we are the authors of a book that is in a constant state of being rewritten, revised and reworded. These two friends responded to the age-old question, “Do people really change?” and the contrast between their answers might as well capture the dynamic of Wes and Edna in Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House.”
After two years of no contact, Edna receives a call from her recovering alcoholic husband, Wes, inviting her to live with him at Chef’s house (located by the ocean side). She packs her things, and they spend a wonderful summer together. Then, Chef tells the couple that they have to leave the house, which devastates Wes. Edna asks if they can restart again in a different house, and Wes, jaded, quietly rejects the idea.
Written from Edna’s perspective, the story’s premise is simple, yet Carver’s brutalistic, cutthroat style elevates the two pages of ostensible mundanity into a grand tapestry of hope (or rather, lost hope). Hitchcock once said, “I believe in putting the horror in the minds of the audience, and not necessarily on the screen.” Instead of horror, though, Carver’s cold writing, with its passing mentions to the past, (oxymoronically) puts drama in our minds: “I listened to him talk. He didn’t slur his words. I said, I’ll think about it.”
Carver packs each paragraph with these simple sentences. Line by line, “Chef’s House” has an almost oppressive dryness, yet altogether the story expands a snapshot of a peaceful summer into an unwritten yet understood history of both Wes and Edna’s lives.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.
“Catskin” by Kelly Link
“How many witches are there in the world? Have you ever seen one? Would you know a witch if you saw one? And what would you do if you saw one? For that matter, do you know a cat when you see one? Are you sure?”
In trying to come up with a way to describe Kelly Link’s “Catskin,” I realized that nothing quite sums it up as well as this quote, taken from the opening pages of the story. Spoken to the reader with the narrator’s urgent, omnipresent voice, it brings the central question (or questions, as it were) of Link’s tale to the forefront: What is it that makes a person what they truly are, and how do we spot it once we know it’s there?
If that question, or its framing, doesn’t make sense, don’t worry: Very little about “Catskin” does. It’s a story about many things — witches, cats, children, mothers, time, revenge, grief, transformation, growing up and, yes, skin — few of which look, let alone behave, as we expect them to. And yet, far from being frustrating, that is the absolute joy of this story.
The parts of “Catskin” that do make sense (at least in theory) are also the things that, when brought together, most closely resemble a plot. Taken from her collection “Magic For Beginners” (which reimagines many of our culture’s most familiar monster stories), “Catskin” is Link’s spin on the classic witch’s tale — albeit a much weirder, darker version of such a thing. In theory, the “plot” is simple: When a witch is poisoned by her rival, she divides her estate among her three surviving children, leaving her youngest — Small — with her revenge, housed, naturally, in the skin of a cat.
Yet, if it wasn’t clear enough from this blurb already, nothing in this tale is ever simple. Over the course of the story, Small and The Witch’s Revenge (as she calls herself) travel to avenge the witch’s death, encountering witches, children, cats and all the other things that hide inside them along the way. It’s a story that really can’t be explained, though I promise I’ve tried my best here — you’ll simply have to read it to see what I mean.
Daily Arts Writer Camille Nagy can be reached at camnagy@umich.edu.
“What Got Into Us” by Jacob Guajardo
No Queer kid forgets their first love. Sure, it’s a universal experience: you’re in elementary or early middle school, you catch someone’s eye just right and find excuses to brush their hand. But for Queer kids, this first always comes with a catch, the crumbling of what you’d thought your life would hold. That eye catch is either hopelessly unrequited or comes with a mutual suffering — two kids discovering through each other how their lives will differ.
This crushing phenomenon is explored in Jacob Guajardo’s short story “What Got Into Us,” about a summer that two young boys, Delmar and Rio, share while slowly letting themselves fall in love. I read this story for a class last year, and while it’s really hard to find anywhere to read it online, those boys still stick with me. I think of them trying on dresses, the way they think of themselves as monstrous, their stolen and completely secret kisses.
The tragedy of the story is not only in the way the boys talk about each other, the way they battle shame, but also in how one of the boys falls into drug addiction rather than ever facing the truth of his sexuality. He’s forever sunk by his teenage love, while the other boy finds the strength to face his identity and marry a different man.
Crushing and beautifully written, “What Got Into Us” details the experience that so many kids, including those in the story, are afraid to.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Campbell Johns can be reached at caajohns@umich.edu.
