“The Sky is Falling” and “Outrageous Fortune” in Weathering Youth
Because Weathering Youth is my biggest collection to date, I’m grouping the short stories and flash fiction stories in pairs for my posts, based on the way they fall in the collection. This lets me look at the connections between the stories and how I decided to arrange specific stories in the collection!
The third and fourth stories in the collection both involve romantic feelings between a pair of young women. In “The Sky is Falling,” which is a flash fiction piece, the young women are on a date when one realizes something is odd in the sky. It’s only after they both realize the full extent of the situation that the other young woman decides she needs to let the first young woman know about her feelings. As such, it has a bit of a bittersweet ending.
“Outrageous Fortune,” on the other hand, is a very short story, sci-fi retelling of Romeo and Juliet, with Romeo replaced with Sierra. The title, of course, refers to Hamlet, in part because I changed the ending, so something from Romeo and Juliet didn’t make nearly as much sense. Told as a series of voice journal entries, this story is extra fun for anyone who’s ever read or seen a version of Romeo and Juliet. (Fun fact: I chose the name for this story because both Romeo and Juliett [spelled with two Ts there] are part of the NATO phonetic alphabet, as is Sierra.)
If these stories sound intriguing to you, you can find them both, along with many others, in Weathering Youth!
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