The Hand-Holding Machine

Abstract

This collection of stories explores themes of the human and nonhuman, of animals and nature, companionship and solitude, childhood and leaving it. In one, a teenager discovers she is a robot and struggles with insomnia. In another, two sisters learn that their neighbor’s Lima bean plants grant wishes and begin to steal them. A young woman attempts to comfort her roommate when her mechanical pet dies. A spaceship’s crew slowly loses the ability to speak. A woman who is afraid of the wood goes to live on the edge of it. The stories ultimately attempt to linger in an atmosphere of slow unease. They question the relationship between the familiar and the strange.