Results for Powerlessness
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Listing 14 stories.
After a revolution, disabled peoples have been captured and banished to a new planet. When they receive a message from Earth, the exiled peoples believe they are in great danger and must decide whether to stay in the society they have established or journey to the other side of the planet to escape.
In the early-twentieth-century South, a black teenager discovers she has a magical power. But when race and gender-related violence violate her existence, she must decide whether to use her power to protect the people she loves or to harm the people who hate.
In a world where some individuals can access the memories of everyday objects, a man works as a cleaner who scrubs away painful memories stored in people's belongings.
Dermot, a being with an insatiable hunger but a controlled demeanor, works with police to find and kill predators, like himself, who are ravaging the city.
A person driven mad by a voice in their head tries everything to stop it, but the voice is quite persistent.
An adult son is living with his parents when they begin to take stronger measures toward kicking him out. They’ve dropped him from the family phone plan, put a lock on the refrigerator, and now have put an official court-approved eviction notice on his door. His parents aren’t sure what went wrong with him. “He had every advantage. We loved him, we still love him, our only child, who came to us as the sweetest and truest blessing from God when I was forty-one and so empty inside…” The son doesn’t understand what his parents are thinking. How is he supposed to get a job without cell service or a car, which he doesn’t have anymore since his parents won’t loan him the money to take it to the shop? When his mom comes home from work, he storms out with the eviction notice in hand to yell at her, and she thinks about how he doesn’t even remember that it’s her birthday. He asks her, “You want me to die?” and she says, in her anger, “‘Yes,’” and then, “‘If you’re going to die, go ahead and do it—but do it someplace else, will you? Will you at least do that for us?’” She immediately says she doesn’t mean it but he’s already storming away. Now, the son is thinking about his own son, which he had on accident when he was a teenager. He’s not on great terms with the mother, and he thinks his mother resents that he’s made it hard for her to see her grandson. The son tries to find a lawyer to help him sue his parents for breach of contract, that “by virtue of their giving me my own room in the house since I was an infant and freely letting me move back in when I had no place else to go, they had entered into an unwritten contract to provide me with shelter, and that, even if it was within their rights to evict me, they at least had to give me six months’ notice, because you can’t just throw somebody out in the street, unless you’re in some country where they randomly kick down doors and put people in concentration camps.” He loses the case. After a lot of stalling, he moves out, and his son and the mother of his child move into his old room. His new apartment is less than ideal and so are the people he’s hanging around. He no longer talks to his father, but his mother puts him back on the family’s phone plan and now calls him every day. She mainly wants to talk about his son. She wants them to spend more time together. She sends him pictures his son drew in school: "fish in tanks, squirrels and dogs and cars, the usual sort of thing, except for one that said ‘Dad’ on it in big red bleeding letters and showed a kid’s face, his face, obscured by a swarm of floating misshapen blobs that I finally figured out were teardrops, as if he was sending me a message.” He figures his mother or the child’s mother put his son up to it. He thinks “the kid was no artist and you couldn’t really what [the blobs] were supposed to be.”
A cursed man and others like him struggle to be accepted by their village, but as they maneuver to gain their community's favor, they discover something important about their condition which shifts their perspectives.
A starving young teenager struggles to survive with her infant on their march towards a Nazi concentration camp. However, another prisoner plots to steal the teenage mom's magical shawl on which the infant relies.
A young girl suspects that she has a power ordained by God. When her mother comes to visit at her boarding school, the girl tries to use the powers to chastise her mother.
In the far future, an alien civilization captures pacifist protesters and, as punishment, turns them into mind-controlled soldiers forced to commit violence. Will they be able to resist the effects of the mind-controlling drug and rebel?
