"The Arbitrary Placement of Walls" by Martha Soukup

 

First appeared in Gardner Dozois' Asimov's. Reprinted by Brad Templeton, Janet Berliner, Martin H. Greenberg, Uwe Luserke. Up for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, and Asimov's Reader Awards.

 

Summary: 

 Laura Hampton lives in a house that has fallen into disrepair. She is trapped there not only by finances but also by "ghosts" of former boyfriends. But they're not ordinary ghosts.

 Her mother stops by to help clean, but that kind of help doesn't seem to help. However, the mother initiates something that does. 

 

Discussion (with spoilers):

 What makes these ghosts different is that the spirits roaming her house are spirits of living people. Clever twist. This could be seen as magical realism or psychological manifestations of memories that haunt her to the point of crippling her from moving on, advancing.

Someone--writer or editor--must have thought was her best or best known work as it is the title story to her collection. Nothing garnered more attention in very different circles.

However, maybe the writer or editor thought it captured the collection. I, however, don't yet see the overall connection to the collection, but maybe. It is an excellent title.

 Now there are a number of approaches to the story. Some may not see much except a little light for the protagonist, which it has.

Some might view this as a revenge tale. Some bad boyfriends got what they had coming for them: death. When Eric dies, so does his ghost, which leads to this new idea of "cleaning up the house" by killing the real life people to make the ghosts disappear. This action is implied. This makes it an evil story in that the punishment doesn't fit the crime (unless one considers one's psychological damage to be worthy of death, which it never was true in society, but perhaps that has changed or is changing). The whole narrative spends its time getting us to care about the character until we learn she plans to murder.

Which brings the third and perhaps more complete view. We are meant to ask ourselves: Why did we invest our empathy in this character? Some things undermine her--lack of empathy for the dying. And perhaps she mislabels what Eric's dying of. It is possible to have three bad relationships, but it is also possible that we haven't yet examined our protagonist's character. That she would even consider this and plan to execute it should erode our empathy. Some might assume that one gender is more innocent than another, but this suggests that all have something to question. This is "The Arbitrary Placement of Walls": that we assume divisions between us, that one is innocent where only other are guilty, especially given clues to the contrary.