Sunday Short -- Rachel Swirsky's If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love

As referenced earlier this week, this blog is going to be reading and reviewing the current Hugo nominees for short fiction on Sundays this month. Today we start with  “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”, the Nebula award winning short by Rachel Swirsky (link, Apex Magazine, Mar-2013).

This story was a sweet and lonesome love letter, with fantastical and science fictional elements. It tells the yearnings of a wife for her husband -- dreams of him as a delicate, 5'11", singing T-rex. When you finish the story, you will have to read the story again because the ending pulls the rug out on you -- changing the meaning of everything. If I say more, I will spoil it! 

My favorite line: 
I would astonish everyone assembled, the biologists and the paleontologists and the geneticists, the reporters and the rubberneckers and the music aficionados, all those people who—deceived by the helix-and-fossil trappings of cloned dinosaurs– believed that they lived in a science fictional world when really they lived in a world of magic where anything was possible.

Overall, this story does something I really love -- evoke emotions in the reader you didn't even plan on feeling. It was also one of my favorite short story reads of the year, and I am definitely planning on reading more stories by this author.

Rating: 5/5

Next week, there will be a review for Thomas Olde Heuvelt's story “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” which is available here on Tor.com.