Strange Little Girl
Flesh Failure
By Sèphera Girón
8 Sep, 2017
A Year of Waterloo Region Speculative Fiction
Sèphera Girón’s 2014’s Flesh Failure is a standalone horror story.
Agatha is a patchwork woman, covered in stitches and scars, smelling of death. She has been buried and left for dead, but claws her way out of the grave. She has only spotty memories of the people, and the process, that animated her.
It is London in 1888. Employment opportunities for women are few, and even fewer for scarred women who reek of the grave. It’s even hard to make friends, as few people can tolerate her smell … especially in the small, poorly ventilated rooms that are the lot of the poor. But Agatha persists, and eventually finds work as a fortune teller and freak. She even discovers that the occasional dose of electricity will temporarily reverse some of her more alarming symptoms.
Except for her tendency to ambush and consume the unwary. Ah well, nobody is perfect.