Plot summary ❔
Two children in the neighourhood are, as the title suggests, sweethearts. She’s an insectoid alien, he’s his traumatised soldier-mommy’s sweet post-war boy. Play dates are interesting, but normal: “You fly to the edge of the pool terrified the little alien has drowned on your watch, but then you realize she has gills.”
Public sentiment changes: Human Pride and nightly Strategic Containment and Deportation. Sweetheart gets taken one night, while mommy turns up the TV and manages to hide it from her boy for a whole day. Definitely captures the emotional mix that is parenting: “He flings an Italian ice at you, and melting strawberry sucrose bursts across your chest.
Love explodes in you, how smart he is, how he was once a part of you but is no longer. You step up so close that the red syrup on your shirtfront smears on him as well.
Get in your room this minute, you hiss. You never talk to me that way again.”
Her cop-out motivation is that all aliens are worth it if it stops humans from killing each other. Peace > love. Hmmmm.
A bit on the nose, but still nice: Sweatheart is a well-written very short story by Abbey Mei Otis that is first sweet and then chilling in the path the story takes – nothing too special either, just a perfectly fine scifi short.
I’m not sure if the author intends “yay nightly deportations of aliens are fine” to be the moral, or if she wanted to show why and how people will come to believe these things are fine. Very mixed feelings – she does the latter way, but I’m worried she actually wants to sell the message that peace is more important than both love and morals. Hmmmm.
