REVIEW: “Sour Milk” by Phoenix Mendoza

Review of Phoenix Mendoza, “Sour Milk,” Flash Fiction Online 140 (May 2025): 30-32 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: body horror; child neglect; femicide

That this is going to be a gruesome story is made obvious right from the start — there’s dead bodies right away in paragraph two. Jean-Marie likes to talk to these women, swollen and maggoty and slick with decomposition, because she has no mother of her own, no one else to talk to. And because this is a horror story, of course the Ladies talk back — they need her just as much as she needs them.

This is definitely not going to be a story for everyone, but if you like horror, it’s deftly crafted.

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REVIEW: “Peace” by Phoenix Mendoza

Review of Phoenix Mendoza, “Peace,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 197-201 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content warning: War.

The narrator (who’s name we never learn) and her partner, Lorna, are trapped in a war that seems unwinnable, fighting ever since the aliens arrived, three years ago. Despite this, Lorna still believes in peace, and tells the narrator that one day, she will too.

Reading such a story in the present climate, where there is so much war but the participants involved are ourselves and not aliens, was a strange experience. There’s something that feels almost safe about imagining battling against aliens: They are alien, after all, it’s okay for us to read about fighting them, killing them, murdering them. But the very fact that this feels okay, just because they are aliens, is a deeply uncomfortable feeling, because that’s exactly the same excuse people use for making war against other people.

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