Diverse Position Science Fiction - I Live With You

 So, this week, I decided to read the short story "I Live With You" by Carol Emshwiller.


 What a short story it was!


  "I Live With You" has to be one of the most horrifying short stories I've read thus far in my life. What makes it so horrifying? Besides the plot, which I'll get into in a bit, the most horrifying thing about this short story is the lack of resolution at the end... I digress, I'm jumping the gun a bit I suppose.

 The story of "I Live With You" is simple, short, and to the point: a being, most likely a female anyways, describes how it lives with a human and tries to make the human's life better. It seems simple enough, but boy is it way more then just that. How, you might ask? Well to start off with, the narrator, who I'm assuming is of a female gender, pretty much stalks, watches, and lives within the life of a poor female girl. And by poor, I mean I feel sorry for. Why? Here's the kicker:

       This female being apparently lives inside the woman's apartment, without the woman knowing for certain that another thing is living with her.


                    Just stop and take a second to think about that one.

                            Seriously. Think about it.


       At first, I thought this being was a ghost. It made sense, since this thing could pretty much blend into any surrounding it came across (it lived in a coffee shop book store before it chose to live with this woman) and not be noticed by anyone. However, as the story picked up, the being did things, like ate, drank, ran into people in the supermarket while buying food....that, made me realize it wasn't a ghost. Which, made my hair stand up on the back of my neck. This...being, was living in this woman's house, taking and using her own clothing, eating her food, petting her cat all while the woman was in her apartment. It got even weirder when the narrator started describing how it would take food off this poor woman's plate as the woman was eating. The worse part was that the woman, had some kind of idea that something was living with her. So, imagine living on your own, and having all your shit fucked with, your food constantly being eaten by someone other then you, some clothes missing while others aren't...it's just a scary thought. Besides that, for me, the other scariest part was that the being/narrator is never identified. Both, in the idea that what the being/narrator is, is never fully explained as well as the fact that the woman who's being terrorized never actually learns for certain that she is. Well, she plants traps and such, but what I mean is that the woman never actually sees or confronts this being. The story just ends and the being moves on to something else. That's pretty terrifying, at least for me.

     Although this thought completely scares the living bajeezus out of me, it's actually a really well written, well thought out story. I'm not sure that I couldn't stop reading due to either the story being so well written or just the idea that someone could be fucking with your life and you really couldn't prove that it was really happening. Either way, this was such an interesting short story. I can see how it's considered to be a diverse position science fiction. In some ways, I feel like this could be considered sci-fi. With the unidentified being, you could argue that it was an alien, especially since the narrator/being is never fully identified. In other ways, like the lack of any real science or technological influences, I don't think this is really sci-fi. Regardless of whether it's sci-fi or not, it's one helluva creepy short story and I know I'll be sleeping with ALL my door close (and maybe even locked) tonight.