Angels We Have Fed on Pie

The old laws said, welcome the stranger—you never knew who might be an angel in disguise, here to pass judgment on the unkind.

So we ended up with this raucous, happy clump of refugees in our kitchen, eating our best pumpkin pie.

Couldn’t see any wings, but you never know.

—Parody of the Christmas carol “Angels We Have Heard on High”

Publisher’s Note: A wonderful version you may not have heard, by a six-member a capella vocal group from Johannesburg, South Africa: JUST 6: Angels We Have Heard on High, “African Christmas Experience” (YouTube, 21 December 2018)

Patapan

No one else could hear it. My husband shook his head and muttered something about my overactive ears. But it was there—a constant drumming, a weird murmuring of flutes, somewhere just out of sight.

Publisher’s Note: Pat-a-Pan from On a Cold Winter’s Day by Quadriga Consort Early Music Band (2013-10-11)

* These tiny stories are from a series of microfictions written by the author in response to Christmas-carol prompts on Twitter, and appear here with her permission from her blog (26 December 2020).

Ada Hoffman

is the author of the space-opera novels The Outside and The Fallen, and dozens of speculative short stories and poems. Her work has been a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award (2020, The Outside), the Compton Crook Award (2020, The Outside), and the WSFA Small Press Award (2020, “Fairest of All”). She is the winner of the Friends of the Merrill Collection Short Story Contest (2013, “The Mother of All Squid Builds a Library”) and a two-time Rhysling award nominee (2014 for “The Siren of Mayberry Crescent” and 2017 for “The Giantess’s Dream”).

Ada was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome at the age of 13, and is passionate about autistic self-advocacy. Her Autistic Book Party review series is devoted to in-depth discussions of autism representation in speculative fiction. Much of her own work also features autistic characters.

Ada is an adjunct professor of computer science at a major Canadian university, and she did her PhD thesis (in 2018) on teaching computers to write poetry. Under her legal name, she has published eight papers and presented her work at conferences around the world. She is a former semi-professional soprano, tabletop gaming enthusiast, and LARPer. She lives in eastern Ontario with a curious black cat.

Author’s website: https://www.ada-hoffmann.com/about/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Real People, Real Stories: An interview with Ada Hoffman, author and professor by Dara Golding in TPGi (28 July 2021)