I was really intrigued by this story and Kayla's side which so rarely gets any type of fictional (or even non-) representation. I was very pleased that Caspian Gray chose to reveal the Deaf Culture side of the cochlear implant debate.
I was confused by the ending and the meaning of the dead girl's presence in the story. Is the author comparing deaf and dead people, or the relationships able-bodied person of the hearing world is capable of having with either deaf or dead girls? Is the dead girl just another outsider like Kayla, at once ignored and a "quaint" spectacle for the community? Like Dan, is the dead girl a potential predator of some description?
I was very much surprised by the ending of implied or suggested necrophilia. For me, it really didn't correspond to the rest of the story. I'd love to hear the author's own description or discussion of this work.
This story of a dead girl, a somewhat rebellious deaf teenage girl, and a lustful boy appears very strange combination with Alistair's remarks that "we can tolerate almost anything, and the only thing we lose in doing so is realizing how much of ourselves we're losing by doing it," which underlines the horror of "a community that has learned to accept that a dead girl appears in its waters, except and worse, be slightly bored by that fact." I'm very much confused and somewhat dismayed by this statement because I can't help but wonder if these remarks, and even possibly the story itself, are meant to conflate the deaf and dead girls' situations. If so, that pisses me off in a way I cannot begin to describe, and if not, the dead girl seems very much extraneous to Dan and Kayla's story. Their angst ridden and complex relationship could have easily existed on its own to make an interesting and emotionally charged story, albeit hardly a horrific one.
Is Alistair implying that by "tolerating" deafness, for example by refusing the cochlear implant in reverence to the supposed superiority of the hearing/non-signing world, disguises a greater loss of identity and humanity somewhere? Deaf and proud crips, like myself, will not tell you they've "lost" identity or humanity, they've found both outside what is considered expected, normal, quaint. Does this mean that getting used to deafness or impairment is something "awful" and that to stop seeing it as something awful, to be ashamed of, as something that must be "fixed", we lose something of ourselves? Somehow I doubt it, as Alistair seems like a lovely guy - I can't help remaining somewhat apprehensive of such statements in the context of this story.
As someone of "differently-abled-ness" (I prefer disabled, "crip," anything but "differently abled" or "handicapable" ) although not Deaf or hard-of-hearing, I greatly sympathize with Kayla's character. Kayla is just on the verge of discovering what it means to be part of Deaf Culture, part of a community and identity, instead of being "damaged" or "lacking" by not being able-bodied. In Gray's story, from Kayla's, and to a lesser extent Dan's, points of view, deafness is not loss, it is very much socially ingrained difference in opposition to an implicit expectation. There is very much the 'crip stare' in this work - the fact that everyone around you feels entitled to gawk because you're signing, you use a wheelchair, or have some kind of visible impairment, or any visible difference from the norm at all. I love that this aspect of everyday disabled life is included. There is so much going on here that implies loss and tragedy only appear from a specific point of view, usually from the outside. In fantasy stories, disability of any kind usually ends up as a stereotypical and superficial form of horror, the left hand of darkness, the one-armed man, the blind man who sees your horrible future, (the list goes on and bloody on). I remain intrigued by this story, even if the author really did mean to conflate the dead girl and Kayla, because this is still a definite departure from the outright depiction of 'cripple' as monster, which remains a much-used device in horror and fantasy fiction.
Apologies for the length of this post - I really got into this story. I'm happy this turned up on Pseudopod.