Category: Previous Issues

Here’s what happened…I crept from my tent and took a walk…It really was pissing it down…Several branches had fallen in the night and the cars along the main road were speeding through the violence. I must have been some sight through their flailing wipers…right at home in the wind and wet mud…something worth speeding past…I…

You were a great starspeaker. You weren’t one of the best. Once, you mistranslated a location and directed a haughty emerald comet into an icy sea, where it obliterated three islands, inhabitants, limestone, glacier tears, and all. Another time, you argued with an invading meteor shower instead of deferring, so they turned their blaze on…

We buried my little brother inside a condom. Mom was upset; she didn’t appreciate the philosophy behind my work. After the funeral, I was ousted from the house. I moved to a small Turkish island in the Mediterranean with my girlfriend to keep making coffins. Grandpa was originally from there. He always talked well about…

Meanwhile elsewhere—” begins Balsam Karam’s The Singularity, depicting an unparticularized city; cars, highways, half-desert and mountains, the ever-rising ocean. Later there’s a description, almost as if a sales pitch for this tourist town.  He says he knows the city has been ravaged by the war but the architectural solutions are so fascinating. The fact that…

The internet abounds with comparisons, joking or not, between Covid and zombie movies; people would deny zombies are real even while they’re being eaten, your neighbors and acquaintances have revealed that they’re the type to hide that they’ve been bitten. Others compare the inefficiency of the government’s response to Covid-19 to societal collapse in zombie…

We talk about the supernatural often, but the preternatural – the hazy area in between the natural and the supernatural – doesn’t seem to have the same grip on us. In Rivers Solomon’s haunted house novel Model Home, it pops up early on as a logic of white supremacy: “everything whiteness does can be rationalized…

Mirror glass shows us a world flattened, reversed, uncanny; a portal trompe l’oeil. The sense of unease from staring into it too long—where the known world becomes suddenly unfamiliar and alien—is a feeling also evoked in the strange prose offerings of Ivy Grimes. At the top of 2024, Grimes released her debut novella Star Shapes…

It was a Saturday, about two weeks before I was set to graduate from high school. I went to Avila Beach to work on my last English paper, the only thing between me and graduation. As the dour tide pressed up against my feet, I could make out the five-appendaged shape smothered by sea foam….

Content warning1 “We can’t move to the hills because Lo’ Rax won’t let us and we can’t move down coast because Lo’ Tally so we have nothing to do but sit here and die.” Ma explains this to the traveller. Again. Traveller stupid and it third time they ask. They have matted hair, long as…

The Private Notary wakes in darkness. It is November already and though there is no snow on the ground the cold seeps into his quarters. Out in the front room, he stokes up some embers in the wood stove, still glowing from the night before, and prepares a breakfast of tea and a soft boiled…