I felt them as the sun came through the curtains on a Saturday morning. First, a light papery brush against my shoulder that I could dismiss as the last minutes of a dream. Then a blunt edge digging into my cheek, faintly smelling of my favorite bookstore.

The dead return in strange shapes, yoked to those who mastered them in life. Thais sees them: shadowy animals who slink between the townspeople in the market square. When he was born, so he is told, his mother held up his birth-wet body and pressed her nose to the middle of his brow. They lay together, crowned by oak branches dragged low to the ground by last night’s rain, on the stone table at the center of the woods.

“Nonsense,” said the rocking horse with the bristle brush mane. “You’ll never be more than what you are.” “Mrs. Bunn says that being grows with time,” began the wooden comb, heirloom from the old country, mislabeled midcentury modern. “No. Time is being’s enemy. And Mrs. Bunn is in the dumpster now, on her way to a landfill.”

In a castle flanked by fjords, so very far from everything that the winds rarely raised its banners, there lived a troll princess. Her mother was a troll queen, by virtue of a castle and a bad temper, but queen she was, and her ambitions did not end at the still shores.

Amy G. Dala went out / for a lunch date / with her brainy friend, Medu La’Oblongata

I saw them once— / sky sisters, swimming, / curly-hooked surf / collapsing, a squall.

tkIn this issue’s short fiction, Lowry Poletti’s “The Dead Return in Strange Shapes” explores what binds us to the past, and Malda Marlys takes us east of the sun and west of the moon in “A Princess With a Nose Three Ells Long”; in flash fiction, Cynthia Gómez wants us to know that “The Books Would Like a Word,” and in “Secondhand” S.L. Harris revisits a different fairytale adventure from an unusual perspective; for poetry, we have “The Mermaids of Magonia” by Carina Bissett and “Food for Thought” by Lisbeth Coiman. Plus essay “The Societal Cost of Magic” by Moses Ose Utomi, author of The Lies of The Ajungo and “The Mirror Test”. Enjoy!

What does magic cost? Throughout my childhood in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the answer to this question was rooted in the magic of Dungeons & Dragons, where a spell may cost an incantation, a few ingredients, and some energy from the spellcaster. To some extent, most modern magic systems derive their cost from one of these currencies—some form of specialized knowledge or language, some form of physical payment, and some of the magic user’s energy.