After a decade of abyss-diving, it wasn’t the jagged stalagmite teeth, puckered slate skin, or uneven, fin-like growths that chilled Lifang; it was the creature’s expression—lidless eyes and too-wide jaws shaped like a perpetual scream.

The sun draped itself over the left armrest of the couch at dawn, while Zella sat waiting for the typewriter’s tapping to commence next door. Even though she’d tossed and turned all night in the summer heat, she still found herself rising early, expectant.

It takes the lieutenant one hundred years to climb the hill to Lao Po’s house. By then, the warlords have come and gone, the Republic has risen and fallen, and developers have been petitioning the ruling party to demolish Lao Po’s hilltop hut for decades.

When rain hurls itself against the diamond glass / with the suicidal passion of a gothic hero, transforming / my window into the white, glycerin eye / of a dark castle, gnarled and hiding among thick trees

Beneath a gibbous moon / the werewolf howls and hunts / for her keys. Again.

In this issue’s short fiction, Z.K. Abraham’s protagonist finds a strange allure in the sounds coming from next door in “The Typewriter,” and Aimee Ogden’s “SOC 301: Apian Gender Studies (Cross-Listed with ZOL 301)” explores a different kind of dorm life. In flash fiction, Simo Srinivas takes us on an unusual quest in “Plum Century” while Kelsea Yu’s “Harvest of the Deep” takes us on a harrowing journey underwater. For poetry, we have “The Space Between Seconds” by Kelsey Hutton and “The Werewolf and the Fox Spirit Are Neighbors” by Amy Johnson. Plus an interview with A Phoenix First Must Burn and Eternally Yours editor Patrice Caldwell. Enjoy!