From Modern Mythcraft to Magical Surrealism

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Jan. 2021 (Issue 63)

In this issue we have original fiction from Tonya Liburd (“10 Steps to a Whole New You”) and C.E. McGill (“Things to Bring, Things to Burn, Things Best Left Behind”), along with flash fiction from Marissa Lingen (“The Billionaire Shapeshifter Ex-Wives Club”) and Megan Chee (“Incense”). We also have poetry by Magaly Garcia (“Butterfly-Hummingbird”) and Maria Zoccola (“like the gator loves the snake”). And finally, co-editor Arley Sorg interviews author N.K. Jemisin.

Cover art by warmtail/Adobe Stock Image

In This Issue: Jan. 2021 (Issue 63)

Nonfiction

Editorial, January 2021

by Arley Sorg and Christie Yant

Check out our editorial for a rundown of everything we have in store for you this month!

Fiction

Things to Bring, Things to Burn, Things Best Left Behind

by C.E. McGill

Author spotlight

Oz is holding a knife to his wrist when they knock on the door. For a moment he hesitates, weighing his options. His eyes dart between the door and the knife—eeny, meeny, meiny, mo—and land on the door. “Might as well,” he mutters, and gets to his feet. The dull sound of the knife as he sets it aside on the kitchen table seems to fill the room. It’s a terrible thing, he muses, how loud a house is when there’s no one else in it.

Nonfiction

Author Spotlight: C.E. McGill

by Reece Michaelson

Oz’s diary entries, the concrete reminder of the countdown to his intended suicide, are things to be burned. They’re too painful to keep in any shape or form, even in memory; better to let them go, turn them into ash, till them back into the soil. His old name, on the other hand, is simply something to be left behind—something that was useful once, that holds memories both good and bad, but that he doesn’t need or want anymore.

Nonfiction

Editorial, January 2021

by Arley Sorg and Christie Yant

Check out our editorial for a rundown of everything we have in store for you this month!

Flash Fiction

Incense

by Megan Chee

The storyteller sits on a plastic stool by the side of the street. Rickshaws trundle past; cars honk their horns. Cart vendors crying their wares (“Beef noodle soup! Dragon’s beard candy! Scallion pancakes!”) swear at him for getting underfoot on the sidewalk. Children, released from school gates in a delirious swarm, run shouting through the streets.

Poetry

Butterfly-Hummingbird

by Magaly Garcia

The clock is ticking. Go / look for the black mariposa-colibrí. / Se nos va el tiempo.

Poetry

like the gator loves the snake

by Maria Zoccola

sunlight on marshgrass, winter-brown and alive / with flocks of nesting birds, flash of white feathers / when the wind blows. i think of the boy and then

Fiction

10 Steps to a Whole New You

by Tonya Liburd

Author spotlight

(1) Be unaware that the wolf was presenting itself to you in sheep’s clothing. It began, as most things do, simply enough. In a simple neighbourhood, on the edge of a town. Too urban to be rural, too rural to be urban. Women grew old. Some women aged with their children, grandchildren, family around them. Some grew old alone, isolated, bitter. Others might grow old and die sick, in pain. Then there was you.

Nonfiction

Author Spotlight: Tonya Liburd

by Veronica Henry

Writing a story in complete Patois had been done; writing small segments of a story in Patois I’d done in “The Ace Of Knives,” my first ever published story. But actively switching between standard English and Patois? I hadn’t seen that done yet. So I’m assuming that’s how it got started, because I’m always striving to do something I hadn’t done previously in my work.

Flash Fiction

The Billionaire Shapeshifters’ Ex-Wives Club

by Marissa Lingen

“You’d have thought it’d be the musk, or the way he could rend me limb from limb at any moment,” said Carla thoughtfully, “but honestly it was the hairballs. You haven’t known gross until you step in a tiger hairball.” They all contemplated that for too long. Steph took a deep drink of her mimosa.

Nonfiction

Interview: N.K. Jemisin

by Arley Sorg

I don’t tell other artists how to do their art. For me, however, it’s important that art accurately reflect the world around me — how people really behave, how societies really work, how change really happens (or doesn’t). Even if I put it in another world, wrapped in trappings that have nothing to do with reality, certain things need to be true to life. That makes it political whether I intend for it to be or not. And right now I see (and feel) a lot of resistance, so naturally that appears in my work.