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In the January issue of Fantasy Magazine…
Short stories by Shalini Srinivasan (“Markets: A Beginner’s Guide”) and Corey Flintoff (“Free Coffin”); flash fiction by Moses Ose Utomi (“The Mirror Test”) and Saswati Chatterjee (“Pest Control”); poetry by Betsy Aoki (“Ōmagatoki”) and Maria Dong (“Cherries, Sweet and Tart”); and an interview with Tochi Onyebuchi.
Cover art by warmtail/Adobe Stock Image
In this issue’s short fiction, we discover the secret life of Banyan trees, in Shalini Srinivasan’s “Markets: A Beginner’s Guide”, and “Free Coffin” by Corey Flintoff reminds us that there’s no such thing as “free”; in flash fiction, Moses Ose Utomi explores the existential with “The Mirror Test”, and Saswati Chatterjee’s “Pest Control” takes a different look at one of the most popular tropes; for poetry, we have “Ōmagatoki” by Betsy Aoki and “Cherries, Sweet and Tart” by Maria Dong. Plus an interview with Beast Made of Night, Riot Baby, War Girls, (S)kinfolk, and Goliath author Tochi Onyebuchi. Enjoy!
“The mirror test . . . is a behavioral technique developed in 1970 by American psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. . . . In the classic test, an animal is anaesthetised and then marked (e.g., painted or a sticker attached) on an area of the body the animal cannot normally see. When the animal recovers from the anaesthetic, it is given access to a mirror. If the animal then touches or investigates the mark, it is taken as an indication that the animal perceives the reflected image as itself, rather than of another animal . . . Very few species have passed the test.” – Wikipedia
In this issue’s short fiction, we discover the secret life of Banyan trees, in Shalini Srinivasan’s “Markets: A Beginner’s Guide”, and “Free Coffin” by Corey Flintoff reminds us that there’s no such thing as “free”; in flash fiction, Moses Ose Utomi explores the existential with “The Mirror Test”, and Saswati Chatterjee’s “Pest Control” takes a different look at one of the most popular tropes; for poetry, we have “Ōmagatoki” by Betsy Aoki and “Cherries, Sweet and Tart” by Maria Dong. Plus an interview with Beast Made of Night, Riot Baby, War Girls, (S)kinfolk, and Goliath author Tochi Onyebuchi. Enjoy!
Some worlds never touch except at this hour. / The sun has set and turned her back, weeping / for a cave where she could be safe once more.
Banyans are great because you can think of them as individuals, but they’re also landscapes in themselves. If you step under an old banyan, the sort that has acquired buttresses and put down root-pillars and started shading tracts of land under its canopy, it can feel like you’ve stepped out of the mundane world, into somewhere else with entirely different rules.
There is a mermaid in your fields, fisherman. I saw the signs when I was coming in; its lower jaw was lying unattached, and I could see the deep groove its upper jaw had left as it dragged it along the dirt, ripping wheat out from the ground, no doubt. Here, I have its jaw for your examination. Look at it well. A fine specimen, is it not?
On the first night of winter, I did dream / of snaking branches sprawled with waxy leaves / and bowed under the weight of fat red cherries.
We still get dreams, and we still have our memories. We still have, somewhere nestled deep within us, the capacity to make a peace for ourselves or to try and climb the umbilical cord back to God or whatever Higher Power can grant us that peace we cannot make for ourselves. If we didn’t have that ability, we might not have gotten the Harlem Ballroom scene and vogueing.
My wife and I were walking around our suburban neighborhood and eyeing the stuff that people put out at the curb. That trash tells surprisingly intimate stories about peoples’ lives, and it struck me that a certain item might tell a story about death, too.
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