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In this issue: Original fiction by M. Shaw (“Man vs. Bomb”) and Hal Y. Zhang (“Arenous”); flash fiction by McKinley Valentine (“The Code for Everything”) and Donyae Coles (“Close Enough to Divine”); poetry by B. Sharise Moore (“Black Beak”) and Priya Chand (“Dragonslayer”); and an interview with Charles Yu.
Cover art by Liia Chevnenko/Adobe Stock Image
In the March issue of Fantasy Magazine . . . Original fiction by M. Shaw (“Man vs. Bomb”) and Hal Y. Zhang (“Arenous”); flash fiction by McKinley Valentine (“The Code for Everything”) and Donyae Coles (“Close Enough to Divine”); poetry by B. Sharise Moore (“Black Beak”) and Priya Chand (“Dragonslayer”); and an interview with Charles Yu.
Izzy hugged her knees to her chest, her stomach a tight ball of humiliation. She was out on the verandah, sinking into a saggy floral couch. The city was doing its ridiculous Melbourne-summer thing, where the night was hotter than the day, and heat radiated off the asphalt in waves. She’d left the party to “get some air,” which was code for “cry where no one can see you.” You had to know the code for everything, that was important.
In the March issue of Fantasy Magazine . . . Original fiction by M. Shaw (“Man vs. Bomb”) and Hal Y. Zhang (“Arenous”); flash fiction by McKinley Valentine (“The Code for Everything”) and Donyae Coles (“Close Enough to Divine”); poetry by B. Sharise Moore (“Black Beak”) and Priya Chand (“Dragonslayer”); and an interview with Charles Yu.
That’s something I hoped for this story interrogate: how do you look, to someone who doesn’t share your frame of reference? When you or I think about, say, zombies, we tend to think that what separates them from normal people is their amoral mindlessness, their bottomless hunger, and the fact that they will instinctively slaughter pretty much whoever happens to be in front of them. But for a prey species, like a deer, that’s just a description of a human.
Mona watched them with dark, darting eyes as they dipped and tripped over the makeshift dance floor in the stuffy basement. Their laughter sounded high and clear, silky strands of hair catching the dim light and refracting it into a million shimmering sparkles. She gripped her cup, the plastic cracking between her fingers, the piss-warm and piss-taste beer threatening to overflow. Careful, careful, she chastised herself, easing her grip, forcing herself to relax. To ignore that itchy feeling between her shoulder blades. The tingling at her fingertips that drove her to something. Was it one of them? She puzzled over it while she watched, her eyes catching everything.
Kongamato has breath like tendrils / of leathery fog.
The knight shone brighter / and smiled wider than the / princess who would be his / bride and said, “I have done / It. I climbed the cliffs until / the clouds wove fog from / my breath.
One of the main themes of this story is how our feelings about ourselves are intrinsically tied to that self and are not something we can separate. While Sarah undergoes this inexplicable transformation, her feelings about it seem to parallel the transformation somewhat. But how much of her numb acceptance at the end is because she’s mostly sand, and how much of is her actually coming to terms with it, whatever that even means? I don’t think there’s an obvious answer to that.
I’d written poems as a kid, and I took poetry workshops as an undergrad at Berkeley. But I didn’t make a sustained effort at writing until my mid-twenties, after graduating from law school. Instead of studying for the bar exam, I found myself at the bookstore every day, reading story collections. Going into a new career as a lawyer, I think I was searching for a creative release valve, some private headspace I could carve out. So I started writing little things in the margins of notepads, or sending emails to myself with scraps of language. My first pieces were very short, weird experiments. I don’t even know you could call them stories.
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