From Modern Mythcraft to Magical Surrealism

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Nov. 2021 (Issue 73)

In November’s short fiction, Kehkashan Khalid offers a condensed epic, where a mother must contend with her fractious sons, in “The Petticoat Government,” and Genevieve Mills gives us a taste of revenge in “Girls Have Sharp Teeth”; in flash fiction, Billie Cohen’s “Lessons” features a different kind of imprisonment, and there are consequences for Charles EP Murphy’s “Shouty Lads”; for poetry, we have “Unfinished” by Eugen Bacon and “After The End” by Jessica Cho. Plus an interview with the author of Victories Greater Than Death, Never Say You Can’t Survive, and Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders. Enjoy!

Cover art by Dominick / Adobe Stock Image

In This Issue: Nov. 2021 (Issue 73)

Nonfiction

Editorial: November 2021

by Arley Sorg and Christie Yant

In this issue’s short fiction, Kehkashan Khalid offers a condensed epic, where a mother must contend with her fractious sons, in “The Petticoat Government,” and Genevieve Mills gives us a taste of revenge in “Girls Have Sharp Teeth”; in flash fiction, Billie Cohen’s “Lessons” features a different kind of imprisonment, and there are consequences for Charles EP Murphy’s “Shouty Lads”; for poetry, we have “Unfinished” by Eugen Bacon and “After The End” by Jessica Cho. Plus an interview with the author of Victories Greater Than Death, Never Say You Can’t Survive, and Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders. Enjoy!

Flash Fiction

Lessons

by Billie Cohen

 I know exactly how many times I’ve tried to leave. The last time, I walked right up to the edge of the playground, as if the swings and the seesaw weren’t penning me in. Weren’t a boundary I couldn’t cross. I pushed my toe against the air, right above where the blacktop meets the meadow. I’m not sure if I imagined it: the thin film flexing and shimmering like a soap bubble against my shoe.

Nonfiction

Editorial: November 2021

by Arley Sorg and Christie Yant

In this issue’s short fiction, Kehkashan Khalid offers a condensed epic, where a mother must contend with her fractious sons, in “The Petticoat Government,” and Genevieve Mills gives us a taste of revenge in “Girls Have Sharp Teeth”; in flash fiction, Billie Cohen’s “Lessons” features a different kind of imprisonment, and there are consequences for Charles EP Murphy’s “Shouty Lads”; for poetry, we have “Unfinished” by Eugen Bacon and “After The End” by Jessica Cho. Plus an interview with the author of Victories Greater Than Death, Never Say You Can’t Survive, and Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders. Enjoy!

Poetry

Unfinished

by Eugen Bacon

Survival reduced to pickets wakes me at night. Walls painted in stench, each day the beginning of my last. A siren of coppers chases rioters waving placards about paradigm shifts. Faces of my dead friends break out from the wind, imprint on each uniform’s head, sketching shapes with colourless lips.

Fiction

The Petticoat Government

by Kehkashan Khalid

Author spotlight

I was twenty years old when Hamida Bano, the Padshah Begum, supreme wife of the Emperor, entrusted her infant prince to my arms before fleeing across the Thar desert. Her opium-addled husband, steeped in the luxury of his harem, had no defense against Sher Shah Suri’s advancing armies, which squeezed Agra like a coal between tongs. The Sur Empire then settled its traitorous haunches on North India, and Hamida Bano, trailing her husband’s camel, trekked across the blistering desert, while I, still a young concubine, nursed the boy who would inherit the throne.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Kehkashan Khalid

by Phoebe Barton

This phenomenon of entitled men and suffering women is universal, but my experience of it derives from my culture. I think I was using this story to speak out against this status quo, and while this story takes place in historical times, the imbalance between how men and women are treated has not improved substantially even in recent times.

Flash Fiction

Shouty Lads

by Charles EP Murphy

2 a.m. in South London, and the dark is shattered again by roars and laughing and screaming. The shouty lads again, the ones around each night, every night, apparently drunk, sound like they’re murdering each other. You get used to ignoring it, if you live in South London. Not your business.

Poetry

After the End

by Jessica Cho

When the story ends—the hero’s hands wiped clean, / sword gleaming above the mantel— / there are those of us who find the belly of a castle / is no place for children who grow / like weeds, like vines, like yellow straw.

Fiction

Girls Have Sharp Teeth

by Genevieve Mills

Author spotlight

When Madison S. didn’t show up to school, and word got around that it was because her boyfriend threw his phone at her mouth and knocked out four of her teeth, the junior girls of Clark High turned into monsters. Taloned, screaming things driven by rage and revenge. We swarmed her boyfriend, Josh C., by his car after school, and though he tried to beat us off with his lacrosse stick, our numbers were too great, our sisterhood too mighty.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Genevieve Mills

by Veronica Henry

I like to think as a society, we’re trending towards believing victims more often than not, but we definitely have a long way to go. I think part of why is what the protagonist says, “It was much easier to believe in attention-seeking girls than in trust-shattering boys.” It’s easier to think that there was some sort of “misunderstanding” or the victim is simply lying than to believe that some actor we admire, or a person we trusted and thought of as good, is actually a monster.

Nonfiction

Interview: Charlie Jane Anders

by Arley Sorg

I feel like it’s more interesting to watch people change through their relationships to other people than to see them go through changes in a vacuum. I feel like one thing the stories in Even Greater Mistakes have in common is that you can usually identify one or two relationships that power them. Even in my novels, this is usually the case for me, and I feel like my novels are firing on all cylinders when you can track a particular relationship from beginning to end.