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Coming into my gender identity entailed undoing a lot of the messages I’d learned about femininity and power while growing up. I had to find new ways to connect to the lineage of women who made me who I am, now that I’m no longer one of them. Darla is experiencing that same tension, and is ultimately assured that it’s okay for her not to be a woman. I wrote this piece out of a desire for that same reassurance.
In this issue’s short fiction, family gatherings are rendered larger than life in S. Fambul’s “Cousins Season,” and “Slow Communication” by Dominique Dickey explores a conversation over generations; in flash fiction, Allahrakhi Memon takes us on a strange journey in “The Unseen,” and Julia August’s “After Naxos, Ariadne” redefines the labyrinth; for poetry, we have “The Prophet, To His Angel” by Bogi Takács and “Mister Potato Head” by Mark Dimaisip. Plus a collective interview with a few notable short fictioneers: Christopher Caldwell, WC Dunlap, Jaymee Goh, Tenea D. Johnson, Sam J. Miller, Russell Nichols, Suzan Palumbo, Pamela Rentz, Eden Royce, and A.C. Wise. Enjoy!
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.
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.
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.
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!
Magic (be it real or imagined) can bring wonder and joy, and I wanted to take a setting that’s usually quite grim and layer in beauty and hope. I chose to combine the “real” magic of calling the rains with the equally important but less tangible magic of love, optimism, altruism, and compassion that the Rainmakers also share.
Stephen King hates fat people. Like all fat people, but especially fat women, I have to accept that most of the creators I admire and respect have intractable issues with my body. They feel perfectly entitled to use it as a joke, or as the site of horror and degradation, or a proof of failure, or a metaphor for avarice, sexlessness, and/or evil. I must also prepare myself for interactions where my body is in danger (hospitals, doctors offices, interactions with the law) for the derision and devaluation my body will be afforded, because that hatred seeps through fiction to fact, from joke into policy, and is obvious at every level of public interaction.
The idea of the Light Market developed from conversations I had with a friend from high school. We would speculate about whether black markets were physical places, and whether they were actually magical. How did they get their name? What if black markets were actually full of walking shadows? What if they were a time and dimension only open to a chosen few? When I revisited these musings, I’d been exposed to conversations about subverting the idea of blackness as evil, so I wondered what the Light Market would look like.
In this issue’s short fiction, we get a different kind of hero’s journey in a really cool world with Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga’s “Saviour of the Light Market”, and “The Rainmakers” by Megan M. Davies-Ostrom glitters and glows in a climate-based post-apocalypse; in flash fiction, Dominica Phetteplace haunts us with “24 Reasons You’re Dreaming About Your Ex / 24 Razones Por Las Que Sueñas Con Tú Ex”, and C.L. Holland’s “What the River Remembers” takes a much closer look at change through a unique perspective; for poetry, we have “Forest Maths” by Nnadi Samuel and “The Other Day The Saucers Came” by Karen Brenchley. Plus a kind of “Part 2” essay, or companion piece to our December 2020 essay, this one called “All the King’s Women: the Fats” by the author of Big Girl, Find Layla, and series The Road to Nowhere, Meg Elison. Enjoy!
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This issue's cover art by
warmtail / Adobe Stock Image.
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