As our third annual issue is born, the world’s oldest forests are burning. As you are reading these stories, now or somewhere long in the future, something else will be happening. Another glacier will calve and die. Another species will tip over the precipice. Another citizen will fall at the hands of his protectors. Something catastrophic. Something that feels like not just an end, but the end.
The act of reading and writing beauty is not just an artistic act. Not a frivolous pursuit, a carnival ship to carry us out to sea and away from the fires burning everywhere on land. It is a political act. A spiritual act. An existential act. Who knows if our relationship to art will save us? Here is what I know: Our relationship to art reminds us that we are worth saving.
Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge
Fiction Editor
Our third annual issue’s stories force us to see beyond the façade of every day, to read between the lines, to consider the lingering effect of each other’s histories and how these histories shape us and our world. In the face of catastrophe, these sentiments may seem trivial. Yet, the long-burning fires in our politics, in our discourse, and in our communities suggest otherwise. Years ago, I learned of the universal power of kindness as a Peace Corps Volunteer serving in the Santa Cruz region of Bolivia. Large swathes of this beautiful tropical region now burn along with the bordering Amazonia. We need more bold interventions of kindness to overcome these fires and all fires that persist and cause harm. May these stories serve as inspiration for us to witness, to act, to be kind. Thank you to our contributors for sharing their hearts and truths with us.
Eneida P. Alcalde
Associate Fiction Editor
The Stories
The Plague
Ethan Cade Varnado
Lucas was twenty-seven, Catholic, happy, in love, and then he found out he had the disease, and a year later he was twenty-eight.
His faith went first, and it went without any struggle. He had started having doubts the year before, after his childhood neighbor Leslie Sanchez died from a stroke…
The Mermaid Shore
Fiona Jones
Isla McMorran had met mermaids, or so she said, in among the rocks and seaweed at the back of the island. She only saw them when alone…
A Life Lost
Lindsey Saya
Atop a hill, they lie in a bed of cool grass.
He watches great cloud formations sail across the sky. He imagines them cottony pirate ships, masterless and untamed. He tells her he will be a captain of his own ship one day, that he will discover the wide-eyed wonders of the world and the mysteries they hold…
Malta
Charles Duffie
John Abbey glanced in the rearview mirror. Twelve palm cockatoos watched him like a jury from the backseat. The exotic birds were two feet tall, slate gray and indigo blue, with bright red cheeks and feathered crests. They perched in a long wire kennel, claws knuckled around a stripped branch. The birds turned their heads back and forth, staring at him with one marble eye (What are you doing?) then the other (Where are we going?)…
Stumbling into babylon
Chris Kassel
In the ICU, eight bays surround the nurse’s station. Inside each is a waxy tile floor, a sliding glass door and a constellation of portable machines. Fluorescent light makes the equipment glitter and the late-night silence of the unit is leavened with gentle mechanical strumming. The patients are barricaded from one another, but as I follow the squat nurse, I can see through the glass doors, and behind one of them, a young man lies on a hydraulic bed…
Abigail
Andrew Hinshaw
The boy sits in the passenger seat of the pickup and looks through its cracked windshield at the thickening clouds. They’ve gone from white to grey, darkening the dirt road ahead as if night may come early. The boy sits back and sighs, knowing they’ll mean another day stuck inside when he finally gets home. He turns to look through the dusty back window behind his seat...
Alone Together
Emily Collins
The new hire was sexy and mean. When Violet introduced herself, Lara, brand new, had looked at her and said, “I’m twenty-three,” as if she would always be so. “When people tell me I’m too ambitious,” Lara continued, “that only fuels my ambition. Don’t cross me.” It was then Violet had noticed the scar on her neck, thin as a piece of thread…
The motion of bodies
Franz Neumann
The two sat in camping chairs, their necks craned skyward as they searched for satellites. Mia spotted the first one, a steadily drifting pinprick of light miles high and free of the concept of a setting sun. It was probably doing a million things at once—measuring, relaying, spying—but to Mia, the satellite seemed placed in the sky to illustrate a mathematical perfection…
Senowbar Khanom
Azin Neishaboori
It was very dark outside. Nahal leaned her head against the bus’s window and tried to discern the trees on the side of the road in the scant light of the bus’s headlamps. The road stretched through a dark forest, perhaps home to foxes, coyotes, bears or even wolves, creatures maybe less dangerous than some of the men and women on the bus…
Dinner
Kailash Srinivasan
I don’t usually get nervous but I get nervous when my publicist tells me the next city on the promotional tour of my book is Vancouver. My heart beats, beats, beats, makes its own tune. My former wife and I haven’t spoken to each other in years. I have no idea what her life’s like now, how she looks, even. But every time my name appeared in an article, or my book was shortlisted for this or that award, or I was on some panel—those kinds of things—I sent her an email and some post-event photos…
A Childhood Neighbor
Kassandra Montag
It had been eight years since she last saw him. Elsa smiled quickly and looked away and looked back. He looked older. There was something about the way he moved, his body more angular, his gestures more certain. It made her wish she had something in her hands, a cup she could take a drink from, a purse she could open and ruffle through…
There Were Hands
Max Hromek
There were hands.
There were hands on my body. They were your hands. Your hands on a body. Your hands on a back—my back. I think it was my back. My back pressed into the bed.
Your hands were on breasts—my breasts? Lips. I remember lips. Lips on lips. Lips on a neck, on a stomach, on a thigh, on...
If it gets better, it can’t get much worse
Kevin Camp
The first time I went to a gay bar I wanted to see the drag show. I climbed out a bedroom window and walked downhill, pausing at an agreed-upon stop sign where a college boy named James was waiting to pick me up. I was secretly in love with him. He fit all the boxes and categories I’d always wanted in a boyfriend: campy, theatrical, playful, gossipy…
The Lost Place
Kimberly Lawrence Kol
At first it was just fantasies. In a surge of anger, I’d imagine hitting my husband over and over with the small, aluminum bat my father kept at his bedside in his basement apartment in Queens. I’m not sure why that bat came to mind, but whenever I reached some peak of disgust or contempt or whatever that feeling was that our former couples therapist called one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse for marriage, it would be there in my hand, ergonomically perfect for smashing over his head…
Marsh Lights
Jesse Durovey
Cleo saw the frog while pulling weeds in the garden. It was early summer, the air hot and moist, and wild grass and vining plants threatened to choke Uncle Darrell’s harvest of maize and white clover. Her uncle had brought his spade down to uproot a stubborn explosion of crabgrass, and when Cleo grabbed the clumped dirt and roots to throw it in the wheelbarrow, she saw something moving in the upturned soil…
For the Love of Drones
DW Ardern
I named it Pete, after my uncle. Is that a weird thing? It kinda feels like a weird thing. My uncle had drowned in a riverboat accident when the waters swelled in a freak thunderstorm that lasted three days and flooded the Mississippi delta and beautiful nowhere of bayou towns from Rosedale to Lake Providence. Motorhomes floating downstream and cars upturned like turtles…
Later
Sarah Terez Rosenblum
“Look at those sexy rollers!”
This is Ryan Jacobson. I’m going to wind up taller than him; my dad’s Lithuanian, Irish and Swedish, and some of those types get fucking tall. In the one photo I have of him, he’s backed up against a moving truck—his head clears the roof almost—and you can see mom’s shadow at his feet…
An Act
Amelia wright
This is not a story. This is a conversation; you and I are learning from each other. This is not a story, but if it were a story it would be a story about people we can pretend to be. But this is not a story; it is an act. Give yourself to me. When you show up on my doorstep, a decade has passed since the day I stopped believing in God…
Survival English
Sarah D. Warburton
“We’re the city mouse and the country mouse,” Kate told Adam on their first date, and after their wedding, the country won out. Adam accepted a partnership in a pediatric practice in Ashland and put a down payment on their first house…
Twilight at Blue Plate
Stacey C. Johnson
SILENCE
The front door is locked again, I am the only one left talking here.
Mama is in a mason jar beside the plant in a coffee can, between the window and the faucet of the sink, and this is the window I am looking through when I catch myself looking toward the doll grave, which rests near the BLM dumpster near the North side of the property…
Scenes from a Coerced Sterilization
Amy Olassa
The year is 1976. A State of Emergency arrests the Nation. Fundamental rights suspended. Newspapers and all other media censored, information and news clogged. And in the country’s southernmost State, the Naxal movement is on the rise. Police stations attacked, young men arrested for their political views, tortured, killed. The nature of resistance matches the nature of governance...
