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Fantasy Magazine
I have a confession to make: I think I’m burning out on writing “Asian American” literature. I know this is wrong of me. I know all writing is political. I know sharing our stories is an important way for us to work past media stereotypes, find each other, and reconstruct our collective histories. I have reread Babel and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and the Green Bone Saga over and over, as if by repeated consumption I could etch them beneath my skin.
I have an interest in history, be it major world events or simply pop culture history, and I wanted to include things like my love of ’40s music, pop art, vintage food, the moon landing, and yes, even Star Wars, in a single story, but I didn’t know how to pull it off. This story finally came about in an almost accidental way. I’m a life-long insomniac, and I woke up in the middle of the night, so as I sometimes do, I got up to write. The opening line just came to me, and I started free-writing from there, the first draft flowing out of my exhausted mind.
On the island of Manhattan, there’s a building out of time. I can’t tell you where it is, exactly. It has an address, of course, as all buildings do, but that wouldn’t mean anything to you. What I can tell you is that the building is called The Oakmont.
On a night where the moon silvers the falling snow and the air is the gaping mouth of a frozen corpse, the skeleton pig lowers its head to the river flowing upstream and drinks while dreaming of spring. Trees like pale fingers strain towards the skies and line both sides of the river—the skeleton pig has never strayed into the woods for fear of losing its way, but it is tempted to venture beyond this eternal walk along the frigid water. It remembers little other than this journey, this cold.
Take: x = today, y = tomorrow, and k = time / Question I: What would you consider as constant / if all of these unknown variables wear / the memory of you?
Lara is a summer witch born with fruit rich on her tongue, a monkey god's chittering beneath her skin, and a full July sun's worth of love for love. Her ba claims to have read Pasternak, but she knows it was Julie Christie's face he traced when he named her, Julie's yellow-gold hair her ma made fun of him for admiring, bright as an August afternoon.
In this, our final issue of Fantasy Magazine: Short stories by Ruoxi Chen ("Fandom for Witches") and P.A. Cornell ("Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont"); flash fiction by Sonia Sulaiman ("Negative Theology of the Child from 'The King of Tars'") and Wen Yu Yang ("Homecoming"); poetry by Joshua Effiong ("The Equation of Time") and Adesiyan Oluwapelumi ("music in the garden"); and an essay by PH Low.
The muse calls me ‘Digenia.’ It is not my real name; that is suspended while I am traveling through these verses, now some 690 years old. To pass through this realm of allegory and myth, of device and symbiotics, one needs to carry a standard. Mine is of the ‘two-blooded.’ Twice-blooded, I want to say. Down through the ages, this language which I speak and write in has no words that contain me. There are plenty of hyphenated adjectives: Half-breed, mixed-blood. But, like the Great Mystery, symbols slide off me. Looking too close is dangerous. I might look back.
In this, our final issue of Fantasy Magazine: Short stories by Ruoxi Chen ("Fandom for Witches") and P.A. Cornell ("Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont"); flash fiction by Sonia Sulaiman ("Negative Theology of the Child from 'The King of Tars'") and Wen Yu Yang ("Homecoming"); poetry by Joshua Effiong ("The Equation of Time") and Adesiyan Oluwapelumi ("music in the garden"); and an essay by PH Low.
“Set Yourself on Fire” actually started out as a realistic fiction short story. I wrote it in second-person, originally, but I was drawn to the idea of the narrator being an actual ghostly presence in the story, so I decided to do a complete rewrite using first-person direct address instead. I wanted it to look like it was written in second-person, right up until the moment the narrator makes themself known to the reader as an actual character present in the story who is quietly observing everything. I ended up being a lot happier with this version. Since every word of narration is in the voice of a ghost, the story itself becomes haunted.
As short fiction lovers, anthologies hold a special place for us. Anthologies over the decades have been the battlegrounds of political movements, as well as markers for shifts in genre communities. We grew up reading them, and we still see them as wonderful places: they often contain amazing work, and interesting things are still happening by virtue of their publication. Nowadays, editors/publishers are creating spaces for a broader range of perspectives through anthologies – bringing out books with an awesome array of stories.
The chrysanthemums are dying. The yellow flowers face downward, stems wilting at the neck. Their petals curl and brown at the edges like burning paper. You lift one of the ragged blossoms up, as if to try and help it support its own weight. You keep the flowerpot on the kitchen countertop right by the apartment window where it can get the most sunlight, but it doesn’t seem to be enough.
Ruoxi Chen is a Hugo Award-winning book editor based in New York City. She’s had the pleasure of working on books that have been shortlisted for the Ilube Nommo, Nebula, and NAACP Image Awards, and that have won the Alex, Locus, Crawford, Ignyte, Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, Astounding, and Hugo Awards, among others. Her work […]
Joshua Effiong is a writer and digital artist from the Örö people of Nigeria. He is a a Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of Aster Lit’s Spring 2022 Award in Poetry, 2nd prize winner of Creators of Justice Awards 2021(poetry category), Finalist for 2021 River Heron Editors’ Prize and Semi-finalist for Jack Grapes Poetry Prize 2021. […]
When I was a child and played in mud, my father was still alive. “Come, m’ijo” he’d say, chewing tobacco, fingernails dirty from working the land. “The night is for monsters,” his eyes glassy from the sun, “and so is the day.”
step one: stop believing. look, my hands are sticky, / reddened by the blood of the death god.
This story had two distinct points of inspiration. The first was that I wanted to write about a sort of Faustian deal but from a new perspective. It doesn’t make sense to me that a malevolent entity would separate humans from animals; at some point, if you’re so far above the mortal world, wouldn’t humans and animals look the same to you? What would a deal like this look like if it were offered to a wolf, and why would a wolf take it?
In the fading shadows of dawn, a hunter meets a wolf with white eyes, a wolf whose mouth stretches open, and in its growl there are three faraway voices, distorted as if heard through water, so the hunter shoots. He does not wait to see what he has done.
In a voyage into the shoreline of my childhood, / I felt a hand tethering my breath and cutting it into a clan / of monsters.
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a poet/essayist from Nigeria. He was the winner of the Cheshire White Ribbon Day Creative Contest (2022) and the 1st runner up in the Fidelis Okoro Prize for Poetry (2023). His works are published in Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales, IHRAF, Brittle Paper, and elsewhere. A 2023 Adroit Journal […]
Zalika Reid-Benta is a Toronto-based writer. Her debut short story collection Frying Plantain won the 23rd annual Danuta Gleed Literary Award, recognizing the best first collection of short fiction by a Canadian author published in 2019 in the English language. Frying Plantain also won the 2020 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in literary fiction, was shortlisted […]
In this issue we’re proud to bring you short stories by Lowry Poletti (“Dread of the White Dog”) and Sam Kyung Yoo (“Set Yourself on Fire”); flash fiction by Angela Liu (“The Cursed Universe Inside Your Eye”) and Alex V. Cruz (“Bacá”); poetry by Zynab Iliyasu Bobi (“Brief History of Monsterification”) and Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe (“A Mortal’s Guide to Attaining Godhood in the Era of Chaos”); and an interview with a few of the many anthologists doing interesting work in the field. Enjoy!
The glass bottles are caked with so much grime you can’t see what’s in them anymore. It’s better that way because you don’t think you’d be able to do what you need to, if you could. You fish the knife out of your canvas bag, and a lighter with just enough fluid for one more flash of fire. This is your first time—but you’ve seen your mother do the same thing countless times before. Before she made her first mistake. Before you were forced to take her place.
In the September issue of Fantasy Magazine, short stories by Lowry Poletti ("The Blooming Pond") and Sam Kyung Yoo ("Set Yourself on Fire"); flash fiction by Angela Liu ("The Cursed Universe Inside Your Eye") and Alex V. Cruz ("Bacá"); poetry by Zynab Iliyasu Bobi ("A Brief History of Monsterification") and Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe ("A Mortal's Guide to Attaining Godhood in the Era of Chaos"); and an interview with several contemporary anthologists. Enjoy!
What came easiest was portraying Bari’s complicated, tangled emotions of love and resentment for her family. I think children of immigrants, particularly eldest children, will experience my story differently from everyone else. It’s a feeling that’s hard to put into words, but I tried.
Many years ago, a writing instructor said that in order to write a story, you need to figure out who the story belongs to. He was talking about the narrator, the lens of the story. I thought it was good writing advice at the time.
The forest whispers of my sister’s arrival long before I sense her. Birds flutter between pink-girdled maehwa trees, mocking her voice in the tongue only shamans understand. Seonbyeon, Seonbyeon, they repeat mindlessly, and this is how I know my sister is looking for me. But I don’t know which sister, not until she finally appears from the forest gloom.
Ariel Kaplan is the author of several books for teens and adults, including Grendel’s Guide to Love and War and We Regret to Inform You. She was raised in Virginia and has a B.A. in History and Religious Studies from the College of William and Mary.
Angela Liu is a Chinese-American writer based in NYC and Tokyo. She researched mixed reality at Keio University in Japan and currently splits her time between taming a feral toddler and navigating the demonic world of IT consulting. Her work is published/forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Fusion Fragment, among others. Find her on Twitter: @liu_angela
Sonia Sulaiman writes speculative fiction inspired by Palestinian folklore. Her work has appeared in Arablit Quarterly, Beladi, FIYAH, Lackington’s Magazine, Seize the Press, and other venues. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Weird Award, Lammy, and Palestine Book Awards. She is a Hugo-nominated first reader (formerly of Augur, Strange Horizons, and […]
Wen Yu Yang (she/her) is a writer born and raised in Taiwan. Currently, she is based on unceded Eora lands, otherwise known as Sydney, Australia. She has words published or forthcoming in Solarpunk Magazine, Ghost City Press, and elsewhere. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award. When she is not training […]
Alex V. Cruz is a Paterson-born, Dominican-raised speculative fiction writer. His short fiction is heavily inspired by his time in the Dominican Republic and his teenage years in Paterson, New Jersey. He loves animals and is the proud pawrent of two dogs and two cats. Alex graduated Magna Cum Laude from Columbia University with a […]
P.A. Cornell is a Chilean-Canadian author who wrote her first speculative story when she was just eight years old (a science fiction piece about shape-shifting aliens.) A member of SFWA and graduate of the Odyssey workshop, her short fiction has appeared in multiple genre markets and anthologies. Her story, “Splits,” went on to win Canada’s […]
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer from Bobi. She is an undergraduate student of Medical Laboratory Science at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto. She is the winner of the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature, Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize 2022, a Pushcart and Best of The […]
Their stories filled encyclopedias. / Matched ranks on the shelf, leather-bound, / volume after volume, / cover to cover / packed with their achievements, their failings, their tales.
They have never fought about it. “It’s your body,” her husband says, and means it. Only sometimes, when they’re out walking, a little girl will careen across their path roaring like a giggly tyrannosaurus, and he falls silent. “What’re you thinking about?” she asks, before she learns not to.
Most of my writing is fictionalized autobiography, and as I’m getting older I cull through my life experiences looking for my more interesting dramas. I was thinking of my first marriage and how my husband left me high and dry, but he was still able to get U.S. citizenship. I moved to New York as we were going through our divorce and everything I touched turned to gold.
It takes a Black woman to tell the truth about another Black woman, whether she likes that woman or not. If the woman in question is loved, the story reaches mythological heights, she could do no wrong, she was brown skinned and beautiful, intelligent, had all her faculties and her teeth, all the men and women of the neighborhood called her by a term of endearment, which is how Medea morphed into Ma’Dear.
In the land that is now Malaysia, there once was a tribe of monkeys called the Mawahs, whose king was appointed by King Solomon to be the Raja of the jungle. Raja Mawah built himself a throne on the south bank of the Perak River and ruled the jungle fairly.
In this issue of Fantasy Magazine: Short stories by Davida Kilgore ("My Dear, My Love"), Hana Lee ("Bari and the Resurrection Flower"); flash fiction by Joshua Lim ("Voices of the Kings") and B. Pladek ("The Runners"); poetry by Ubong Johnson ("Kumbaya") and Marie Brennan ("Damnatio Memoriea"); and an essay by AT Greenblatt. Enjoy!
In this issue of Fantasy Magazine: Short stories by Davida Kilgore ("My Dear, My Love"), Hana Lee ("Bari and the Resurrection Flower"); flash fiction by Joshua Lim ("Voices of the Kings") and B. Pladek ("The Runners"); poetry by Ubong Johnson ("Kumbaya") and Marie Brennan ("Damnatio Memoriea"); and an essay by AT Greenblatt. Enjoy!
As of this writing, the Nebula Awards Conference just wrapped up! It was a fun event, and it felt like a real celebration of genre. The vibe of the conference inspired us to do a collective interview with the Nebula Awards finalists in the Short Fiction category.
My climate anxiety was at an all-time high. I couldn’t bear to write about reality, but I also couldn’t bear to leave it completely behind, so I built this world where disasters bruise themselves into the people who survive them, leaving wild magic behind.
It's so dark. Black-orange-bloody-bruised. Flashlights throw long beams across the sand. Police lights flicker blue and red, blue and red, blue and red, and the Ferris wheel on the pier glows an obscene neon. No one thought to turn off the calliope. It echoes off the empty boardwalk, cheerfully macabre.
Davida Kilgore is an award-winning writer, editor and educator, with an International career with a focus on African American women’s issues, and expressionistic and intuitive creativity. Learn more at https://davidakilgore.com/
A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work has won a Nebula Award, has been in multiple […]
It’s 6.18am and you are looking at / reproduction William de Morgan tiles / and Morris & Co fabrics on John Lewis
No one saw me, but they certainly saw you: lithe and swan-armed, assured in your poses. You had a way with the steps. The light followed wherever you danced.
I guess I was thinking a lot about the push-pull of human progress and how it’s all so gray. It seems that our wellbeing has an inverse relationship to the wellbeing of non-humans. Not necessarily a bad thing, not necessarily a good thing. And everyone’s pure motives have become less pure over time.
The women of my lineage / all have hands wrapped / in ribbons cut out of us by men / we trusted.
Outside is the palace of slaughter. Under its gambrels of boiling sky, there is the cold unforgiving sea; there are mountains ready to cradle your bones. Along its corridors of singing grass, there are horseback warriors who will cut you to pieces.
In this issue of Fantasy Magazine: Short fiction by Simo Srinivas (“Bozpo Witch-Bane”) and Margaret Jordan (“Blue”); flash fiction by Kimberly Terasaki (“The World is Ending Tomorrow”) and Catherine Yu (“The Dancer”); poetry by H.B. Asari (“After the Pyre”) and Julia August (“The End of Little Dreams”); and an interview with the finalists for the Nebula Award for Short Fiction.
The world is ending tomorrow. That is what everyone was told. We panicked, of course. Looted stores, got into accidents, went to confession, got drunk.
In this issue of Fantasy Magazine: Short fiction by Simo Srinivas (“Bozpo Witch-Bane”) and Margaret Jordan (“Blue”); flash fiction by Kimberly Terasaki (“The World is Ending Tomorrow”) and Catherine Yu (“The Dancer”); poetry by H.B. Asari (“After the Pyre”) and Julia August (“The End of Little Dreams”); and an interview with the finalists for the Nebula Award for Short Fiction.
This story was written for a Halloween contest, a friendly contest among crit partners, not directly for any kind of publication. It doesn’t really have a Halloween vibe—I quickly abandoned any attempt to make it feel very Halloween-ish—but it came from the prompts another writer suggested to me. A snippet of an Emily Dickinson poem, a creepy image, and a question.
As a Black woman and a speculative fiction writer, I take Octavia E. Butler’s advice to write myself into my stories seriously. My first series, the Earthsinger Chronicles, takes place in a secondary fantasy world populated by people of all skin tones, much like our own. The themes of the series include racism and prejudice, as well as identity, love, freedom, and community. And like myself, the heroines I write about are Black.
I am haunted by a funeral, a pageantry of mourners and tears that I can only barely remember. I am not certain, but I suspect the funeral may be my own.
“Leave it, you old bat!” Ashraf screamed at his mother-in-law. He tried to grab Waseefa, but she slid through the rising water like an otter before clawing her way up a Kilimanjaro of possessions. Her litheness was momentarily unhampered by her arthritic limbs decorated with varicose veins.
Your grandmother was made of paper. / Millimeter-thin, she could slip in / and out of closed doors, unnoticed.
Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for inspiration. She recently misapplied her professors’ hard work to The Game of 100 Candles and the short novel Driftwood, and together with Alyc Helms as M.A. Carrick, she is the author of the Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy, beginning […]
This story was the result of a personal writing challenge. Every once in a while I challenge myself to write something that is really out of my comfort zone or that I just plain don’t know how to do yet. In this case, I challenged myself to write fairy tale retellings and mashups for a period of time, I think about six months. At the end of the challenge, I had five stories.
Flautist. / With your moss and crystal shoulders. / You sit cross-legged on the back of a turtle.
Don’t feed him, Greta. We can’t afford to feed him! There’s not enough to eat! We were lost when we found the tower made of sugar that stretched up into the sky in endless red and white spirals. A sea of ants milled at its base. Fat dollops of sugar dripped onto the surrounding trees, candied the leaves, and brought curious bees to hover.
Back when I was a kitten, existing inside a hypothetical box a scientist had trapped me in, one where I might be dead or alive, from here or there, pansexual or not, I was definitely a fan of The Guest Cat, an audiobook that the young scientist, Soni, played at 2x speed while she worked outside my box, tracking waves and particles flashing above us overhead, like a planetarium show, muttering incompletely about radioactive decay and funding competitions to herself, and to invisible colleagues on her phone.
AS: Last year in June, we talked about conventions! Where we were at with attending, as well as what some of our faves are, and more. This year, I attended the SFWA Nebula Conference in Anaheim, CA and WisCon in Madison, WI, and I’m currently planning to attend Readercon in Quincy, MA. I’m hoping to […]
In this issue of Fantasy Magazine . . . Short stories by Melissa A Watkins ("Eat") and Daniel Ausema ("What Passes for Eyes in Dreams and Death"); flash fiction by Bidisha Banerjee ("Schroedinger's Kitten Falls In Love") and Kim.M.Munsamy ("Things Handed Down"); poetry by Tahnia Barrie ("Holy Dyad, Till Sunup") and Eleanna Castroianni ("Foldable Daughters"); and an essay by Leslye Penelope. Enjoy!
First, we love horror, and it’s what we’d watch by choice, even if we weren’t writing about it. Second, as previously mentioned, horror is particularly revealing about the nation’s fears and anxieties, and America has plenty of that when it comes to race. Third, while Black people have historically experienced marginalization in other genres, horror stands out because marginalization typically equates to death, a fate that is so blunt and dismissive that it draws attention and generates discussion—thus the well-known trope that gave us the name of the book.
I write a lot about homelands—longing for them, feeling out of place within them, the mythologized ideal of them, etc. I like cathartic vengeance stories and reimagined myths. And, obviously, queerness, but that one is almost never intentional (except when it is). It’s just the lens through which I see the world, so obviously my stories will be biased towards it.
In the wild backwoods of your country, an old belief persisted: Any curse or blessing that befell you would be repaid tenfold in ten years’ time. Small superstitions surrounded it—iron to ward off a reversal of fortune, witch hazel to hasten it—but everyone knew that no matter what you did, a decade later, change was coming for you.
“I can’t believe I have to miss Pig Day,” my twin brother Jeremy complained. He picked at the white medical tape on the back of his hand. The machine next to his bed whirred as it dispensed another drop of clear medicine into the tube attached to his arm.
I am the child of fallen gods. This is how I know: / I found my parents’ altars in the attic, cobwebs nestled in the cracked stone / Mummified fruit, tarnished coin, cracked paint / The root of rot and metal and mildew that we can never air out the home
Kimberly Terasaki is a lifelong reader and writer of speculative fiction, with a particular love for fantasy in all its forms. After deciding on her career path in 5th grade, she wrote fanfiction to hone her skills and get feedback from a public forum. She then attended Barrett the Honors College at ASU and Sarah […]
Bidisha Banerjee (she/her) aspires to write playfully and humorously—but often ends up sounding earnest and prescriptive. Her first book, Superhuman River: Stories of the Ganga, came out of her climate activism and resonated with indigenous feminist scientific perspectives on expanding the idea of humanity to include what was previously considered non-human. After curing her sleep […]
H.B. Asari is a student at the University of Lagos. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022 and the Stephen A. Dibiase Poetry Prize 2023, and has been published in Ake Review. She can be found daydreaming about stories when she’s supposed to be listening to lectures.
Melissa A Watkins has been a teacher, a singer, an actress, and a very bad translator but now has found her way back to her first love, writing. Her work has previously appeared in or is forthcoming in midnight & indigo, khoreo, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. After fifteen years of living […]
Joshua Lim is a Malaysian Chinese writer of fantasy and horror fiction. Born and raised in Klang, Malaysia, his stories often feature legendary beasts and malicious spirits, stemming from his deep fascination with local myths and folklore. Since 2021, Joshua’s works have been published in various speculative anthologies such as KL Noir: Magic and The […]
Kim. M. Munsamy works as a Counseling Psychologist in Blaauwberg, South Africa. Her work has appeared in The Misbehaving Dead anthology, The First Line Literary Journal, the F is for Fear anthology, the Strange Births Magazine, and online journals Ripples in Space, The Fictional Café, The Mystery Tribune, and the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. […]
Margaret Jordan is a writer and theatre artist from the wilds of suburban Southern California. The magic found in community and the ever-present anxiety of living during a climate crisis have shaped much of her writing over the last few years. She lives in Orange County with her family, three orange cats, two German Shepherds, […]
I prefer to write stories where the main character has direct agency, so as the narrative progressed, there had to be a climactic moment where the story became more about her and her struggles than about the titular character, yet it also had to work out in a meaningful and believable way.
The beheaded tilapia nudged teasingly against the riverbank in a bloody soup, staining the lush weeds beneath the little girl’s feet. Oblivious to the stench, she squatted beside the muddy water, her gaze tracking over the dead fish. There were a dozen of them, freshly killed. Flies had only just begun to settle over silver flanks, scuttling shyly over tooth marks.
Eleanna Castroianni is a writer, poet, and oral storyteller from Greece. A cultural geographer by training, Eleanna tells speculative stories from the margins of history and the far futures of the Anthropocene. Their written work has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Fireside, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, PodCastle, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere.
Ubong Johnson is a medic and writer who lives in Nigeria. He is fascinated by literature. His works have appeared in or are forthcoming from: The Healing Muse by SUNY Upstate Medical University, Blood and Thunder, The West Trade Review, Fiction Niche Literary Magazine, and others. Ubong also plays the piano, and is a cat […]
Tahnia Barrie is a Sierra Leonean poet and writer, currently based in her country’s capital city, Freetown. Her work has been published in Commonwealth Writers’ magazine adda and Strange Horizons. She can be found on Twitter @TSBarrie.
Hana Lee is a biracial Korean American fantasy author. By day, she makes her living as a software engineer. She’s always loved the dark, the gothic, and the occult, so there’s usually a picturesque ruin of some kind lurking in the background of her novels. In her downtime, she enjoys knitting, crochet, TTRPGs, and video […]
B. Pladek is a writer and literature scholar based in Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Slate Future Tense Fiction, PodCastle, and elsewhere. His debut novel Dry Land appears from the University of Wisconsin Press in fall 2023. You can find him at bpladek.net or on twitter @bpladek.
Catherine Yu writes dark speculative fiction. She was born in Nanjing and is now based in New York. She is the author of Direwood and Helga, slated for spring 2024. You can find her at catherineyuwrites.com.
In this issue’s short fiction, Anya Ow’s “God of the River” wades into family legends and survival, and “The Body Fate” by Avi Burton explores role, identity, and expectation; in flash fiction, Anne E.G. Nydam pieces together a new kind of narrative in “Some Assembly Required,” and “It’s What’s Inside That Counts” by Warren Benedetto delivers a slice of hard truth;; for poetry, we have “1960s With a Glass Harp” by Chinedu Gospel and “Legacy” by Anjali Patel. Plus an interview with Mark H. Harris about nonfiction book The Black Guy Dies First, co-authored with Robin R. Means Coleman. Enjoy!
In this issue’s short fiction, Anya Ow’s “God of the River” wades into family legends and survival, and “The Body Fate” by Avi Burton explores role, identity, and expectation; in flash fiction, Anne E.G. Nydam pieces together a new kind of narrative in “Some Assembly Required,” and “It’s What’s Inside That Counts” by Warren Benedetto delivers a slice of hard truth;; for poetry, we have “1960s With a Glass Harp” by Chinedu Gospel and “Legacy” by Anjali Patel. Plus an interview with Mark H. Harris about nonfiction book The Black Guy Dies First, co-authored with Robin R. Means Coleman. Enjoy!
The most difficult part of writing this was trying to understand what tone to use. While I felt that the story always contained grief, it was hard to write about collective grief in a way that didn’t seem abstract or too expository.
The topic I’ve chosen isn’t one that can be fully explored within the brief span of this essay alone, but I will endeavour to broach it anyhow, because it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The idea of language itself is something I’m always trying to tackle as a writer, but I’m still having difficulties grappling with it when it comes to publishing and writing fiction, both how it has the power to alienate us and also bring us together.
I walk into Old Town. In a curio shop on the promenade, an old man sells paintings, deras, kikois, and ornaments. Tuk-tuks move swiftly along the cabro paving, passing the teapot sculpture at the round-about. Pushcarts lumber beside the street restaurants and past the old buildings covered by vines. A radio plays “Malaika,” the song rising like a wisp of steam. Shouts of children playing football near the sea reach me. I buy a ticket to Fort Jesus and the seller tells me I am lucky because it is the day of secession.
Leslye Penelope is the award-winning author of the Earthsinger Chronicles. The first book in the series, Song of Blood & Stone, was chosen as one of TIME Magazine‘s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. Her latest novel The Monsters We Defy won the 2023 Audie Award for Best Fantasy Audiobook. Equally left and right-brained, […]
In the beginning—the newest beginning—the Universal Field Operative (UFO) looked out across the multiverse and said, “What shall I do today for fun? I’m in the mood for something different.”
Something stayed behind on the shore / When I followed you back from the sea. / Here’s a horror movie: / (Here’s every horror movie) / ‘People never come back the same.’
I feel like a lot of my evolution as a writer has been (/continues to be) about realizing/accepting creative work can be play and doesn’t have to be painful to have value and meaning.
The toe wiggled at Mirella from the compost heap. She let the lid drop with a thud and a cloud of flies. Enough. Time to order an electronic composter.
With quiet flair the Jubjub watched / the Bandersnatch decay. / Thru mimsy wobe and tainted tove / she snicker-snacked her prey.
In this issue’s short fiction, we have “Children of Earth” by K.A. Wiggins, and “Nairuko” by Dennis Mugaa; flash fiction “Trading With Monsters” by Miguel O. Mitchell, and Keech Ballard’s “The UFO’s New Clothes”; in poetry, “The Frumious Jubjub” by C.H. Lindsay and “Sleeping With the Fishes" by Shreejita Majumder. Plus essay “What Language Do You Think In: On Being Lost in Translation” by Linghun author Ai Jiang. Enjoy!
There are six rules regarding trading with monsters. Rule #1: Get a good night’s sleep before you cast your protection circle. If you nod off even once, the last thing you’ll ever see is sharp teeth.
In the April issue of Fantasy Magazine . . . Short stories by K.A. Wiggins ("Children of Earth") and Dennis Mugaa ("Nairuko"); flash fiction by Miguel O. Mitchell ("Trading With Monsters") and Keech Ballard ("The UFO's New Clothes"); poetry by C.H. Lindsay ("The Frumious Jubjub") and Shreejita Majumder ("Sleeping With the Fishes"); and an essay by Ai Jiang ("What Language Do You Think In?: On Being Lost in Translation").Enjoy!
I like for my fantastical work to feel deeply grounded in the real world before I introduce the weird or impossible elements. In The Changeling I wanted New York City to feel lived in, tangible; I wanted the marriage of the two leads, Apollo and Emma, to be believable, and I wanted the trials of being new parents to be utterly grounded. And then—SMACK—here comes the strange stuff.
I think that, for me, there’s been a huge uptick in antisemitism lately, which has made me lean into my culture and religion a bit more. I hadn’t seen a ton of Jewish speculative media prior to 2020, when I started writing this story, and I wanted to put something out there. A golem is both very Jewish, and also a thing you can directly create and act upon.
“Everyone’s making bread,” I say, trying to sound casual and not like I’m terrified, because talking about bread is easier than talking about what’s going on. My phone balances on my belly as I lie in bed. “It’s like the pandemic hit, and everyone’s collective delusion went ‘I’ll bake bread, that’ll solve it.’ I just don’t get it.”
Anjali is a Black and South Asian speculative fiction writer and software engineer. She lives with a grizzled dog who offered to teach her magic in exchange for free New York City rent. Her work has appeared in Escape Pod, Uncanny Magazine, khōréō, and others. Find her at anjali.fyi or on Twitter @anjapatel.
I-96 is quiet while Libby drives east from Lansing, into the big same-y smear of suburbs north and west of Detroit. What must be thousands of abandoned cars still line the route, those whose drivers were abruptly bodily assumed into heaven—or whatever. Most of them have been pushed to the shoulder of the road by now, and in a few places an effort has clearly been made to start towing them away. Libby wonders what’s going to happen to all of them. Can you recycle a whole car?
Last night was beautiful / fog-swallowed, rain-kissed / we got drunk on the balcony / and talked of Plank’s length
Warren Benedetto writes dark fiction about horrible people, horrible places, and horrible things. He is an award-winning author and a full member of the SFWA. His stories have appeared in publications such as Dark Matter Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and The Dread Machine; on podcasts such as The NoSleep Podcast, Tales to Terrify, and The Creepy […]
I'm interested in the intersections between disability and religion—particularly the narratives constructed at both organizational and individual levels around what disability means in relation to the god(s) one worships, as well as how one might respond accordingly . . . I find it fascinating that in certain personal and corporate theologies, the god(s) might be blamed for misfortune, might be raged at, while in other belief systems, even within the same nominal religious umbrella, the adherent might be told to focus on their own self-improvement and/or positive thinking, for their virtue is being tested/they are but a worm, etc . . .
You hear the door open as if in dreaming. Back when you were a conservatory student, you chewed a third of a melatonin tablet every night—to keep yourself from snapping awake before sunup, chest tight, your head still achy with exhaustion. Now, mornings are difficult: your eyelids weighted, sliding; thick grey wool between your temples. Your body drifting in a warm, slow sea.
In this issue’s short fiction, P.H. Low takes craft to the extreme in “The Will of the God of Music,” and Effie Sieberg’s “There’s Magic in Bread” connects lessons of the past to the problems of the present; in flash fiction, Mari Ness takes a hard-hitting look at current magical trends in “Enchanted Mirrors Are Making a Comeback. That’s Not Necessarily a Good Thing,” and in Aimee Ogden’s “Moments of Doubt” an absence of evidence leaves us guessing about the fate of the evidently absent; in poetry, we have “The Distance Between Us” by Rati Mehrotra and “Possession” by Tonya Liburd. Plus an interview with the author of The Changeling, The Ballad of Black Tom, and Lone Women, Victor LaValle. Enjoy!
Enchanted mirrors. Once restricted to royalty—and only a few of them—these days they seem to be everywhere: in crumbling mansions, sparkling penthouse pieds-à-terre, rundown apartments, executive office buildings, and even the occasional meticulously maintained castle. For those trading in enchanted mirrors—or just looking for one—this probably seems like a good thing. But the increased abundance of enchanted mirrors does have a more sinister side.
In this issue’s short fiction, P.H. Low takes craft to the extreme in “The Will of the God of Music,” and Effie Sieberg’s “There’s Magic in Bread” connects lessons of the past to the problems of the present; in flash fiction, Mari Ness takes a hard-hitting look at current magical trends in “Enchanted Mirrors Are Making a Comeback. That’s Not Necessarily a Good Thing,” and in Aimee Ogden’s “Moments of Doubt” an absence of evidence leaves us guessing about the fate of the evidently absent; in poetry, we have “The Distance Between Us” by Rati Mehrotra and “Possession” by Tonya Liburd. Plus an interview with the author of The Changeling, The Ballad of Black Tom, and Lone Women, Victor LaValle. Enjoy!
I don't believe in walk-on roles. If a character's in a story, they have their own reason for being there. Every story is richer for knowing what that is.
What does magic cost? Throughout my childhood in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the answer to this question was rooted in the magic of Dungeons & Dragons, where a spell may cost an incantation, a few ingredients, and some energy from the spellcaster. To some extent, most modern magic systems derive their cost from one of these currencies—some form of specialized knowledge or language, some form of physical payment, and some of the magic user’s energy.
In a castle flanked by fjords, so very far from everything that the winds rarely raised its banners, there lived a troll princess. Her mother was a troll queen, by virtue of a castle and a bad temper, but queen she was, and her ambitions did not end at the still shores.
Born and raised in India, Rati Mehrotra now lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of the science fantasy novels Markswoman (2018) and Mahimata (2019) published by Harper Voyager and the YA fantasy novel Night of the Raven, Dawn of the Dove (2022) published by Wednesday Books. Her short fiction has been […]
“Nonsense,” said the rocking horse with the bristle brush mane. “You’ll never be more than what you are.” “Mrs. Bunn says that being grows with time,” began the wooden comb, heirloom from the old country, mislabeled midcentury modern. “No. Time is being’s enemy. And Mrs. Bunn is in the dumpster now, on her way to a landfill.”
C. H. Lindsay (Charlie) is an award-winning poet, writer, housewife, and book-lover—not necessarily in that order. She currently has short stories and poems in twenty anthologies (so far). Her poems have also appeared in magazines including Amazing Stories and Space and Time Magazine. She is working on four novels, six short stories, and at least […]
Dennis Mugaa is a writer from Meru, Kenya. He won the 2022 Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest, was shortlisted for Isele Magazine‘s inaugural Short Story Prize and was longlisted for the 2021 Afritondo Short Story Prize. His work has appeared in Jalada Africa, Lolwe, Isele Magazine, and Washington Square Review. He has been an Ebedi […]
Shreejita Majumder can usually be found typing away on her laptop, or spinning stories in her head while walking along the busy streets of Kolkata. Poet, artist, writer, keeper-of-sparrows, and plant-whisperer, her work has been published in Strange Horizons and reviewed in Locus Magazine. She is fascinated by themes of memory, time, and personhood, and […]
Anne E.G. Nydam has been creating imaginary worlds since she could hold a crayon, bringing them to life in both art and writing. She makes relief block prints celebrating the wonders of worlds both real and imaginary, and writes and illustrates books, stories, and poems about adventure, creativity, and looking for wonders everywhere. With an […]
Miguel O. Mitchell, PhD is a retired chemistry professor, a speculative poet and SFF author, and a visual artist. Two of his poems were nominated for the 2022 Rhysling Award in the Long Poem category by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). In the fantasy fiction genre, he has also published the short […]
Keech Ballard has been writing speculative fiction and poetry for nigh unto forty years. He was awarded a Bank of America Achievement Award in Fine Arts fifty years ago as a mere high school student. His stories and poems have appeared in a variety of amateur and semi-pro venues in recent years. This is his […]
Chinedu Gospel (Frontier IV) is an emerging poet & undergraduate from Anambra, Nigeria. He plays chess & tweets @gonspoetry. He is a Best of the Net nominee. He is the winner of the StarLit Award, AsterLit 2021 Winter Issue. He won an honorable mention in the 2021 Kreative Diadem annual contest (poetry category) and Dan […]
Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer and an immigrant from Fujian. She is a member of HWA, SFWA, and Codex. Her work can be found in F&SF, The Dark, and Uncanny, among others. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop’s 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of Linghun. Find her on Twitter (@AiJiang_) and […]
When writing characters like this, I like to question every assumption I’ve made about them. Conformity to social mores, normal behavior, and even emotional responses are all assumptions made based on how people act in the real world. These assumptions that don’t necessarily make sense for characters in a fantasy setting.
The dead return in strange shapes, yoked to those who mastered them in life. Thais sees them: shadowy animals who slink between the townspeople in the market square. When he was born, so he is told, his mother held up his birth-wet body and pressed her nose to the middle of his brow. They lay together, crowned by oak branches dragged low to the ground by last night’s rain, on the stone table at the center of the woods.
tkIn this issue’s short fiction, Lowry Poletti’s “The Dead Return in Strange Shapes” explores what binds us to the past, and Malda Marlys takes us east of the sun and west of the moon in “A Princess With a Nose Three Ells Long”; in flash fiction, Cynthia Gómez wants us to know that “The Books Would Like a Word,” and in “Secondhand” S.L. Harris revisits a different fairytale adventure from an unusual perspective; for poetry, we have “The Mermaids of Magonia” by Carina Bissett and “Food for Thought” by Lisbeth Coiman. Plus essay “The Societal Cost of Magic” by Moses Ose Utomi, author of The Lies of The Ajungo and “The Mirror Test”. Enjoy!
I felt them as the sun came through the curtains on a Saturday morning. First, a light papery brush against my shoulder that I could dismiss as the last minutes of a dream. Then a blunt edge digging into my cheek, faintly smelling of my favorite bookstore.
In this issue’s short fiction, Lowry Poletti’s “The Dead Return in Strange Shapes” explores what binds us to the past, and Malda Marlys takes us east of the sun and west of the moon in “A Princess With a Nose Three Ells Long”; in flash fiction, Cynthia Gómez wants us to know that “The Books Would Like a Word,” and in “Secondhand” S.L. Harris revisits a different fairytale adventure from an unusual perspective; for poetry, we have “The Mermaids of Magonia” by Carina Bissett and “Food for Thought” by Lisbeth Coiman. Plus essay “The Societal Cost of Magic” by Moses Ose Utomi, author of The Lies of The Ajungo and “The Mirror Test”. Enjoy!
When I was a kid I adored Tolkien—I remember in 4th or 5th grade taking the time to draw out fifty individual stars for a school poster about favorite books. I’m rereading it now and while some of it holds up—the worldbuilding, for example—so much of it does not. It’s not just the classism, racism, sexism; there are also a lot of weird clunky plot choices and bent-over-backwards justifications for what are presented as unassailable principles and long descriptions that I mostly skimmed as a kid.
I made the decision to keep the story science fantasy instead of science fiction. I was tempted to make it a bit more technical, with descriptions of the chemicals and processes of creating the organic metal, but those details would take away from the heart of the story, which was more about impossible dreams suddenly made possible than about immersive and specific worldbuilding.
Shaundra took the small, empty cardboard box and swiveled on her work stool to place it gently on top of her daughter Dineisha’s head. Her daughter went cross-eyed trying to look at it and started chewing on the corner of her thumb, smiling at the game.
girl scouts sell s’mores to pay their dues / & boy scouts light cigarettes before vanishing
The Myopic Cryptozoologist - Everyone’s least favorite human, this persistent creature is a narrow-minded cousin of perhaps our favorite type of human—the cryptozoologist—and differs from that specimen in several key ways.
Other work by Mari Ness appears in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Nature Futures, Diabolical Plots, Reckoning, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and previous issues of Fantasy. A tiny collection of tiny fairy tales, Dancing in Silver Lands, was the 2021 Outwrite Short Fiction Chapbook winner, and a tiny short story, “Verisya,” was a finalist for the […]
This story haunted me for two years before I finally got it out. It taught me that if I can’t stop thinking about something, I should probably start writing it down. Pay attention to your ghosts.
I’m happy on the road. The land stretches like a languid animal, and I find tranquility in its measured length. Outside the car the earth breathes, the ground rising and sinking. Even though I am the one driving, concentrating on the road and the trucks roaring past, it’s like a meditation for me—my mind empties into the open space.
There is a part of me / that scuttles across the sea floor, / that stares up scowling / at rays of sunlight / filtering down to dapple the sand.
Lowry Poletti is a Black author, artist, and veterinary student from New Jersey. They write a variety of fantasy, scifi, and horror fiction unified by their fascination with gore. When they aren’t writing about monsters and the people who love them, they can be found wrist deep in a formalin-fixed lab specimen. Their other pieces […]
In this issue’s short fiction, Erin Brown grows a little hope in “Skyscrapers That Twist to the Sun,” and “Broodmare” by Flossie Arend gives us a dark glimpse into the future; in flash fiction, Ruth Joffre turns the lens on us in “A Brief Catalog of Humans, as Observed by the Cryptids of Encante,” and “Monsters” by Liz Colter peels away some uncomfortable layers; for poetry, we have “As the Witch Burns” by Marisca Pichette and “I Should Have Been A Pair of Ragged Claws” by Alice Towey. Plus an interview with Infomocracy, And Other Disasters, and The Mimicking of Known Successes author Malka Older. Enjoy!
October 8th - I found more skin this morning. Pale flakes polka-dotting my blue sheets, grouped there as if they had conspired to jump together. Little sailors abandoning ship to take their chances in the expanse of my bed. I look my normal self in the mirror and find no red patches on my torso or legs. My back, maybe? It’s been itchy.
In this issue’s short fiction, Erin Brown grows a little hope in “Skyscrapers That Twist to the Sun,” and “Broodmare” by Flossie Arend gives us a dark glimpse into the future; in flash fiction, Ruth Joffre turns the lens on us in “A Brief Catalog of Humans, as Observed by the Cryptids of Encante,” and in “Monsters” by Liz Colter peels away some uncomfortable layers; for poetry, we have “As the Witch Burns” by Marisca Pichette and “I Should Have Been A Pair of Ragged Claws” by Alice Towey. Plus an interview with Infomocracy, And Other Disasters, and The Mimicking of Known Successes author Malka Older. Enjoy!
Cynthia Gómez (she/her) is a writer and researcher. Her stories have appeared in The Acentos Review, Strange Horizons, and collections including Mine: An Anthology of Body Horror; 206-Word Stories; and Antifa Splatterpunk. Her novelette, “The Shivering World,” was released in November 2022 as part of Split Scream Volume Two from Dread Stone Press. She is working […]
Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, and The Washington Post. She is the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station, currently running on Realm, and her short story collection . . . And […]
Annie Wilkes is standing at the foot of the bed, sledgehammer in her hand. From certain angles, the hammer looks like an axe. From certain angles, she reminds you of your mother. When she speaks, you hear the voice of your dealer. When she looks down at you, she’s every undeniable mouth-breather who’s ever trapped you in a conversation you could not escape.
It is innocuous and normal to think, “I miss my friend, I hope that I see her again, maybe we’ll patch things up,” but when it turns out the friend has passed away . . . well it’s still normal to miss them, anyway. Less so, when their posthumous letter says “trust me,” to actually trust them. I think it’s also unfortunately normal to still have regrets and what ifs. What if I had reached out sooner, or at all? Did they know how much I cared?
Angie is three months dead before I get her letter. She sent it the week before she died, and I guess that figures; the postal service got fucked in the twenties and never recovered. Maybe she even relied on that delay.
Erin Brown is a black, neurodivergent author of horror, fabulist, and fantasy short fiction and poetry. She has been published in FIYAH Magazine, the Los Suelos CA Interactive Anthology, and 3Elements Literary Revue, the anthology It Was All a Dream: An Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right, as well as other publications. Erin is a Voodoonauts Fellow and an SFWA member, and […]
Once a year, during the Sturgeon Moon, a house appears off Seven Mile Line Road in the heart of Chickasee County. Native grasses surround it, thick and tall, protecting the house and its sprawling kitchen garden from view. The being who lives inside the house calls herself Helga Tillinger when she manifests here.
I started my writing journey with poems. I think mostly in poetry when creating, though I believe different stories crave different styles and structures. My favourite things to read, or be inspired by, use a perfect blend of prose and poetic techniques. And I try my best to listen to the story I am working on, its different parts, and do whatever they demand of me.
Walking, crossing, moon-kissed streets, black top, blue jeans, unwashed. Her afro is home to a million brown-winged birds, everlastingly chirping. There’s a baby boy, eight months old, asleep in her arms, and maybe he dreams of beautiful spinning star-like things because he doesn’t know of the hurt in the heart that loves him.
Lisbeth Coiman is a bilingual author born in Venezuela. She earned her BA in Modern Languages at Universidad Metropolitana, Caracas, and her Masters in Education at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. Her first book, I Asked the Blue Heron: A Memoir (2017) explores the intersection between immigration and mental health. Her bilingual poetry collection, Uprising / […]
Malda Marlys teaches science just outside Chicago and writes the sort of speculative fiction that requires too many qualifiers for the normal flow of conversation. Fortunately the SFFH umbrella is wide (and kind of spooky and full of brass fittings and snakes). Eir short fiction has appeared in Fusion Fragment, Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, […]
S.L. Harris is a writer, teacher, and archaeologist who can often be found digging in gardens, libraries, tea cabinets, and ancient houses. Originally from West Virginia, he currently lives in the Midwest with his wife, two children, and many books.
Marisca Pichette collects monsters and echoes. Her work appears in Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, Vastarien, Fusion Fragment, Flash Fiction Online, PseudoPod, and PodCastle, among others. Her speculative poetry collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, is forthcoming from Android Press in April 2023. Find her on Twitter as @MariscaPichette and Instagram as @marisca_write.
Alice Towey is a writer of speculative fiction and poetry based out of Northern California. Her work has appeared in Asimov’s, Fireside, and Clarkesworld. She is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writing workshop. When she’s not writing, she works as a civil engineer specializing in water resources management. Visit alicetowey.com for more information on […]
Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Pleiades, khōréō, The Florida Review Online, Wigleaf, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. […]
K.A. Wiggins (Kaie) writes award-winning speculative fiction that explores the tangled webs of society, environment, and identity through intricate, dreamlike tales of monsters and magic. (That’s a fancy way of saying “get your body horror & angst here!”) Best known for “climate change + monsters in dystopian Vancouver” gothic YA Fantasy series Threads of Dreams, […]
Flossie Arend is a writer, a bibliophage, and a collector of midnight hours. She loves to consume horror, science fiction, and fantasy, play video games, knit socks and sweaters, and spend time with her husband and their tortoise of indeterminate age. You can find her on Twitter at @flossiearend and at flossiearend.com.
Carina Bissett is a writer and poet working primarily in the fields of dark fiction and fabulism. Her work has been published in multiple journals and anthologies including Upon a Twice Time, Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales, and Arterial Bloom. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Sundress Publications […]
Clare Rhoden is a writer, editor and reviewer from Melbourne, Australia. Her dystopian trilogy The Chronicles of the Pale tells of intelligent canini living alongside human tribes on the ruined land. Her WWI historical novel is The Stars in the Night, and her latest book is the middle grade fantasy novel How to Survive Your […]
Liz has followed her heart through a wide variety of careers, including farming with a team of draft horses, as well as working as a field paramedic, Outward Bound instructor, athletic trainer, and roller-skating waitress, among other curious choices. She also knows more about concrete than you might suspect. Her short stories have been published […]
In this issue’s short fiction, Victor Forna takes us on a search for home in “Parebul of the Mother, Asked in Moonlight,” and something allures from beyond in Jennifer R. Donohue’s “Into the Dark”; in flash fiction, Jennifer Hudak gives a taste of preserved magic in “Sturgeon Moon Jam,” and Sam Kyung Yoo draws a daring, imaginative escape in “The End of a Painted World”; for poetry, we have “Luminous” by Timmi Sanni and “What Chimerae Read” by Mary Soon Lee. Plus essay “All the King's Women: Annie Wilkes is the Mother Goddess of Cocaine” by Big Girl (PM Press) and Number One Fan (Mira) author Meg Elison. Enjoy!
Flaming orange tongues devour the walls around us. The soldiers outside batter at the old wooden doors of the back entrance. Gingko holds fast, the ornate mural of gingko tree branches and golden leaves glowing like painted sunshine.
Erika T. Wurth’s work has appeared in numerous journals including Buzzfeed and The Kenyon Review. White Horse is her debut novel. She is a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Scholar, attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and is a narrative artist for the Meow Wolf Denver installation. She is of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee descent.
I love getting to explore new worlds, to fall in love with characters who become real to me, and be moved by the words on the page. Genre fiction got me through the height of the pandemic, and it’s also gotten me through so many times when I felt unmoored. Just being able to dive into a world, to for a moment be somewhere else, it’s the best gift.
The bee liberation group meets at seven o’clock every other Thursday in the group study rooms on the fourth floor of the Main Library. Hannah tears tabs from the flyers that they post all over campus—outside the big auditoriums in Wells Hall, on the doors of the dorm cafeterias, in the women’s bathrooms—and feeds them into her jacket pocket. When she forgets and puts the laden jacket through the laundry, they turn into so much confetti.
When I wrote the story, I didn’t want the insects to anchor too closely to any singular real-world equivalent; in fact I went back and forth a few times with how they worked, changing their logistics and building in some of the in-world fallout of having bees as a fundamental fact of life, in order to keep them from drifting closer to being one clear metaphor or another (because I found that drifting very easy to do!) Being a woman is a lot of things, personally and interpersonally, societally, and I wanted the bees to be a lot of things too.
It takes the lieutenant one hundred years to climb the hill to Lao Po’s house. By then, the warlords have come and gone, the Republic has risen and fallen, and developers have been petitioning the ruling party to demolish Lao Po’s hilltop hut for decades.
I think oppressive expectations and self-criticism, and the negative emotions associated with these, are the main deterrents to beginning writing. We have many obligations and demands we prioritize and manage on a daily basis because we have to, because they are habits, because we don’t have expectation/emotion tied up with these items, and because we often value what is expected/imposed on us as inherently more worthy of our time and sacrifice. Writing can be easy when we are more fair with ourselves.
When rain hurls itself against the diamond glass / with the suicidal passion of a gothic hero, transforming / my window into the white, glycerin eye / of a dark castle, gnarled and hiding among thick trees
The sun draped itself over the left armrest of the couch at dawn, while Zella sat waiting for the typewriter’s tapping to commence next door. Even though she’d tossed and turned all night in the summer heat, she still found herself rising early, expectant.
In this issue’s short fiction, Z.K. Abraham’s protagonist finds a strange allure in the sounds coming from next door in “The Typewriter,” and Aimee Ogden’s “SOC 301: Apian Gender Studies (Cross-Listed with ZOL 301)” explores a different kind of dorm life. In flash fiction, Simo Srinivas takes us on an unusual quest in “Plum Century” while Kelsea Yu’s “Harvest of the Deep” takes us on a harrowing journey underwater. For poetry, we have “The Space Between Seconds” by Kelsey Hutton and “The Werewolf and the Fox Spirit Are Neighbors” by Amy Johnson. Plus an interview with A Phoenix First Must Burn and Eternally Yours editor Patrice Caldwell. Enjoy!
After a decade of abyss-diving, it wasn’t the jagged stalagmite teeth, puckered slate skin, or uneven, fin-like growths that chilled Lifang; it was the creature’s expression—lidless eyes and too-wide jaws shaped like a perpetual scream.
I fell in love with AfroSurrealism when I was drafting the stories for my forthcoming debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky, 2023). So many absurd things have happened in my life. I bought a loaf of bread for ten million dollars when hyperinflation hit my country, Zimbabwe, which means that I’ve been a penniless billionaire; I’m only twenty-six and have lived under two dictatorships.
The idea of “The Black and White” has been kicking around in my head for a really long time and was spurred by a terrible thought. I used to have this great fear that I would lose contact with my sister and the only thing that would reunite us would be our father’s death. Over time, that fear or anxiety started to change shape into something more fantastical, like many of my fears.
She wasn’t at his funeral, so I took the van around to where I knew she was staying while she was in town. He always taught us to stick close to our home. It was her ex’s place, a rundown one-story with dead grass and an old plastic playground for some forgotten children.
Eurydice has never felt as if she fits in her own myth. It doesn’t belong to her, not really, because the story doesn’t end when she leaves it. Orpheus gets to keep going to the land of the living, and he gets to grieve, and he gets to die a brutal death, and then the story ends. She is left abandoned in the aftermath.
This story came together from several sources of inspiration—the ballet Giselle itself, of course, as well as the 1920s song “Pirate Jenny” from the The Threepenny Opera, by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann. Both of these are excellent revenge stories—highly recommend! I’d also recently learned more about the extremely exploitative nature of the lives of young ballet girls in 19th century Paris, when the ballet Giselle debuted.
perhaps, waking up here is the closest I've ever gotten / to living life on a bed of roses.
Paris Opera Ballet, 1841 / You’re enjoying your reprieve here at the opéra, m’sieur, are you not? All the wealthiest gentlemen do. Here in the exclusive foyer de la danse, wives are forbidden and young girls lightly clad. Champagne obtained, you complain of your tiresome wife—how she will never replicate a young girl’s bloom, no matter how much rouge she rubs on her cheeks!
In this issue’s short fiction, Kelsey Hutton brings the curtain down on Giselle in “Queen of the Wilis” and Aigner Loren Wilson’s “The Black and White” takes us on a monstrous road trip with badass sisters; in flash fiction, Eurydice reconsiders this whole… Orpheus thing in Avi Burton’s “Quantum Eurydice,” and something’s fishy in Stephen M.A.’s “Short Swims From Great Heights”; for poetry, we have “The Road” by Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí and “Wolves Heaven” by Abu Bakr Sadiq. Plus essay “Reclaiming a Traditional African Genre: The AfroSurrealism of Ngano” by Drinking From Graveyard Wells author (and author of Fantasy poem “The Himba Destroyer”) Lisa Yvette Ndlovu. Enjoy!
Davvit was six years old the first time he saw a shark kill a man on the beach. It came up, looked the guy’s wife straight in the eye, then stabbed him in the throat, right there next to the cotton candy stand beneath the hoverboard rental hut.
Sam Kyung Yoo is a science fiction and fantasy writer and third-degree black belt taekwondo instructor living in Massachusetts. They have a BA in English, creative writing, and film studies from Brandeis University, and they like to write about ghosts, East Asian folklore, and sad robots. Their short fiction has been published or is forthcoming […]
I’ve had a Mami Wata story lurking in my bones for a minute. When I started writing I didn’t know this would be the one. though. The first working title was ‘something, something, sea-witch’ actually, and at first I was thinking it would be an Ursula-type figure that the main character beseeched. But as the tone of the story solidified, I realized it needed to be a benevolent figure, and Mami Wata fell into place naturally.
Ostensibly a readers’ poll, the Locus Awards are decided by an open vote: anyone can participate, and there are no requirements, other than the ability to cast the vote. This means these awards potentially reflect the tastes of a broader range of individuals—but presumably still folks who love genre fiction. So, who better to talk about fantasy fiction than the top ten finalists of the Locus Awards in the Best Fantasy Novel category?
Step One: You Wait - You are patient and your love, true. There is nothing you cannot withstand.
Kelsea Yu is a Taiwanese Chinese American writer. Her debut novella, Bound Feet, is published through Cemetery Gates Media’s My Dark Library series. She has stories forthcoming or published in PseudoPod, Reckoning, and Kaleidotrope, and in various anthologies such as Classic Monsters Unleashed, Death in the Mouth, and Dark Matter Presents: Human Monsters. Kelsea is […]
Amy Johnson’s stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Diabolical Plots, Fantasy Magazine, and Lightspeed, among others. She’s the editor of Drones & Dreams, a speculative sprint collection published by Digital Asia Hub, and runs workshops using speculative fiction techniques to explore the personal and societal consequences of technologies. She’s currently working on […]
Timi Sanni writes from Lagos, Nigeria. He is the winner of the 2021 Anita McAndrews Award Poetry Contest. His works have appeared in Black Warrior Review, New Delta Review, Lolwe, Lucent Dreaming, HOAX, Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. Find him on twitter @timisanni.
Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella “Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters” was a 2021 Nebula Award finalist, and her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction.
A child of immigrants from Tamil Nadu and Penang, Simo Srinivas now lives in Colorado with their spouse and two senior, standard-issue tabby cats. When not writing about all things weird and queer, Simo can be found on the trail intently counting pikas. You can also find them on Twitter @srinivassimo.
Jennifer R. Donohue grew up at the Jersey Shore and now lives in central New York with her husband and their Doberman. She works at her local public library where she also facilitates a writing workshop. Her work has appeared in Apex Magazine, Escape Pod, Fusion Fragment, and elsewhere. Her Run With the Hunted novella […]
You leave while it is still dark. Your lover sleeps on his stomach, the sheet draped only to his waist. You don't want to go. You want to slide back into bed and listen to him breathing. And for him to make you coffee later, dark and sweet. But you've never let anyone haunt you. And you're not about to start now.
I kissed a dragon once / in a desert hammered flat by stars. / His breath, hot with experience, / scraped / but / / made me feel / vibrant.
This is the second story I’ve written in an attempt to process and understand my eating disorder. The first one, “Getaway,” was written soon after my diagnosis, and it’s pretty grim. It was important to me that “The Weight of It All” end on more of a hopeful note. In that sense, writing this story was very cathartic. It enabled me to look back on the person I was not so long ago, and realize how far I’ve come. It also made me think about what gives me a sense of hope—what makes me see a brighter future for myself.
Elizabeth is the first person to notice I’m inside her. “Tell me how to do it,” she whispers. It’s a shock. No one has spoken to me directly in ages. I’m nothing more than a whisper when I slip beneath her skin. I’m less than a breath. I should be undetectable, but somehow, I’m not. It might have been a relief—to be acknowledged, to be known—except that Elizabeth clings to me with her bony fingers and won’t let me go. I struggle to escape her, but no matter how hard I push, she’s got me trapped inside her body.
Whenever a mother does not have a child / but needs a child, she goes to the hole / and there is always a baby / waiting for her.
In this issue’s short fiction, K.S. Walker takes us on a gorgeous, transformative journey in “How to Join a Colony of Sea-Folk; or, Other Ways of Knowing” and Jennifer Hudak’s “The Weight of it All” explores the substantial through the insubstantial; in flash fiction, Samantha Murray challenges traditional ideas of hauntings in “This Blue World” while Jen Brown’s “The Probability of One” teaches us to speak the language of particles; for poetry, we have “I Kissed a Dragon” by Sharang Biswas and “The Hole is the Beginning” by Angel Leal. Plus part two of our collective interview with Top Ten Finalists from the Locus Awards Best Fantasy Novel category, this round featuring (alphabetically): RykaAoki, FondaLee, NaomiNovik, and C.L.Polk. Enjoy!
Chained doulas pull a child from the womb in low-gravity orbit; a babe of the Many Mouthed Empire, unencumbered by duty. Defiant, I face the birthing altar—jaw, clamped; gaze, glassy. (I mustn’t. Look.) I dreamt of children, once. Now it’s as if Mama Caarine gazes through the newborn’s eyes; as though my brother, Zjor-Anu, thumbed […]
In the September issue of Fantasy Magazine . . .
Flash fiction by Jen Brown (“The Probability of One”) and Samantha Murray (“This Blue World”); short stories by Jennifer Hudak (“The Weight of It All”) and K.S. Walker (“How to Join a Colony of Sea-Folk, or, Other Ways of Knowing”); poetry by Sharang Biswas (“I Kissed a Dragon”) and Angel Leal (“The Hole is the Beginning”); and Part 2 of our interview with the Locus Awards top ten finalists.
This story is “hidden lore” inside the aforementioned novel’s text—the society of algorithms hides its historical connections to Judaism, in much the same way that Christian society obfuscates and oppresses Jewish narratives. So this is a Jewish story, but at the same time, the algorithms have retold it in a way that makes sense to them.
We invited the authors of the top ten Best Fantasy Novels (according to the Locus poll) to participate in a brief collective interview, to discuss their work, their careers, and other things. We asked them all the same ten questions, with the request that they respond to at least seven of them, and let them pick whichever questions they want to answer. We are breaking the interview into two parts, across two issues, for space. We hope you find their responses as interesting as we did!
Once upon a time, in the dark ages before the singularity, there was a fox who, while walking its way along a riverbank, saw a great big bevy of catfish fleeing in a panic this way and that. Curious, the fox called out to the fishes, saying, “Good fishes of the stream, I see you fleeing in a panic this way and that. I do not wish to interrupt your suffering, but I am curious and as a fox I must follow my curiosity: Surely, there must be some great evil from which you are fleeing?”
Kelsey Hutton is a Métis author from Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation (Winnipeg, Canada). She loves to write across genres, but her favourites are historical fantasy and space opera. Kelsey was born in an even snowier city than she lives in now (“up north,” as they say in Winnipeg). She […]
Avi Burton (he/they) currently moonlights as a writer and daylights as a university student. He enjoys studying theater and mythology. His stories often feature queer characters, revenants, and—on occasion—laser swords. You can find more of their stories in Escape Pod, PodCastle, and Apparition Lit, or find the author themself on their website (aviburton.com) or on […]
The label said, Grow your own girlfriend! Cultivate the perfect partner! Just add water! Sam pulled the packet off the shelf.
Misha Handman has been involved in writing for most of his life. He started by writing comics for his friends in elementary school and was promptly drawn into the artistic world by their approval, moving on to produce short stories and collaborative works. He has lived in cities across Canada, including Victoria, Ottawa, and Toronto, and […]
Samantha Murray is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories. Her fiction has been seen in places such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Escape Pod, among others, and has been collected in The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year. Samantha is […]
I wanted to look at the harmful messages that women pass to each other, especially within families’ internalised misogyny that teaches daughters to be ashamed, be quiet, not be like those other women. These are messages that exist despite parents wanting what’s best for their children. I wanted to examine this without pointing the finger at a “bad guy” because family relationships are much more nuanced than that.
The moon is a god / It is best to thank him. / The night is the time of spirits; of the dead / It is best to stay inside
Ninth - It is a few days before your suspicions are confirmed. Perhaps it is the baggy trousers your daughter has started to wear, or that she picks at her food. She will lie if you ask her outright, this you know. You throw her bedroom door open without warning, the damp towel clutched around her chest after the shower the only barrier between you. Her mouth hangs open, shrieking like brakes in protest.
In this issue’s short fiction, Eliza Chan explores gender and power across generations in “The Tails That Make You,” and P H Lee’s “A True and Certain Proof of the Messianic Age, with two lemmas” brings us folklore through an algorithmic lens; for flash fiction, Mary Soon Lee explores classic fairy tales through a different lens in “Introduction to Couture 101,” and M. H. Ayinde grows something new in “Girlfriend Material”; for poetry, we have “The God’s Wife” by Nana Afadua Ofori-Atta and “The Himba Destroyer” by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu. Plus! A collective interview (part one of two) with several of the Top Ten Finalists for this year’s Locus Awards, from the Best Fantasy Novel category! Enjoy!
Before we delve into the difficulties of designing doublets for dragons or flame-resistant undergarments for would-be dragonslayers, let us consider six instructive examples. Firstly, Cinderella. Set aside the matter of her ballgown. Any fairy godmother can conjure a fabulous confection of chiffon or taffeta. Focus instead on the shoes.
Angel Leal is a Latinx genderqueer poet from Texas. Their previous work is out or forthcoming in Strange Horizons and Kaleidotrope. They’re most inspired by the works of Megan Milks and Kai Cheng Thom, insects found in their backyard, and local folklore and legends.
Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí writes from Nigeria. His work has recently appeared/ is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Mooncalves: An Anthology of Weird Fiction, and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, A Pocket of Genesis (Variant Literature), appears in 2023. He is working toward a B.A. in History and International Studies at Lagos State University.
Erich Krauss is uniquely qualified to write this story of the world’s worst natural disaster. He has a degree in geomorphology with a specialization in natural disasters and is the author of Wall of Flame, a nonfiction account of the 2003 California wildfires. He resides in Thailand and San Diego, California.
Stephen M.A. is a gay he/him first generation tribal descendant originating on a federal reservation in big sky country. He now lives and writes in the Northeastern United States. His prior works, including the satirical space opera Tiny Planet Filled With Liars, can be discovered at smapublishing.com.
K.S. Walker writes speculative fiction. You can often find them outside with their family or inside starting a craft project they may or may not finish. K.S. Walker has been published or is forthcoming at FIYAH, Uncanny, The Deadlands, Translunar Traveler’s Lounge, and various anthologies. You can find them online at kswalker.net or on Twitter […]
Jen Brown (she/her) weaves otherworldly tales about Black, queer folks righteously wielding power. An Ignyte Award-nominated author, her short stories have appeared in FIYAH Literary Magazine, Tor.com’s Breathe FIYAH anthology, Anathema: Spec From the Margins, Baffling Magazine, and other places. Find more of her stories at jencbrown.com, or follow her tweets about cats, media, and […]
Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black writer of speculative fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and games. She serves as a senior fiction editor at Strange Horizons and has guest-edited issues of Fireside Fiction and Apparition Literary Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone Magazine, FIYAH, and […]
Abu Bakr Sadiq is a Nigerian poet. An Ignyte Award finalist, his work is nominated for the Rhysling Award and is published or forthcoming in MIZNA, Uncanny Magazine, Augur Magazine, FIYAH Literary Magazine, Zone 3 Press Magazine, Palette Poetry, The Lit Quarterly, Rockvale Review, and elsewhere. He writes from Minna. Find him on Twitter @bakronline.
Jennifer Hudak is a speculative fiction writer fueled mostly by tea. Her work has appeared on both the Locus Magazine and the SFWA recommended reading lists, and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Originally from Boston, she now lives with her family in Upstate New York where she teaches yoga, knits pocket-sized animals, […]
Music is a huge staple of my personal identity, so I think it always reflects one way or another in my work. However, for this in particular, I wanted to show every memory of the past associated with a song, the reigning anthem at that point in the protagonist’s life, as the memories themselves are often painful, and music for me has always been a useful suppressant, redirecting my mind from bitter introspection.
RF Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, Chinese-English translator, and the Astounding Award-winning and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and the forthcoming Babel. Her work has won the Crawford Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies […]
The year was 1999. Tupac’s Brenda’s Got a Baby was the anthem in Old Creek ghetto. Yes, I wasn’t born. But the first time, in a beat-up, metal-scrunched blue taxi, on her way back home, when the song came on, Mother felt my first kick coincide with the blistering bass beat. It’s a wonder how I knew that feet were made for dancing.
It begins with an explosion: his mother. He isn’t born yet, but he’ll be made from the bits and pieces she leaves behind. Star-stuff. She’s also left some heavier elements, extra dusts and gasses he’ll have to figure out what to do with later.
It’s always intrigued me that insects—creatures we rarely think about except when we are hellbent on exterminating them—are the repository of so much folk belief. They’re divine messengers, symbols of soul or scourge, portends of death and new beginnings. It’s no coincidence that, in our day and age, immigrants are represented by the monarch butterfly, which flies as far as 3,000 miles across the continental Americas to reach home.
Confused, are you / the inkling shoestring type / who always gets away / You must remind me: / who am I to you if / you do not bite?
We hunt for the structure of the universe in its ghosts. - Dr. Michelle Francl / In the beginning / In the beginning was the trigger warning: / Prepare for insects. Prepare for words in Latin and Spanish. Prepare for science and other species of the supernatural. Prepare for losses that rewire the chemistry of the brain. Prepare for aging and the way it flays you back to the first cell. Prepare for ghosts.
In the July issue of Fantasy Magazine . . . Short fiction by Boloere Seibidor ("Odd Peas in a Pod) and Sabrina Vourvoulias ("The Memory of Chemistry"); flash fiction by Lindsey Godfrey Eccles ("A Star is Born") and Michelle Muenzler ("The Life and Death of Atomic Tangerine"); poetry by Shilpa Kamat ("Goldilocks") and AJ Wentz ("Self-Inflicted Haunt"); and an interview with author RF Kuang.
Atomic Tangerine skates like a dream / nobody beats Atomic Tangerine. —Federova, Anya. Preserved Graffiti of the Water Riots. 2055, mixed media. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In the July issue of Fantasy Magazine . . .
Short fiction by Boloere Seibidor ("Odd Peas in a Pod) and Sabrina Vourvoulias ("The Memory of Chemistry"); flash fiction by Lindsey Godfrey Eccles ("A Star is Born") and Michelle Muenzler ("The Life and Death of Atomic Tangerine"); poetry by Shilpa Kamat ("Goldilocks") and AJ Wentz ("Self-Inflicted Haunt"); and an interview with author RF Kuang.
As writers, we’re commonly asked which authors have influenced our work. As a follow-up question, we may be prompted to discuss movies, TV series, media properties, etc. that have been impactful in shaping our writing. These are valid questions that shed light on our creative impetus, style, and tastes. That said, such questions often give me pause. In responding, I must make the decision to provide what I perceive as the expected answer, or challenge the assumption that the major influence on my writing has been my consumption of narratives in a physical or visually recorded form.
First, the emotional core of the story was inspired by a conversation I had with my younger brother. He asked me, “If we were in an anime showdown, and we had to fight each other to the death, who would win?” and I knew my answer immediately. I said, “You would win. I wouldn’t fight—I’d let you best me. I wouldn’t want to go on after besting you.” That conversation stuck with me, and I had that scenario in mind as the story’s climax since the very beginning.
There are always three: the father, the unfather, and the child. That’s why Vriskiaab threw my unfather off his back after she bore my baby sister, or so Vriskiaab tells me when he stops in the shade of a dune, his massive scales warm under my calves and the tail of him stretching behind me for leagues. My baby sister is soft and crimson-tacky in the crook of my arm.
When I was small, my mother told us a story about a talking fish who granted wishes. I got the family sow, who doesn’t. “Something’s wrong with Little Sister,” I whispered to the sow. Her ears perked. “Tell me.”
P H Lee lives on top of an old walnut tree, past a thicket of roses, down a dead end street at the edge of town. Their work has appeared in many venues including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine. From time to time, they microwave and eat a frozen burrito at two in the morning, […]
When I use storytelling, I don’t want to shy away from the harshness. To some extent, it is an unfortunate inheritance I have to deal with. The person I am, I will have to bring to life stories containing pain. At the same time I also want to explore the logical end of a world that has grown tired of cruelty and builds itself anew in unexpected, interesting ways, with more imaginative and hopeful hearts.
My mother tells me all the wrong stories. In our hut beneath the cypress trees, my mother opens up at story time. She steps away from her apron and her broom, her heaps of marjoram and pennyroyal, her pestle and her mortar, and her ingredients for medicinal soups. She throws off her scarf, and oils our hair with fragrant sedr oil. We keep company with her stories as the wolves outside howl their song to the moon. Just as their ancestors have and as their descendants always will.
the day i realized you weren’t just for me anymore / but you were now for someone else too / i found dry sweat in every sheet and skin crease
In this issue’s short fiction, Fatima Taqvi gives us happy endings where none are expected in “Baba Nowruz Gives His Wife a Flower Only Once a Year,” and Sara S. Messenger’s “Potemora in the Triad” is an earth-shaking kind of coming-of-age story; in flash fiction, Victor Forna explores cosmic consequences in “rat/god,” and revenge could be quite tasty in “The Magical Sow” by Wen Wen Yang; for poetry, we have “Georgia Clay Blood” by Beatrice Winifred Iker and “noonday reflections” by Doriana Diaz. Plus we have essay “Oral Storytelling and Culture as Personal Canon” by 2022 Nebula finalist Suzan Palumbo. Enjoy!
The rat was a god, but you had no idea. You found it snapped in half on the trap you set, dead.
M. H. Ayinde was born in London’s East End near the bells of Shoreditch. She is a runner, a chai lover, and a screen time enthusiast. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, FIYAH Literary Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and elsewhere, and she was the 2021 […]
Eliza Chan is a Scottish-born fantasy author who writes about East Asian mythology, British folklore, and madwomen in the attic, but preferably all three at once. She likes to collect folk tales and modernise them with a drizzle of sesame oil, a pinch of pepper, and a kilo of weird. Her short fiction has been […]
A Houston-raised lover of enchiladas, Lindsey Godfrey Eccles lives and works in Seattle, spending as much time as she can in the mountains and occasionally practicing law. Her fiction has appeared in Hobart and The Writing Disorder, and is forthcoming in Orpheus + Eurydice Unbound from Air and Nothingness Press. You can find her at […]
Mary Soon Lee was born and raised in London, but has lived in Pittsburgh for over twenty years. Her latest books are from opposite ends of the poetry spectrum: Elemental Haiku, containing haiku for the periodic table, and The Sign of the Dragon, an epic fantasy with Chinese elements, winner of the 2021 Elgin Award. […]
Nana Afadua Ofori-Atta is a writer and poet based in Ghana. She is an avid tennis fan. Her work has appeared in AFREADA and in the Kalahari Review.
Michelle Muenzler is an author of the weird and sometimes poet who writes things both dark and strange to counterbalance the sweetness of her baking. Her short fiction and poetry can be read in numerous magazines. Check out michellemuenzler.com for links to the rest of her work (and her convention cookie recipes!).
AJ Wentz writes speculative poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in Eye to the Telescope, Riddled with Arrows, Fireflies’ Light, and elsewhere. When not daydreaming about other worlds, AJ is an attorney who works to make this one more just. She lives in Arkansas with her husband, cat, and too many copies of Pride […]
In this issue’s short fiction, Fatima Taqvi gives us happy endings where none are expected in “Baba Nowruz Gives His Wife a Flower Only Once a Year,” and Sara S. Messenger’s “Potemora in the Triad” is an earth-shaking kind of coming-of-age story; in flash fiction, Victor Forna explores cosmic consequences in “rat/god”, and revenge could be quite tasty in “The Magical Sow” by Wen Wen Yang; for poetry, we have “Georgia Clay Blood” by Beatrice Winifred Iker and “noonday reflections” by Doriana Diaz. Plus we have essay “Oral Storytelling and Culture as Personal Canon” by 2022 Nebula finalist Suzan Palumbo. Enjoy!
Literary gangster/seasonal romanticist. Boloere Seibidor—B.S—is an African writer, her work featured in The Temz Review, Nat. Brut, Feral Journal, Neologism, and others. She is largely inspired by music and art and all things beautiful, unnamed. Say hi on Twitter @BoloereSeibidor, where she fondly calls herself a black swan.
Trouble the Waters is an anthology that gathers the tidal force of bestselling, renowned writers from Lagos to New Orleans, Memphis to Copenhagen, Northern Ireland and London, offering extraordinary speculative fiction tales of ancient waters in all its myriad forms. The editors spoke with Fantasy Magazine about the project and their relationships with Black speculative fiction.
I had the scene of a mother and a mermaid daughter pop into my brain a while ago. I set it aside for a few years, but when I started talking with my friends who were becoming new moms and hearing what the adjustment was like for them, the scene started bubbling up again. But it wasn’t until I took a writing class with Ploi Pirapokin, who encouraged us to follow your first idea, that I finally buckled up and banged out a working draft. By then, I think my brain had enough time to stew about postpartum mental health, how shame operates in East Asian communities, and how community support can be healing.
“Tell me again about the night I was born.” Li Shing drags the comb through her daughter’s oil black hair. Impermeable, like a starless sky reflected against a dense sea. Or a fish’s opaque cloudy eye as it gasps at the bottom of a boat. Li Shing’s fist accidentally brushes the creature’s clammy gray neck, and she tries not to shudder.
Dear Jojober, I hope this finds you well, old friend. I write to you from the deserts of Akosa, from a place so dry and far inland that the natives simply laugh at my tales of the sea. They call them eb’yore. Mirage-stories. I am the silly man who speaks in riddles, whose memories are dreams. Ha! If they only knew how true my stories are. If they only knew what kind of man I used to be.
Methuselah star (HD 140283) is a yellow subgiant located in the constellation Libra. It is one of the oldest stars known. With an estimated age of 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years, the star appears older than the universe itself.
Sabrina Vourvoulias is an award-winning Latina news editor, writer, and digital storyteller whose work has appeared in The Guardian US, PRI’s The World, Inquirer.com, NBC Philadelphia, Philadelphia Magazine, and other English- and Spanish-language publications. An American citizen from birth, she grew up in Guatemala during the armed internal conflict and moved to the United States […]
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano (storyteller). Her debut short story collection, Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky, Spring 2023), was selected for the 2021 UPK New Poetry & Prose Series. Her novel manuscript in progress was selected by George RR Martin’s team for the Worldbuilder Scholarship to attend Clarion West in […]
The hardest thing for me to nail was what the story was about—not the chronological events, but the deeper themes. The link between transition and death came late in the process, because it felt too raw to look at head-on in those early drafts. It was the kind of big truth that I couldn’t process until I was happier with who I am, and much less worried about outside opinions on who I’m becoming.
When you were a centipede, I was a millipede. / Our difference was but time, distance, length and speed. / You measured in centimeters while I did mine in millimeters;
The clatter of rain against the window draws Lesley close. “Hey,” she hisses from across the kitchen. She calls me by my old name and I don’t even flinch. It’s morning, and I’m trying to get breakfast done before Mom comes down, because a perfectly fried egg makes her more likely to say yes to what I’m about to ask. The light was coming through the windows over the sink all yellow and golden, but the storm blew in fast, and now there’s electricity prickling in the air and everything smells damp. I left the window open, hoping she’d show, despite the water pushing through the screen into Mom’s flowerboxes above the sink.
Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Suzan Palumbo is a Nebula finalist, active member of the HWA, Co-Administrator of the Ignyte Awards and a member of the Hugo nominated FIYAHCON team. She is also a former Associate Editor of Shimmer magazine. Her work has been published in Neon Hemlock’s Unfettered Hexes, The Deadlands, The Dark Magazine, […]
In this issue’s short fiction, Dominique Dickey explores the many pasts we cling to in “Drowned Best Friend”, and K. J. Chien’s “One Day the Cave Will Be Empty” takes a different kind of look at parenthood; in flash fiction, Katherine Ley provides some very important safety tips in “How to Make Love to a Ciguapa”, and contemplation changes everything in “Mirage-Stories” by Ernesto Fuentes; for poetry, we have “Evolve” by Soonest Nathaniel and “Methuselah Performs a Magic Trick” by Alyza Taguilaso. Plus there’s an interview with co-editors of anthology Trouble the Waters, Sheree Renée Thomas, Troy L. Wiggins & Pan Morigan. Enjoy!
- Wake at dawn. 2. La ciguapa finds you, but you must first pay her homage. Lore dictates she is tucked in the lush mountains of the Dominican Republic. Try the countryside of Constanza, away from the business of the valley below. Follow the crushed line of cliffs set against the horizon.
In this issue’s short fiction, Dominique Dickey explores the many pasts we cling to in “Drowned Best Friend,” and K. J. Chien’s “One Day the Cave Will Be Empty” takes a different kind of look at parenthood; in flash fiction, Katherine Ley provides some very important safety tips in “How to Make Love to a Ciguapa,” and contemplation changes everything in “Mirage-Stories” by Ernesto Fuentes; for poetry, we have “Evolve” by Soonest Nathaniel and “Methuselah Performs a Magic Trick” by Alyza Taguilaso. Plus there’s an interview with co-editors of anthology Trouble the Waters, Sheree Renée Thomas, Troy L. Wiggins & Pan Morigan. Enjoy!
(Note: this essay contains major spoilers for The Wicked + The Divine.) I am a first-generation Indian-American. I did well in school. I am a “model citizen,” not even a current speeding ticket on my record. In The Wicked + The Divine (WicDiv) by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, every 90 years, twelve young adults are told they’re gods from various pantheons. They will be loved. They will be hated. They will be brilliant.
In the beginning, June and Nat are best friends. June is not yet a swarm of honeybees and Nat is not yet a cloud of horseflies, and the king hasn’t yet decided that separating them into parts like this—June’s left pinky finger one bee, her left ring finger another—is the only surefire way to strip them of what they really are. Which, at least in the beginning, is best friends, living together on the outskirts of town, sharing a dresser full of secondhand band tees, squeezing lemon juice onto one another’s hair in the summer, then sitting together on the blacktop to wait.
Trent Jamieson is the award-winning author of Day Boy, The Stone Road, the Death Works series, The Nightbound Land duology, and The Giant and the Sea.
Sara S. Messenger is a speculative fiction writer and poet residing in Florida. When she’s not playing fetch with her cat, she reads poetry collections in the sun. Her short fiction has appeared in Diabolical Plots, and her poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons. If you enjoyed this work, her full portfolio and other musings […]
I think a lot about fairy tales: who gets to live inside them and who can only wish to; how they help us to survive, and when they no longer serve us, what parts of them we can leave behind. With this story in particular, I wondered whether a prolonging of a character’s beginning could act as a refusal of their ending, and whether refusing their ending could be a way to save them.
you don't paint but still find / yourself with loaded brush, / limning a creek from memory, / a place you played as a child, / a weeping tree
We were at the mouth of the cave, peering into the darkness that glimmered faintly with the gold of the dragon’s hoard, when my phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my leather satchel just far enough to see that it was, in fact, the daycare. My heart sank.
Doriana Diaz is a storyteller, shapeshifter, and sensitive spirit rooted in Philadelphia’s soulful rhythms. Doriana is the self-published author of Mami Calls Me Gabriella and Sunphases, both released in 2018. Her words have appeared in platforms such as Nappy Head Club, Black Women Radicals, GROW/N Mag, Saddie Baddies, SYLA Studio, Black Girl Magik, We Heal […]
I’m part of a writing group with two friends from college, and sometime last year we chose the prompt “Illusion.” I started thinking about my time at Yale, and how we all presented these glowing, successful versions of ourselves when we first got to campus, not deliberate illusions, but subconscious ones. With that mental image in my head, I sat down and wrote the first few paragraphs of “How to Make a Man Love You,” and the rest of the story grew from there.
Handsome Monkey King, Great Sage / Equal to Heaven, we appeal / with dusty knees and shoulders / aching to match our hearts.
Zayyan meets Cecilia on the first day of freshman year. He does not believe in love at first sight, but he does believe in the scientific method, and what is this moment if not empirical evidence of the former? She is like no one he has met before. Black hair pulled into a messy bun, bare arms laden with books, brown eyes ardent as a summer storm.
In this issue’s short fiction, Hannah Yang takes a different kind of look at the magic of love in “How To Make A Man Love You,” and in Kristina Ten’s “Beginnings” we get a new twist on “once upon a time;” in flash fiction, Martins Deep plays with format, imagery, and emotion with “Isio,” and fantasy meets reality in “Practical Childcare Considerations for Knights Errant” by Rachel Locascio; for poetry, we have “Great Sage, Protector of Horses” by May Chong and “Alice Is Much Farther Than She Appears” by Laura Ruby. Plus essay “Stereotypes, Godhood, and The Wicked + The Divine” by Priya Chand. Enjoy!
it is a windless evening in april/ & night drinks my exhalations /in my palms are corpses of fireflies as i sprawl/ here, my aching back reclined /on the breast/ of a half-timbered wall/ above me, the glorious reincarnations of fireflies /mostly with autopsy reports/ “a child’s curiosity” / to steal into a child’s body/ is to be granted magic/ to breathe in wonder/ it is to want eyes /that mirror gods too perfectly, they flutter by, in bodies of/ butterflies calling you by your poison /beyond the cliff
In the April issue of Fantasy Magazine...
Short stories by Hannah Yang ("How to Make a Man Love You") and Kristina Ten ("Beginnings"); flash fiction by Martins Deep ("Isio") and Rachel Matuch ("Practical Childcare Considerations for Knights Errant"); poetry by May Chong ("Great Sage, Protector of Horses") and Laura Ruby ("Alice is Much Farther Than She Appears"); and an essay by Priya Chand.
Shilpa Kamat has an MFA in Creative Writing and has been published by a range of magazines, including Strange Horizons, Kweli, On Spec, sPARKLE & bLINK, Colossus anthologies, Jaggery, and SAND (forthcoming). Her chapbook, Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet, was a finalist for the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound. You can […]
K(atherine) Garcia Ley is a Dominican, speculative fiction author who lives and writes in the Washington, D.C. area. Rewatching Star Wars, chasing her three kids, and cooking vegan meals, are a few of her favorite things. Her short fiction has appeared in Voyage YA, Mermaids Monthly, Daily Science Fiction, and more. Connect with her at […]
Maladies we used to blame on spirits or an imbalance of humors are now known to be due to germs, or genetic factors, or organ dysfunction. Mental illnesses and drastic personality changes that used to be called possession are now discussed in terms of functional brain connectivity. But there are cultures that still believe in those older, less scientific explanations, and what if they’re not wrong?
Creativity is fragile. You can’t let many voices in because there’s always plenty of people who want to tear you down, not realizing your harshest critic is yourself. Or at least it is for me. So while I do sometimes read early reviews, I tend not to read anything about my work after it’s been released. It’s already gone through editors and a critique group and many, many drafts. And no work will ever be perfect or please everyone. It can only capture a moment in time for the author – who they were and what concerned then when they wrote it – and then we move on to what’s next.
I am not an illness. I’m a soul with a goal. Everyone on this floor is here for intrusive thoughts, ideations, risk of harm to themselves or others. What society used to call possession, they now call neurotransmitter imbalance or schizophrenia or obsessive compulsion.
Victor Forna is a Sierra Leonean writer based in his country’s capital, Freetown. He currently works as an environmentalist. His short fiction and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in homes such as Lolwe, Short Story Day Africa Anthology: Disruption, Brittle Paper, and elsewhere. He is an alumnus of the 2022 AKO Caine Prize […]
Beatrice grew up in the picturesque (and undoubtedly haunted) valley of the Great Smoky Mountains. As a child, she spent an incalculable time in her grandmother’s living room staring at the unending ridges and peaks; eventually, she decided to write about this bewitching place. A great passion of hers is genealogy and ancestry. As a […]
Alyza Taguilaso is a resident doctor training in General Surgery at Ospital ng Muntinlupa in the Philippines. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and published in several publications, including Strange Horizons, ANMLY, High Chair, Stone Telling, and Kritika Kultura. She is working on her forthcoming book, Juggernaut. You can find her […]
Soonest Nathaniel is a poet, broadcast journalist, and spoken word artist from Nigeria. His poetry collection, Teaching Father How to Impregnate Women, was selected as a winner of the RL Poetry Award. A Rhysling and Pushcart nominee, Soonest was named a 2021 Langston Hughes Fellow at the Palm Beach Festival and Poet Laureate for the […]
Ernesto is a science fiction and fantasy author based out of Seattle, WA. When he’s not writing or reading, he’s usually watching cooking videos, FaceTiming his mom, trying not to let his girlfriend cave to their dog’s every wish and desire, shooting down his friends’ horrible sports takes, dying a lot in FromSoftware games, or […]
Fatima Taqvi is a Pakistani author who enjoys folklore and strange stories, especially of all the places whose history has made her who she is today. She loves reading about parenting, adopting strays, not cleaning up what is going to be a mess again tomorrow, and having a partner who makes sure all her devices […]
K.J. Chien is a Taiwanese-American writer based in New York City. She originally hails from the Bay Area, and now lives with her elderly dog.
Wen Wen Yang is a first-generation Chinese American, raised in the Bronx, New York. She graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University with a degree in English, Creative Writing. You can find her fiction in The Arcanist, Factor Four Magazine, and more. She updates WenWenWrites.com and tweets @muteddragon.
Her grandchildren are little greygreen screefalls of tumbling action / tumbling up over her shoulders in the moonlight / just to fling themselves down her incline, down the long hill
Ynes doesn’t remember the marigold, but she has a recurring dream in which she accidentally swallows an entire tangerine. She grows very warm and realizes it was not a tangerine at all but a small sun. She knows if she tells her mother what she swallowed, there will be a panic. So instead, she keeps her mouth shut. The sun sits warm in her belly and shines tendrils of light down her arms and legs. When rays escape her fingertips, she puts on mittens.
I think in a world where death is just a state change, we would absolutely turn the dead into one of the cogs in the machinery of capitalism, a resource to be utilized by the living, and this story takes that idea to that logical conclusion. I was inspired by the classic idea of “necromancer resurrects skeletons/zombies to do their bidding”—great, now what if it’s just the whole guy you grab, and everything that the guy knows?
This is the dead thing becoming the body. This is the dead thing opening the body’s eyes. This is the dead thing rising from the grave. This is the dead thing saying “What the hell—I didn’t ask to be summoned. I was having a great time being dead and dreaming about nothing.”
Some days I wake too early / Eyes like hardboiled eggs / All of me borrowed / Blood beating in my ears / Limbs arranged in a / Semaphore of loneliness.
In this issue’s short fiction, Isabel J. Kim gives us a necromancer out for justice for her murdered brother in “Christopher Mills, Return to Sender,” and Gabrielle Harbowy takes us inside “The Dybbuk Ward”; in flash fiction, Marie H. Lewis re-examines Persephone's fate in “I Have Reached Into The Quantum Basket,” and Lisa M. Bradley’s “Collecting Ynes” is a mythologized account of Ynes Mexia, a Mexican-American woman who experienced mental illness, and who eventually became a world-renowned botanist – without a degree; for poetry, we have “Negative Detection” by Alex Jennings and “Stilling” by Cislyn Smith. Plus an interview with award-winning author of the Sixth World series, Race to the Sun, Black Sun and Fevered Star, and much more, Rebecca Roanhorse. Enjoy!
I HAVE REACHED INTO THE (Quantum) BASKET, SEEN THE THINGS SHOWN, HEARD THE THINGS SAID, KNOWN THE THINGS DONE. (Declaration of Initiates)
In the March issue of Fantasy Magazine . . .
Short stories by Isabel J. Kim (“Christopher Mills, Return to Sender”) and Gabrielle Harbowey (“The Dybbuk Ward”); flash fiction by Marie H. Lewis (“I Have Reached into the Basket”) and Lisa M. Bradley (“Collecting Ynes”); poetry by Alex Jennings (“Negative Detection”) and Cislyn Smith (“Stilling”); and Arley interviews author Rebecca Roanhorse.
Laura Ruby is primarily a novelist with eleven books published, including Bone Gap (HarperCollins, 2015) and Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All (HarperCollins, 2019), both National Book Award Finalists. Other works include the Edgar®-nominated children’s mystery Lily’s Ghosts, the ALA Quick Pick for teens Good Girls (2006), and the York trilogy. Her short fiction and […]
This issue, I thought I’d do something slightly different. I wanted to celebrate a few authors, and I also wanted to celebrate short fiction in general. Interviews are a great way for readers to gain insight into favorite works and authors. They are also a great way for writers to find perspectives on both the craft of writing and the publishing industry. So I asked a handful of notable short fiction writers if they’d like to do a group interview.
I want my readers, specifically Black women, to walk away from this story understanding that there are always choices in life. That they do not always have to choose what has been set out in front of them, that they can always say “No” and establish boundaries for themselves and it may be scary and it may be a big unknown, but it is their lives and no one has more right to their lives than they do.
Last week, in a tangerine raincoat that did not suit her pallid skin tone, Phylicia Wimby smiled through her lies. There is an 87% chance of rain for tomorrow. Due to the high probability of unpleasant weather for the entire week, we predict the Cousins won’t be arriving until next week at the earliest, once the rain dries up. Her and all the other meteorologists in shiny citrus-colored vulcanized rubber swore to us that Cousins Season wasn’t coming for a while, that in Virginia we had more than a week to prepare.
Rachel Locascio is a freelance writer and editor. She lives in Chicagoland with her husband and two kids, who both wish she would stop trying to add dramatic plot twists to their bedtime stories. She is a graduate of the Futurescapes Writers’ Workshop and tweets at @RachelLocascio1.
After Naxos, Ariadne moved to Nicosia and built a new labyrinth online. Here she sits and smiles and buries her bullish secrets: where to buy building permits and apply for trademarks and government grants and benefits. How to join the fire service. Authenticating seafarers. “That way leads to an external labyrinth,” she says pleasantly. “Oh dear, has the roof fallen in? I’ll send someone down to dig it out later.”
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.
How pleasant your steps / upon the mountains – / I prostrate myself / in front of you like Avraham / because there could be / no greeting more precise.
Darla Revere was born to live her whole life as part of a conversation, the outcome of which she would never know. She was raised to be certain of three things: 1. The leviathan will come for you. She will come suddenly and without warning. 2. You will feel great joy and pain at the moment she contacts you. Be prepared. You may only ask her one question. 3. If you change yourself too much—if you do not bear resemblance to your mother, your grandmother, the long line of women the leviathan has touched—she may not be able to find you when it is your time.
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!
A city stands on the horizon. It glitters against the hazy background of a desert, enticing you to come near, to relieve yourself from this afternoon heat and revel in the shade of its skyscrapers. You consider it. You’ve considered it for a good portion of your life.
In the February issue of Fantasy Magazine . . .
Short stories by Dominique Dickey ("Slow Communication") and S. Fambul ("Cousins Season"); flash fiction by Allahrakhi Memon ("The Unseen") and Julia August ("After Naxos, Ariadne"); and poetry by Bogi Takács ("The Prophet, To His Angel") and Mark Dimaisip ("Mister Potato Head").
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.
The coffin lies at the curb, tilted aslant on the strip of grass next to the sidewalk. Old Mr. Byerly spies it on an evening walk through his suburban neighborhood. It’s been put out alongside a pile of other discards—an old-fashioned lawn mower, a chrome-legged kitchen table, a bookcase with only one shelf. The stuff is from a house that’s under renovation after sitting vacant for many months.
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.
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?
Gabrielle Harbowy, a 15-year veteran of the publishing industry, is an award-nominated editor, author, and anthologist. She wrote the novels Aether’s Pawn (forthcoming), Pathfinder Tales: Gears of Faith, and Hearts Are Jerks. She is an active member of SFWA and the International Association of Media Tie In Writers, and has written game adventures for Pathfinder […]
Cislyn Smith likes playing pretend, playing games, and playing with words. She calls Madison, Wisconsin her home. She has been known to crochet tentacles, write stories at odd hours, and study stone dead languages. She is occasionally dismayed by the lack of secret passages in her house. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Strange […]
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.
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.
In the folds of banyan trees, between the treeish world and ours, are markets. Real markets, not the pale human sort that happen every week, as if things that are worth buying happen every week. A banyan market occurs one day a year, which is as often as trees are willing to entertain on such a lavish scale. And once a year is just barely enough time to make the stuff that trees dream of. - Revathi Kumar, ‘Markets: A Beginner’s Guide’
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
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.
“When in doubt—” I catch Thomas’s eyes and hold up a jar of sparkle lip gloss. “—add more glitter.” The mirror we face is cracked and wreathed in vanity lights that flicker in time with the strained chugging of the ancient generator outside. The smells of old perfume, road dust, and hush puppies fill the painted wooden wagon that serves triple duty as my transportation, home, and dressing room. I blame the generator for that last odour. We restocked on biodiesel at our last stop, and now everything smells like frying corn.
I was a river, once. Fish-filled, smooth-pebbled, with currents to snare the unwary and weeds that undulated like the hair of the drowned. Boats travelled me, while birds and small creatures lived and died on my banks. I was a world.
Dawn in graphics: / a brightly cropped cloud takes dew across the length of a waxed May, left undated / like a girl refusing to repeat her skin.
S. Fambul is a storyteller from Northern Virginia. Her stories explore community, power, and body magic. Her fiction can be found in Pen + Brush, No. 5. Water is her favorite drink.
Mark Dimaisip is a Filipino poet based in Manila. His poem “Underwater Tongue” placed in the EAL category of 2021 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. His works have appeared in The Brasilia Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Harana Poetry, Human Parts, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. He has spoken word tracks in Bigkas Pilipinas, and […]
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.
Rain soaks through my hair, stretching my coils to wavy locks streaming down my face. A cold gaze follows me through dark windows, reminding me of Lisa’s face. I complained about my parents, once.
That day, the saucers landed. / Hundreds of them, glittering, like stars broken free / Spiraling down, / Where we met them.
May Chong is a bi Chinese Malaysian poet, speculative writer, and multiple Rhysling nominee. Her verse has been published in Strange Horizons, Anathema Magazine, Apparition Literary, Bending Genres, and Eye to the Telescope. When she’s not coaxing words out of her keyboard, she enjoys birdwatching, video games, spoken word (on both sides of the mic), […]
Marie H. Lewis has lived in three Gulf Coast States and now resides in southeast Texas. She’s retired from teaching and now can just enjoy interacting with people of all ages including those in the Woodlands Writing Guild. Many subjects attract her from native plants, ancient beliefs, bird-watching, and planets showing through light pollution. In […]
A queer Latina living in Iowa, Lisa M. Bradley writes everything from haiku to novels, usually with a speculative slant. Her work has appeared in many venues, including LeVar Burton Reads, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her first collection is The Haunted Girl; her debut novel is Exile. Recently she coedited with R.B. […]
Alex Jennings’s poetry has appeared in The Hunger Journal, Native Skin Online, and EVENT Magazine. Born in Germany, he trotted the globe until settling in New Orleans. Before the Pandemic, he MCed a literary readings series called Dogfish. Alas. His debut novel, The Ballad of Perilous Graves (Orbit/Redhook) arrives this June, and it is available […]
Bogi Takács (e/em/eir/emself or they pronouns) is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person and an immigrant to the US. E is a winner of the Lambda Award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, and a finalist for other awards. Eir debut poetry collection, Algorithmic […]
Martins Deep (he/him) is an Urhobo poet living in Kaduna, Nigeria. He is a photographer, digital artist, and currently a student of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. His most recent works have appeared, or are forthcoming, in FIYAH, Lolwe, 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Aké Review, Native Skin, Chestnut Review, Brittle Paper, Barren Magazine, […]
Kristina Ten is a Russian-American writer with work in Lightspeed, PodCastle, Diabolical Plots, Flash Fiction Online, Weird Horror, and elsewhere. A graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop, she is a current MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also teaches creative writing. You can find her at kristinaten.com and on Twitter as […]
Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction writer who loves all things strange and surreal. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Analog Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, The Dark Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and other marvelous publications. She has a BA from Yale University and lives in Colorado. When she’s not busy writing, you can […]
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!
- Because he is an espectro that only appears to you in dreams. / 2. Porque lo echas de menos. / 3. Because you’re back in the place you first met, en la cabaña cerca de Bacalar.
Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of Riot Baby, a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Awards and winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction; the Beasts Made of Night series; and the War Girls series. He has earned degrees from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and Sciences […]
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 Suenas Con Tu 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 Meg Elison.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moses Ose Utomi is a Nigerian-American fantasy writer and nomad currently based out of Honolulu, Hawaii. He has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and short fiction publications in Fireside Fiction and Purple Wall Stories. His debut books, Daughters of Oduma (Atheneum Books) and The Lies of the Ajungo (Tor.com), will be coming […]
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.
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.