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!
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.
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
