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May 2021 (Issue 67)

In the May issue of Fantasy Magazine . . .

Original fiction by J.L. Jones (“The Sweetest Source”) and Anya Leigh Josephs (“By Our Own Hands”); flash fiction by Izzy Wasserstein (“Like Birdsong, the Memory of Your Touch”) and P.H. Low (“Disenchantment”); poetry by Louisa Muniz (“Self-Portrait as Wolf”) and Kim Whysall-Hammond (“Visitor”); and an interview with Tasha Suri.

Thanks for reading!

Author Spotlight: Anya Leigh Josephs

In one of the earliest golem stories, the Golem of Chelm is destroyed because its creator fears it will eventually consume the whole world. However, in Jewish stories, the creator of the golem isn’t an all-powerful figure who has succumbed to hubris, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, summoning magic he cannot control. He is a member of an oppressed community trying desperately to protect the people he cares about. I think the golem myth is one example of how we can reimagine our relationship to the things we create.

Interview: Tasha Suri

In The Jasmine Throne I wanted to explore shades of grey: ostensibly good people doing unjust things for their ideals; people choosing to become villains with their eyes open; the way power can unmake you and monster you. It’s also about unjust systems and cruel power hierarchies and—yes—love. But its characters don’t always choose the right path, and love doesn’t always have the power to save them.

By Our Own Hands

On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, David Lev descends into the library, flouting both Jewish law and university regulations. The building is closed, and he is supposed to be praying, or at least meditating thoughtfully on the wrongs he has committed over the past year, not committing new ones. This is an unfamiliar scale of sin for David, a rabbinical student whose usual Yom Kippur regrets are things like only skimmed a reading and said he’d read it or should call his mother more often. Breaking and entering, not to mention violating the most sacred day of the year, are new ones for him.

Visitor

Spinning languidly in a particle stream / forfeited to gravity and the final dead cold / lies a slender needle-ship / glinting against stygian space.

Disenchantment

A girl is born with a hole in her heart. Her parents cannot touch her for weeks; instead, they whisper in immigrant languages over the rune-inscribed plastic tube in which she sleeps: terrified, for the first time, of death. She is so tiny—fists small as a doll’s, fingers the clenched sepals of some infinitesimal flower—and as they watch the tufts of her hair, her mouth opened in a cry no one can hear, a love swells in them so fierce and pure it hardly fits their skin.

Author Spotlight: J. L. Jones

I wanted to do a story that had a joyful, positive spirit for once. Usually, I like to tell dark stories, so it was a nice change. The idea itself came from my attempt at finding “the source” of a powerful, positive feeling. I thought of and gathered things that have been good in my life, and my mother was top of the list.

The Sweetest Source

The sound they’ve all been waiting for finally comes at night. It’s a melting pot of noise ingredients: howls and claps, cries and stomps. Laughter and shrieks are sprinkled in like cayenne powder. It isn’t long before the sound crescendos, the pot overboiling with a furor that calls hearts and stomachs. Deron scrambles to the window, momentarily forgetting his tablet and the buggy application he’s been working on.

Editorial: May 2021

In the May issue of Fantasy Magazine . . .

Original fiction by J.L. Jones (“The Sweetest Source”) and Anya Leigh Josephs (“By Our Own Hands”); flash fiction by Izzy Wasserstein (“Like Birdsong, the Memory of Your Touch”) and P.H. Low (“Disenchantment”); poetry by Louisa Muniz (“Self-Portrait as Wolf”) and Kim Whysall-Hammond (“Visitor”); and an interview with Tasha Suri.

Thanks for reading!

Like Birdsong, the Memory of Your Touch

When I was a little girl, I’d experience premonitions, like the time I sensed that Mrs. Weatherby should stay home and not take her usual walk around the neighborhood, but of course she did anyway, because who listens to a six-year-old? and got caught in the grill of a self-driving car, which were everywhere in those days, like the kudzu climbing up every tree, swallowing abandoned houses like the old Ripken place, where I’d sit for hours, where there was no sound but birdsong (so much birdsong then, and I didn’t know to treasure it) and in that decaying house the vines were invading so fast I believed I could hear them grow, which was ridiculous, since back then nothing grew that fast.