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!
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.
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.
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!
1. 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.
