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.
Beneath a gibbous moon / the werewolf howls and hunts / for her keys. Again.
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.
