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October 2022 (Issue 84)

Reclaiming a Traditional African Genre: The AfroSurrealism of Ngano

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.

Author Spotlight: Aigner Loren Wilson

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.

The Black and White

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.

Quantum Eurydice

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.

Author Spotlight: Kelsey Hutton

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.

Queen of the Wilis

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!

Editorial: October 2022

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!

Short Swims From Great Heights

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.