The Icarus Writing Collective, Issue 01: The Sun

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All rights reserved to authors.

Published June, 2023. Digital & Print. www.icaruswritingcollective.com

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The Icarus Writing Collective Issue 01: The Sun

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For Icarus, and all who dare to fly too close.

May your wings carry you far.

We believe in you.

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Letters from the Editors Back in Summer 2020, I reached out to Liz and asked her if she wanted to start a type of “daily community writing challenge” with me to combat quarantine depression. That idea never saw the light of day. However, one college course and three years later, we now welcome the debut of The Icarus Writing Collective.

Often, we criticize those who fly too close to the sun, that their passion led to their downfall. Rather, we believe there’s something extraordinary about pushing limits. Create. Change.

Challenge. No one should clip your wings; don’t let anyone tell you your limits. These stories are our wings, not of wax, but of beauty.

Kyle Ross When Kyle reached out to me about starting a literary magazine, I had no idea what that would entail. All I knew was that I trusted––and still trust––Kyle more than anyone else when it came to creative endeavors. He has pushed me to be the best writer, editor, and all-around person that I could be and I am forever indebted to him for this.

The Icarus Writing Collective is for the overzealous, the over-passionate, the kids who were told they were “too much” and “too loud.” It’s for every marginalized person who has been told they should hide an aspect of themselves in order to assimilate to the world. We don’t believe anyone should have to minimize any part of themselves, and we hope these stories reflect that.

Elizabeth Zarb

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Table of Contents The Day Without Eros in All the World Ellen Huang

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The Leap Shelly Jones

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Pegasus Danai Christopoulou

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“Omen” Erin Bryant Petty

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Old Man Wizard Craig Hinds

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Dawn’s Man Claire McNerney

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All That Was Golden Orion O'Connell

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“xix. the sun” S.M. Hallow

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Blood of My Blood, Dreams of My Dreams, Heart of My Heart Molly Likovich

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Monsters in a Maze Heather Meatherall

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The Sweet Loathsome Honey of Love Kath Giblin

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“Knowledge” Erin Bryant Petty

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Poison Cup C.M. Green

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I Heard They’re Beautiful This Time Of Year P. Henry

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Narcissus’ Self-Love Workshop Beatriz Seelander

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“Citrus” L.M. Cole

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Orpheus at a Funeral Cyrus Quan

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Thistle, Utah Devon Bohm

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“Ritual” Erin Bryant Petty

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Parasite/Psyche Robin Kinzer

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To Fill Homes Thirsty Cracks Madalena Daleziou

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“On Fire” Sadee Bee

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One for the Road Deborah Zafer

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Tavvauvusi: The Shaman’s Vision Shelly Jones

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My Formaldehyde Darling; or, A Redress for the Female Creature 124 S.M. Hallow “Hades and Persephone” Masie Inman

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Entombment to the Myth Haley Wartalski

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The Strings That Bind Us M.K. Hale

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The Day Without Eros in All the World Ellen Huang The day without eros in all the world, they told us, the world would stop. And yet, we found the hour hands still moved and the minute hands ticked the same incremental pace. The sun meandered across the sky still, a fiery chariot, the clouds still fluffed and rolled away, soft as seafoam. The shadows still rung around the rosies and grabbed poles to swing around in graceful choreography.

The day without eros, they said, the flowers would cease to smell sweet, and full-on houses would collapse apart, because eros delivered the foundation. Kids’ molecules would spread apart until they disintegrated into nonexistence, eggs all around the world would die.

Somewhere, a caterpillar would cough up its shell and crawl back into it, discarding a greater destiny of becoming something more. Somewhere, a chocolate company specializing in valentines would go bankrupt, 90% of the songs on the radio would translate to a screeching pitch we couldn’t hear before, and all beauty would be watched through a terrible blinding filter that made everyone turn to cabbages.

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But the day without eros was not like that.

We woke, and it was strange; love seemed to still be there, but in a different font or frequency. It was as if jazz covers were playing in the night before smoothly transitioned over to lofi covers of nostalgic songs, soothing the world into living. We looked to one another and felt the relief of familiarity, and that was enough. We felt so coolly fulfilled. It was the colors indigo and blue glowing that day. The sky’s brightest baby blue at midmorning never felt so new.

We put the kettle on the stove. We cracked the eggs sizzling into the pan. We made pancakes. All the usual sweets throughout the day were easy to forget somehow (though now it’s obvious looking back). Sparks—the usual choreography to caress and kiss and hold and keep— dissipated that day like a dream. No one got lost in each other’s eyes, no one watched the shape of each other’s lips, no one was distracted by swishes of beauty. Every conversation, strangely, we could remember, full attention, fully shared enthusiasm for every subject. And we laughed, fully invested, even teasing one another like close friends in a car, both facing forward towards the sun.

We felt like children that day, somehow, and any memory we had of us married dissolved into the air as if it were all a game.

No one cheated, either, on the day without eros, because everyone was too busy looking at kites or puppies or little wonders by a

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babbling brook, or abstract paintings where the golden hour hit just right, or that glorious last blue sky.

Everyone with so much love inside felt the urge to call their gangs of old—you know the ones. The squad that ditched class and got detention together. The cast of that play was running on production in-jokes and philosophical discussions, over milkshakes at Denny’s at 3am before opening night.

The tight-knit, late-night slumber party of misfit girls who brushed, braided, dyed, and cut their hair, lip-synced to rock music, giggled over gross secrets they thought no one else had, chilled each other over ghost stories, and got no sleep because they were up too late geeking out about amphibians and reptiles, weird wonders of the universe, while doing their nails and helping a curious little brother join in and pick colors for his.

The dog pile of guys who always got together for that Jackbox game with serial killer trivia (that this girl they all knew introduced them to), who started rowdily daring whether they could balance trays on their faces, or seeing who could stack the highest chairs, or go the furthest down an abandoned local tunnel, or make the funniest Edna Mode impressions, or make the best gingerbread houses out of milk cartons that had been piling up like another Jenga game in that teeny recycle bin.

The pranksters. The punk bands. The D&D nerds. The teams. The church youth group that asked tough questions together and got in trouble. The co-ed band of misfits who were

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always teased they’d end up dating (and yet only two of them ever did, once, and not the two anyone was expecting), ordering large pizzas, playing board games, running with their shopping carts down general store aisles as they gathered up a wild cart of ice cream and ingredients for an experimental smoothie concoction. It would be a disaster, but oh a wonderful memory with in-jokes long to come. Knowing how young they sounded, but without a care in the world. They were young and happy.

And new co-ed, gender-freed bands of misfits. The black sheep queer cousins who had confessed to one another quietly on the floor or couch or bed what their families had said—and found refuge coming out to each other. They now met up again, some of them immediately family, neighbors, homesteads, adopted or adopting. Even the introvert king having the time of his life traveling like a wizard and then hosting everyone in his castle. All of them feasting, all of them blissfully sharing how far they’ve come, how all is found.

Our children did not die, on the day without eros, nor have their molecules spread apart, but rather saw how we modeled friendships and did likewise. For that magical day, they were all playing outside together in Neverland, Heaven, harmony, what have you, and their laughter and ours felt one and the same.

“Why haven’t we talked sooner, all this time?” some of us asked, over games and coffees and shakes and breakfast for dinner.

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“Milestones happened,” some of us replied, shuffling the cards, rolling the dice, refilling the drinks. “It just never seemed like there was enough time.”

The day after, starting at different times in different places, the passions returned, the kisses, the mating dances of the funky birds, the creakings on the other side of the wall enough to make your eyes roll out of your head. Sunsets warmed, flower arrangements were curated, and people some time or other felt flowers bloom inside themselves, between each other.

The day after, the world kept turning like normal, as if the day without eros was all a surreal shared dream. But love increased in everything, for what was planted the day before. ☼☀☼ Ellen Huang (she/her) is an aroace folklore enthusiast and whimsical gothic dork. She reads for Whale Road Review and is published in 100+ venues including Lumiere Review, celestite poetry, Ram Eye Press, Sword & Kettle Press, Crow & Cross Keys, Lucent Dreaming, Moss Puppy, warning lines, Amethyst Review, Exhume Journal, and The Medusa Project by Mookychick, among others. She is also working on an ace horror collection. Follow @nocturnalxlight on Twitter.

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The Leap Shelly Jones Daed unraveled the blueprint with a flourish and splayed his design before the Assembly. They squinted at the thin lines inching across the paper like ants and shook their heads skeptically.

“Another labyrinth?” one papery voice finally croaked.

Daed thought of dried leaves cracking in a fire, of feathers desiccating in the sun.

“A kind of one, yes,” he replied. “A labyrinth in the sky.”

Daed searched the ashen faces of the Assembly before looking down at his hands and tucking them behind his back.

“To get us closer to the sun that is killing us? That has killed so many already?” the voice hissed, spiraling serpentine up to the rafters.

“For too long we have viewed the sun as an enemy,” Daed began. “But it is one we cannot fight. What do you do with such an enemy but make a treaty, become allies instead?”

A murmur swelled among the Assembly like the birdsong of old. Daed’s ears strained to discern individual voices. Fool and just so, just so rose above the others. The papery voiced one tapped

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their bench lightly and the others went silent. Daed waited, eyes cast upward, for their final word. ☼ Daed slipped his arms into the solar cell wings and leapt into the air, scouting for the right place to start construction.

“What will your new sky city be called?” the Assembly had asked as Daed turned from the council room, eager to begin.

“Icarus,” Daed whispered as he lilted upward toward the sun. ☼☀☼ Shelly Jones (they/them) is a professor at a small college in upstate New York, where they teach classes in mythology, folklore, and writing. Their speculative work has been published by F&SF, Apex, The Future Fire, and elsewhere. Find them on Twitter @shellyjansen or at shellyjonesphd.wordpress.com.

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Pegasus Danai Christopoulou I was safe inside my mother’s ribs, breathing her every heartbeat.

There was no such thing as time. There was only warmth and love and the mighty muscle in her chest that pumped blood, putting me to sleep with its rhythmic workings.

Sometimes she would tell me stories. About how she and her Gorgon sisters would be called to bless the temples of old, to ensure the stonemasonry held. About how humans would carve my mother’s likeness on those temples, her face both a warning and a benediction. About how the same humans forsook the Gorgons in time, trading their blessings for the new twelve gods, gods that looked more like them.

I didn’t understand these stories, although I liked hearing my mother’s voice. But she’d get sad and silent afterward, so I would stomp my hooves ever so gently, reminding her I was there, that I would never forsake her for anyone. Then my mother would laugh, and she would sing to me, and the cavern of her ribs would vibrate from the sound. I would unfurl my wings and flap them to

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the rhythm of the song, and then she’d laugh some more and tell me to settle in now, allow her to catch her breath.

Then I would sleep, happy, cradled in the echoes of her laughter. ☼ One evening, my mother’s heart picked up a new rhythm.

Faster. Frantic.

I woke to feel her springing into action. Adrenaline flooded her veins along with something else, something I’d never felt before. It was bitter and rancid and later in my life I would learn to call it “fear.” My mother struggled, fighting a moving obstacle I could not see. In that little space I occupied inside her, I stood up. Knees wobbly, but wings at the ready. If I flapped them hard enough, maybe I could lift us both up. Away from danger.

But I was small and weak. I hadn’t felt the wind currents caress my back or learned how to ride the sun’s rays. All I could do was hover a bit higher.

I reached my mother’s throat. The forest of her vocal cords was burning.

My mother screamed.

I heard another voice then, alien and angry and so unlike the singing and the stories I was used to. The voice came from outside my mother, distorted by the barrier of flesh and bone that rose between us. My mother fell silent, although her insides were still screaming, her heart a booming thunderstorm, her breathing a

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cyclone. There was a sound, like metal scraping the stone walls of our cavern. I felt my mother’s hands covering her heart. Protecting me.

Then I felt nothing as the world exploded. ☼ The monster thought my mother was alone.

That no one would bear witness to his crime.

But I was there. I saw. And as he turned his back to my mother’s lifeless body, polishing his sword so certain of his victory, I erupted from her throat in all my newborn fury. I flapped my wings in the world for the very first time, causing a gust of wind so strong it toppled him over.

He looked misshapen, all pink skin and barren limbs. Haycolored strands covered his hideous head. His eyes bulged, green murky things filled with dread. His pupils dilated, his mouth opened into a gaping hole. Was he one of the humans my mother warned me about? Did the new gods put him up to this? Rage burst into my veins, searing everything. I rose up on my rear legs and stomped his chest with my hooves.

A crunch, like an eggshell breaking. A crater of white and crimson, of bone and sinew. His bubbling blood coated my sticky hooves. He was nothing, the man who caused my mother’s heart to stop beating. Not even worth my reveling in my revenge. Maybe his gods will come and save him. Maybe not.

If I were them, I’d run.

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I cast my first and final look at my mother’s glorious shape. At the delicate body that had nurtured me with its essence, at the heavy head that carried so much wisdom even her hair pulsed with sentience. Perhaps she knew it would always come to this. That she would need to be cut in half, for me to fly free. I blinked away the tears that caused my mother’s murdered form to blur, and turned my face toward the sun. Our cave’s opening smelled of sunlight and carnage.

“The world is made of dirt and stone, of air and water,” my mother used to say. I always knew she could control the first two, and that’s the reason she and her sisters lived in caves. But until that moment, when I spread my russet-colored wings preparing for my first flight, I had no idea how well I could control the other two.

I shot up like an arrow amid a sky I had no words for. The world of humans spread beneath me, a tapestry of greens and browns, of trees and roads. Ahead, at the corner of my eye, something flickered. It called to me, as profound as my mother’s past, as ever-flowing as her love.

Water.

My mother called me Pegasus; the one from whom water bursts forth. The one who can create streams, and springs, and rivers. She hoped I would bring new life to this world.

She wasn’t wrong. But for new life to bloom, the old first has to be extinguished. This became my mission. To find these

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puny gods, and the wretched humans who served them, and cut their life’s thread just as that monster’s sword cut off my mother’s head. With no mercy. No regrets.

I’ll fly far and wide and I will land like a red rhomphaia, cutting the Earth with my wrath. And everywhere I stomp there will be blood, and water, and it will all flow for her.

For my mother.

Medusa. ☼☀☼ Danai Christopoulou (she/they) is a Greek speculative author drawing inspiration from the myths she grew up with, as well as her experiences living abroad. Danai’s nonfiction has appeared in lifestyle magazines such as Glamour and Marie Claire since 2008. She is a submissions editor for Uncanny magazine, a proofreader for khōréō, and an intern at Tobias Literary Agency. Her short fiction is published in Etherea Magazine, Haven Spec, khōréō, and others. Her novels are represented by Lauren Bieker of FinePrint Literary.

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“Omen” Erin Bryant Petty

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Old Man Wizard Craig Hinds “‘Sir Arthur, king,’ said the damosel, ‘that sword is mine’” Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur ☼ “Were I not a woman, I could tell a tale.”

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Merlin and Vivien In the forest, the first leaf falls from a hawthorn tree.

Merlin walks on the surface of the lake. Beneath him, in the water, a lady matches his step. Her white dress trails behind her.

“My love,” his ivory shadow sings to him, “did I ever tell you how I forged Excalibur beneath the lake? I did it with a bolt of lightning.”

“No, you have not,” replies the wizened wizard, “though I have asked you many times. Tell me then, how it was you put the magic in the blade?”

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“Devil’s son, I’ll tell you, but you have to promise me something first,” she answers playfully. She is swimming now and then again she is walking.

“What?” he asks warily.

“A token of your love.”

He frowns. Age’s wrinkled hand has inscribed volumes on his forehead.

“I have heard that you have a charm,” the submerged lady continues.

He comes to a stop, the bottom of his staff sending out ripples over the lake.

“What charm?” His old voice creaks with suspicion.

“A charm which you use to lock up your buxom maids so that no one can get at them but you. It is like they are imprisoned in a tower.”

“And where did you hear of this, Nimue?”

“I heard it whispered in the trees, old goat head.” She dives away and chases a fish around and then comes back.

“There is no such thing.”

She howls and her teeth become pointed and shark-like.

He raises a hand.

“Calm yourself, nymph. I have something quite like it. A few things actually. Hmm.” He takes several long strides and her feet kick madly to catch up.

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“Tell me, tell me.”

He glances over the length of her body as she drifts beneath him, turning slowly in the water. His eyes slide from her pleading face to her powerful legs and to the ends of her trailing dress.

“Fine, yes, yes, I will give you a charm,” he sighs.

His fairer reflection rewards him with a sly smile. He eases his ancient body down in the middle of the lake and they both sit cross-legged and look into the other’s face, Merlin looking down, Nimue peering up. Merlin rests his staff across his knees. Bubbles shoot from Nimue’s lips as she clears her throat.

“Did you know, my magician, long before we met, many turns of the world ago, that there was a time when I set foot on the lakebed? My feet—” “No, I did not know you had ventured so deep,” he says over her.

She looks at him sharply for interrupting.

“Forgive an old man his deafness,” he chuckles.

She sends a small wave over the lake from behind him that nearly knocks him from his seat. He steadies himself with the staff and nods, with some measure of respect, for her to proceed.

Nimue closes her eyes. Her face becomes calm and beautiful once more. Merlin leans closer, until his beard hangs down above her face. Something like a smile twitches her lips. She stifles it and begins again.

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“Long before I heard the name Merlin,” she says pointedly, “many turns of the world ago, I set foot on the lakebed.

My feet slipped into the sand as I made my way through the primal dark.” This time she keeps her eyes hidden behind her pale lids, her voice pure and intent. It sings out from the water like a leaping fish.

Merlin’s eyes remain wide and eager. They glint greedily; his long fingers look ready to snatch each word from the air. They tense as she reaches up and absently twists one of her fair tresses.

Already her voice has become softer, gentler, as she loses herself in the memory, challenge and guile replaced with an apparent lack of self-consciousness. Merlin is entranced; he could be a deep-sea creature snared by a predator’s light.

“I plucked seaweed and made of it ribbons for my hair,” she says as if in wonder, as though Eve returned to Paradise.

“Clouds of mud broke over me. I took fish from their shoals and prised their scales off one by one with my nails as their tails beat uselessly against me. I took the scales, silver, pink and golden, and made a corset to line my waist.” She rubs a hand over her stomach in memory of the hard scales. “Resplendent in my briny jewels I trekked through the deep. Yet my long and sleepless walk was to have an end.

The lightning found me. It smashed into the lake like Heaven’s fist.”

Her lids snap open.

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“Yes, now we come to it,” Merlin purrs lustily.

“The water seethed and boiled,” she narrows her eyes at him, the pleasure of reverie fading from her voice. “The lightning zigzagged between my forearm and my waist and sent up the sand at my feet. Thrown in a stream of bubbles, I twined and clung round the white fork.” She grits her teeth, as if gripped by that struggle again.

“Fastened between my hands, the bolt could not retreat into the clouds, or dissipate into the water. I held it there, my body spasming and wracked with pain as it squirmed against me. Its neck curved this way and that as it tried to swim to the surface. Its blind face struggled upwards, the point of its nose cutting through the water. But ever I weighed it down and kept it submerged.

For untold days, we grappled in the timeless deep.

Sometimes we floated up towards the surface and others we thudded into the sand. Always my watery brain was at work with ways to beat it, my thoughts boiling and bubbling like a cauldron’s brew.

The next time we reached the bottom, I grabbed a stone and directed us towards an outcrop of ancient rock. I pushed it against a boulder and beat on the electric snake with my stone. I did this until rock and pebble crumbled into dust.

Weary from my toil, it dragged me towards the surface world, but like a rider on a wild horse, I pulled it back. Like Zeus or Thor, I rode the sky flame. On the lakebed once more, I

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grabbed another stone, setting the fabric of my realm against another.

And slowly, rock after rock, I ground my foe into shape.

Sparks shivered and shrank from it at my every strike. The bones of fossilized creatures caught within my rocky anvils exploded into powder. With dust and marrow and sky fire, I forged the magic blade.

Excalibur. Its holy light shone in the lake like a submerged star. Soon I learned that while all in my oily zone was mutable–the waving plants, the bloody coils, even reef and rock would crumble– the law of flux and fluid was broken by the blade. I took it against the sea monsters and severed their long necks and separated their soft hides. What I had thought was true. Its shape was fixed and it could not be broken, no matter what monster I slew, no matter what rock I cleaved. If only your Round Table was made so well.”

“Speak carefully, if you still want your charm.”

“Yes, yes, I do,” she cries. She bangs her palms against the surface of the lake as though it is ice.

“I will tell you the charm.”

Her features are contorted with longing as she searches his smug features, as if he hides the secret in his beard. Bubbles froth from her open mouth. Carefully, Merlin prostrates himself over her thrashing body. She continues to thump silently against the water’s skin. He brings his mouth close to the surface as if to take a drink.

He whispers the charm.

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Instantly, she turns still. She smiles again, coyly.

“There is more to the tale.”

His ear hovers over her lips.

“Exhausted from my labors, I drifted in the lake. My eyes glazed over and my hair fanned out around me. I lost all strength.

My body ceased to move, the blade’s hilt fastened to my hand. For centuries stacked upon centuries that was our existence. We floated closer to the surface world than ever before.

I thawed. Sensation returned to me in time to see an enormous and monstrous sun bearing down on me. Its red tendrils reached out for us. Tangled in its feelers, we were buoyed up. The tip of the sword ripped through the lake’s surface and into the open air. My hand followed. My skin burned as it was exposed to the surface fire. I watched as a boat was drawn up beside my aching hand. A boy reached out and wrenched Excalibur from me.

I tried to recoil, but could not. And in the boat, Merlin, your face.”

Her hand smashes out as it would through glass and grabs him by the throat. Half of his face is dragged into the water. He tries to push himself away, but her hold is too strong. Her fingers feel cold, damp and hard digging into his neck. She bobs up at the back of his head and leans over his ear. Above the water, her plastered locks are darkened and slick. Droplets rain down from her chin and on to his forehead. She struggles him into position.

Her cheek glistens as each slow word drops from her lips.

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Merlin breaks from her wet grip and bounds away over the surface of the lake. He glances back at her with terror in his eyes and splashes through into the water. She laughs as he flounders in the shallows. Wobbling to his feet, he sloshes to the shore and into the trees. Her cold voice follows him.

“In the hands of kings, it ventures through the ages of the world. But Excalibur is always returned to me. If only you could remember that wizard, in your small and addled brain. I am enslaved as Arthur, your deathless king, and must pawn my most precious trinket.”

He twists and sees her through the gaps in the trunks, walking on the shore. Her form waves with new power.

“Always your face, Merlin, always it is your face beside the boy’s. You have your occupation, but your liberty also, while I, I am free to emerge only when that which I am apprenticed to permits.”

He runs through the trees.

“I nursed my hand for years, years after he took it from me.”

He goes deeper into the wood. Her shouting fades. He tugs at his sleeve. His wrinkled flesh is dry and hard and flaking. He continues to run, but the transformation is upon him. His robes whip about behind him and he tosses them aside piece by piece as he flees over the hills. It gets harder to run. His feet fan out and his

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long toes work their way into the soil, his wide and swinging steps leaving muddy craters in the grass.

He is brought to a stop in a distant wood. Merlin falls to his knees and places a hand on the ground. He spits and looks down at a pool of milky sap. His hand is lifted away. His knees are straightened. He rises further and further from the soil. Around his chest, his remaining robes burst and drop away. The staff buried at his armpit is knitted into his side. He feels his hair stand on end, as though by static. It twines up and into branches. His arms stretch out and snap into new angles. His face becomes a knot in the wood. Finally, his lips split into a twisted and mournful cleft.

The metamorphosis is complete. Merlin has become a tree.

The soonest is the first taken. A breeze shivers the hawthorn’s branches and a second leaf falls.

Beset by dreams and darkness, Merlin wanders from Camelot. He tramps by post and standing stone, towards the distant lake, in hope of the sweet Lady of the Lake, who is waiting for him.

The wizard smooths his beard and walks out onto the surface of the lake... ☼☀☼ Craig Hinds (he/him) lives and works in Newcastle, UK, where he is often mistaken for his identical twin brother. He graduated from Newcastle University with a first-class degree in English Literature,

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and a Distinction in his English Literature 1500-1900 MA, for which he was awarded two prestigious scholarships, the School Bursary Award and Excellence Scholarship. His fiction has appeared in Lackington’s Magazine and The Broken Spine. Twitter: @CraigHinds_

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Dawn’s Man Claire McNerney I met Eos the only way anyone could meet Eos: at dawn. I was driving to work—this was back when I used to deliver coffee, it’s just as terrible as it sounds—and there she was, a rosy fingered sunrise in my rearview mirror. I made an illegal U-turn just to go say hi.

I lost my job that day, but I got the girl.

Eos is stunning.

She’s always been stunning. If you ask her billions of followers, they’ll be so starstruck they’ll only be able to respond in emojis. Heart. Face with hearts for eyes. Stars. But the most accurate emoji to describe Eos is fire. She’s brilliant. She’s bright.

She’ll warm your heart. But she’ll burn you up within minutes and act like it’s not her fault.

Maybe it isn't her fault. She’s just a sun goddess, she can’t control it. But when she put a camera in my hand and told me to get her best angles, she let her red acrylic nails linger where they met mine, even as my skin blistered beneath them.

I took her pictures. I felt all warm inside when she posted them, even though all the comments were for her. She kissed me

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(burn marks on my lips, face; permanent scars everywhere her love had landed), told me that I was the best she’d ever had, and for a while it was good. I would photograph her in the morning, and she’d kiss me as dawn faded into day, hotter than ever.

I didn’t care that my skin was melting off when she touched me. I didn’t care that I could barely take her picture, my fingers like candle nubs stumbling over the shutters. I forgot that the red sky in the morning was a bad sign for sailors, shepherds, and especially me. Instead, I lived for the sunrise, for her to come and let me see her. I didn’t care that she barely looked at me.

I let her shine as I burned away.

Soon, I was too small for her to care about. But she had touched me with an unwanted piece of her own immortality. And so I melt smaller and smaller: a wheel of a car, a flower petal, a grasshopper, the tiniest molecule of dirt. And I’ll live forever in each atom thinking of her, and wishing with everything that’s left of me that I would have driven away from the sunrise and her dooming red heat. ☼☀☼ Claire McNerney (she/they) is an actor, student, and writer from California, where she currently attends UCSD. She enjoys, among other things, busking poetry on her 1930s typewriter. Her writing appears in Los Suelos, Proton Reader, and Cossmass Infinities. Follow her

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on Twitter @claire_mcnerney or Instagram @o.h.c.l.a.i.r.e to say hello and see what she does next!

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All That Was Golden Orion O’Connell Achilles—golden, beloved—trades father’s crown for one made of flowers and blushes as the maidens call them beautiful.

They were always made for war, not for roses. To touch them is to bleed. To be close is to provoke destiny. Such things, the heroes of legend, are not meant to be soft. If the hero must be painted in red, must it be with blood and not something gentle, more delicate, like the petals of such flowers, velvet on skin.

They delight in their new name and bury the secret in their heart, lets it catch fire, spins it into dance. Repeats it as bare feet skip across palace grounds. Pyrrha. Red, and not golden.

And she wishes there weren’t a war. Wishes to be beautiful, clothed in silk, and painted as art. Wishes for no more than to be lovely. And this, too, is like a flower. Beautiful in the moment, but quick to fade, to die. To become nothing.

Pyrrha would become nothing. End as nothing.

Achilles would win the war, achieve immortality in stories.

Pyrrha dances with pretty maidens, forgets the world.

Doesn’t forget Patroclus, the honey of their childhood. Messy and

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lazy, syrup laden summers that had woven them together as one, bound their hearts like all things that are written in the stars.

And Patroclus does not know Pyrrha, only Achilles.

And Patroclus cannot find him here, under this guise, only half of who they are.

For they are both. One and the same.

They whisper Patroclus’ name syllable by syllable, long and drawn out as they count the days. After a time, they judge not in one, and two, and in three, but in the way the changes mark them, who they become. Pyrrha graces the king’s daughter with lipstick kisses, leaving mark of their betrayal all while thinking of Patroclus, beloved. What would true lover do, they wonder, with kisses that stain like wine?

There is no answer for this, although princess whispers adorations, praises so devoutly that they reach the heavens. She compares them to the god of poetry, and of the sun. Jealous Apollo hears them—and knows Achilles then—and stifles revenge.

For everything has its moment, and Achilles’ time is not nigh.

Whispered words are powerful. They have thorns of their own, a rare weapon that could wound the pride of even a god. No one reaches for the sun without burning in its glory.

In this moment, Pyrrha does not endeavor for the sun, nor the spoils of promised victory. She simply wishes to share this secret with the one who matters, wishes to whisper with delight into beloved’s ear: Her. Her. Call me her.

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Instead, she paints her face as days diminish. Watches wartaught features begin to soften. Coldness blossoms like spring into warmth for the princess of Skyros, for Deidamia, she becomes a dear friend, and Achilles tells themself that one day, they may love her in return. That one day, perhaps friendship will catch fire and remove disgraced boy from mind, the one that had come from nothing and simply had become their everything.

Even joys of hope fade. Light dies in the winter, forgets itself for darkness that remains. When the lipstick smears against the princess’ bare skin, it too, looks like blood. What was once sweet tastes bitter in the mouth. Patroclus is not coming, and neither Achilles nor Pyrrha shall ever love again.

One may trade a shield for an instrument, unwrap feet from heavy boots and learn to dance with them instead of march to war. Still, they will tell you your destiny. They will decide who you are.

Such is the way of the world.

When mother Thetis had baptized them in the River Styx, the trees had not whispered of Patroclus. Never mentioned Pyrrha.

Whisper of nothing that matters and claim to know everything. And when the poets write of them, they too, will know only Achilles.

They will compare them to Icarus, call them prideful, say they flew too close to the sun.

They will act as though it was ever a choice.

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They will ignore the beauty of the moon, inconstant, in flux, lovely in phases and cold in the next. The scholars will not compare them to flowers or night sky, only speak of more death.

The color red for blood, always blood. Never of the heart, broken. Never of flowers, blooming. Never of secrets stifled by destiny.

Flowers bloom over graves too. For and in spite of it all.

They just forget to mention them in the songs, like all things that were once beautiful. ☼☀☼ Orion O’Connell (they/them) is an aspiring novelist and not-so-secret poet whose work has recently been featured in publications such as Ink (2021), Tell Your Story (2021), and Endings (A Fix-It Zine) (2022).

Orion believes in love, kindness & happy endings, and can be found on Twitter @orionoconnell.

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“xix. the sun” S.M. Hallow

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Blood of My Blood, Dreams of My Dreams, Heart of My Heart Molly Likovich The Sun was screaming.

Kalinda tilted her head back and let the rays penetrate her skin as she tried to hone in and make sense of the sound. It was a ripe, rough sort of sound. A singer who had just woken up, their vocal cords—scratchy from lack of lemon and water. The sound lingered over her skin, and if she were a less powerful Sistra it might have made her ears bleed.

“It’s early today.”

Kalinda opened her eyes and let them take a moment to refocus as her Sistra Carlotta came into view. Carlotta had cotton balls stuffed in her ears—she was the same age as Kalinda but nowhere near as strong.

“Louder too,” Kalinda said.

Carlotta put a hand across her forehead, just above her eyes, to make a shield against the sweltering rays.

“I don’t know how you can stand it.”

She said this to Kalinda every time the screaming started.

It was a ritual of sorts.

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“Help me up,” Kalinda said.

Her Sistra held out the hand that wasn’t blocking out the sun, Kalinda took it, and Carlotta brought her to stand. The two smiled at one another and spoke sacred words in whispers that brushed softly against each other’s multi-colored, ever changing skin. Kalinda was a deep ruby shade today, Carlotta was the color of a ripe peach. It was Day 62,096.

“Come,” Kalinda said, taking Carlotta’s hand in hers. “The other Sistra will be waiting.”

The two women rushed down the hill, their white satin dresses billowing in the wind, swaying with the sound of the sun.

From above they looked something mixed between angels and wraiths; their autumnal skin a fire blazing across the hilltops. ☼ Jessamine marched back and forth across the temple floor—a soldier before her Sistras.

“They are late,” she snapped as if the other nine women were somehow responsible for Carlottta and Kalinda’s usual tardiness.

“The Sun is loud,” Ayundia said loudly herself, shouting over the cotton in her ears and the thrum of the waterfall across the temple walls. “Kalinda always dailies when the sun is this loud.”

“Yes,” scoffed Dana, “because she thinks she’s better than us.”

“She doesn’t need to stuff her ears,” Sally said.

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“And?” Dana said back, her tone full of vinegar.

“She is better than us.”

“Jessamine doesn’t need to stuff her ears,” Dana insisted.

“Is Kalinda better than her elder Sistra?”

“Well,” Mary—the quietest of them all—chimed in, “Kalinda is several leagues younger and it took Jessamine quite a long time to endure the Sun’s screams and—” “I can speak for myself perfectly well, thank you,” Jessamine said. “I must admit I am sometimes loath to accept Kalinda’s power, but Sally is right. Kalinda will very well be the one to lead us from the Sun to the Stars.”

Dana snorted. Unimpressed.

“Sorry we’re late,” Kalinda said as she walked in at a leisurely pace, her bare feet slapping against the temple’s stone floor, her hair soaked from the waterfall.

She didn’t sound sorry at all. Carlotta—her dearest Sistra smirked at her—she knew the truth in Kalinda’s words, she always did.

“Carlotta,” Jessamine said, “I sent you out to fetch Kalinda, not to frolic through the fields.”

“But the weather is so nice today,” Kalinda said, biting down a smile.

Jessamine seethed, and several of the younger Sistras (Ayundia, Haliana, Stephania, and Lyana) laughed at the joke.

“Sit,” Jessamine said tersely.

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The two girls took their seats near the back of the other nine Sistras and looked up at their leader Jessamine with mockeager eyes.

“I have consulted the Threads,” Jessamine announced.

Kalinda and some of the others often likened Jessamine’s lecture to the priests of old and their homilies and sermons.

Jessamine would have been deeply offended by the comparison, but no matter what she did her words were too stiff; they lacked all the sweetness of the late Sistra Yoniana—the last of the Lucifer line, until Kalinda.

Kalinda knew (as many of the other Sistra did) that the role of Head Sistra should have been hers by birthright, Jessamine was of the Belenas line whom the Lucifer line had defeated generations ago, long before the order of Sistra was even formed, back when they were waring villages and clashing beliefs. Back before the Sun opened its mouth and unleashed its wails onto the world, burning almost everyone with its blaze.

The Sistra temple was one of very few buildings to survive the burning of the Sun song.

But Jessamine was the eldest Sistra after Yoniana passed, and just as powerful as Kalinda, so no one—not even Kalinda— questioned her when she claimed the golden wreath for her own head.

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That was 157 years ago. In that time Kalinda had grown angry. Even her dearest Sistra Carlotta couldn’t fully feel the rage under Kalinda’s skin.

“They have told me,” Jessamine continued, “that tomorrow is the day that the Beast will finally come.”

There were panicked gasps from the younger Sistra and looks of angry fear in the older ones. But Kalinda smiled.

She had been ready for fifty-two years.

Jessamine could also endure the Sun’s song like Kalinda did but what none of the other Sistra knew was that Kalinda understood the words. The Sun’s song wasn’t a feral, meaningless wail, it was a declaration —of war. ☼ “Kalinda,” Ayundia whispered in the night air in the blessed silence of the Moon, “don’t do this.”

Kalinda paused with her hand on the door to the temple.

She could ignore Ayundia and continue on with her endeavor— undeterred. Ayundia was not her dearest Sistra, she had only been Kalinda’s Sistra for a handful of decades, nothing in the ways of their world.

But being Sistra was more than that.

Their blood danced in each other's veins. They dreamed each other’s dreams. They tasted each other's laughter. They were one in a way that other creatures would never understand.

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So Kalinda turned around. Ayundia stood behind her, wearing nothing, holding a taper, the flame illuminating her robinegg-blue skin.

“You will die,” Ayundia said, tears glowing in the candlelight.

“I am eternal,” Kalinda said.

“If you die, won’t we all die?” Ayundia asked, ignoring Kalinda’s declaration of undying. “We are Sistra. We are one?”

“We did not all perish when Yoniana died so why should any other deaths be different?”

“Because,” the younger Sistra said, “this world is different.

You know that.”

“I have heard the Sun’s song for over a century,” Kalinda said calmly, “I have waited for the day of the Beast. Jessamine does not know what she’s up against; none of you do.”

“Do you think,” Ayundia asked, “that because you are the last of the Lucifer line that you are stronger than us?”

“No,” Kalinda said. “I am stronger because I chose to be.

Do you think I was magically able to withstand the Sun’s screaming? Do you believe that is how the Sistra work? Are you so foolish? No. I bled my ears daily, my brain begging me to stuff my ears with anything to drown out the sound. But I refused. I listened. I ignored Jessamine’s precious threads because they did not save our people from the great burning of the Sun’s song and they will not save us now. If Sistra dies then this world will die. The

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Sun will consume us and move on to sing other worlds into nonexistence. So step back, Ayundia of the Neto line and let me pass.”

“No,” Ayundia said; her firm voice surprised Kalinda. “I’m going with you.”

“As am I,” a voice whispered in the darkness.

Ayundia cast her taper’s light down the temple hall to where Mary of the Khor line stood. One by one the other Sistra joined the ranks: Haliana of the Ra line, Dana of the Helios line, Diane of the Apollo line, Sally of the Saulé line, Stephania of the Päivätä line, Kiara of the Aurora line, Lyana of the Nap Anya line, and Kalinda’s dearest Sistra Carlotta of the Sól line (the only Sistra not in attendance was Jessamine).

“You see,” Carlotta said with a smile only her dearest Sistra fully understood, “we are Sistra. We are one. If you die we will feel it in our bones. If you succeed we will feel it in our hearts.

But Sistra do not cower. Yoniana thought she could do this alone, but that is not what Sistra is. Blood of my blood, dream of my dreams, heart of my heart.”

“We’re coming with you,” Ayundia reiterated.

This time Kalinda did not argue. ☼ The Sistra have long fought us. The Us who are I. We (I) crack the sun open like an egg and descend upon them. I (We) have warned them of this day when all of ourselves are one beautiful Beast. I am whole again. The corners of every world I swallowed runs through me, emboldening me—I will

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burn out the Sistra who dared defy me and swallow their beautiful moon and their blood will be sweeter than cherries and nectar; I will make ambrosia from their bones.

I will endure and the Sistra will fall. ☼ The moon was melting as the eleven Sistra who still believed in what their ancestors had burned for, stood together on the hilltop, their skin bleeding into a beautiful hue—a nebula of color unlike any before seen by the beings that once roamed that world. They held tight to each other’s hands and swallowed their teas.

They watched the Beast that was Ra, and Helios, and Apollo, and Saulé, and Belanas, and Päivätä, and Sól, and Neto, and Aurora, and Khors, and Nap Anya, and Lucifer crawl out of the cracked sun to make its way down to them.

Kalinda unhinged her jaw.

The Sistra sang their song of fire.

And Kalinda swallowed the Sun. ☼☀☼ Molly Likovich (she/her) is a queer, disabled, proud Marylander with a BA in Creative Writing from Salisbury University. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in The New Mexico Review, Shore Poetry, Rust + Moth, Bluestem, Boomer Lit Mag, Tattoo Highway, Seven Circle Press, and Dreams & Nightmares Magazine. In 2017 she won Honorable Mention

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in the AWP Intro Poetry Journal Award and the Glimmer Train Short Story Contest for New Writers. In 2020 she won Silver Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. Her indie poetry collection Not a Myth, co-authored by Marcia Ruiz, was a #1 New Release in Women’s Poetry on Amazon and her indie romance novella Riding The Headless Horseman was a #1 New Release and #2 Bestseller in Erotic Horror on Amazon. She currently works as the head playwright for A Cow Jumped Over The Moon Theater.

You can find her on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube @magicalmolly.

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Monsters in a Maze Heather Meatherall Ask Icarus and he'll tell you there was more than one monster in that maze.

There was the obvious one, of course. The half-man halfbull, with hooves and horns and a horrible roar Icarus would remember for as long as he lived. There were no timepieces in the maze, but you could still tell time by the sun and sounds of screams that marked the monster’s meals.

The other was less noticeable. An older man, with a graying beard and blue eyes that went from kind to cruel in the time it takes two boys to kiss. Icarus could still see the way his father had looked at him when he’d caught the two embracing, could still hear the threats he’d made after Apollo had fled back to the sky. He wasn't sure if Daedalus knew who the golden-haired boy really was, but he wasn't sure it mattered. There wasn't much that scared his father.

Some nights Icarus wondered if Daedalus mourned him.

He'd certainly screamed loud enough when he'd fallen into the sea, to anyone else they might have sounded like the screams of a father

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losing his only son. But Icarus had watched him fly away, not even bothering to look back and see if he'd surfaced. It hurt a little, to know his only blood family wanted nothing to do with him. But Icarus knew a monster when he saw one, when he heard it, and the love of a monster wasn't one he was willing to fight for. ☼☀☼ Heather Meatherall (she/her) is a poet and writer from Canada. She finds a lot of inspiration from quotes, music, and nature. Her work has been published in magazines such as Poetry Undressed and Mythos Magazine. Heather is currently studying Computer Science at Ontario Tech University. You can find her on Instagram under the handle @heathermeatspoetry.

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The Sweet Loathsome Honey of Love Kath Giblin It started the morning after the wedding, the official one; her mother had insisted on that after it had all come out. Her father growled and cursed but she suspected that he was secretly pleased to heal the ancient grudge with his old enemy. Certainly those two were amongst the last to leave the wedding party, staggering drunkenly to bed, arms wrapped around each other’s necks, delaying the moment of parting with affectionate claps on the back and loud kisses. They had been like that all night: calling for more wine, punching one another, laughing uproariously at jokes about shriveled swords and pointedly enjoying the glares of their respective wives. It turns out they had shared the same Latin master years ago and once they’d stopped arguing over who was most sorry for the rift, they spent the entire night cocooned in a drunken mist, exchanging lewd stories from Ovid and congratulating each other on the sterling match their children had made.

Meanwhile, the happy couple themselves had retired early to bed, giggling like schoolchildren at the head of a procession of well-wishers. After shutting the door firmly on the cat calls and

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bawdy comments of Benvolio and the rest of them, they were finally alone. The husband looked long at his wife’s reflection in the mirror as she slowly removed her heavy necklace and then her gown. She held his gaze for a moment, then followed his eyes as they moved wistfully to the balcony window. She woke up the next morning to find herself alone, light snaking through the gap in the curtain on his side of the bed and glinting on the huge emerald ring that dominated her left hand.

It was never the same after that. He seemed different somehow. She often found him peering closely at her face, as if looking for something he’d lost. She couldn’t understand it. Hadn’t they once completed each other’s words? Completed each other?

She looked at her hands palm to palm in Mass, cast furtive glances at her kneeling husband, a stone effigy at her side. He avoided her eyes.

Months or weeks went by. He had taken to rising early and meeting the other young men for the hunt. Sometimes she didn’t see him for days. Her mother didn’t understand the fuss.

The poor girl tried everything. Ordering special dishes, having her hair fixed just right, spending hours on her wardrobe.

Nothing worked. She talked to the good friar about it, thought of asking if he had some baleful weeds or precious-juiced flower to induce love. He just raised his eyebrows and shook his head. He’d seen it all before.

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The sonnet was the last straw. At first her heart had leapt at the sight of the beloved scrawl. The words of love, the praise of her raven hair. Raven? But hers was fine gold. She read the clues, watched him closely. His eyes as they moved with lovely Adeline’s progress across the courtyard burned with a new fire.

She hated to admit it but her mother was right. She should have married Paris. ☼☀☼ Kath Giblin (she/her) is a writer, English teacher, and Arts Festival director, based in South Wales, UK. Her passion is writing and promoting a love of literature. She is particularly interested in how literature is transformed for each new age and her previous postgraduate research centered around this idea of adaptation in the works of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlow.

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“Knowledge” Erin Bryant Petty

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Poison Cup C.M. Green ‘Gertrude, do not drink.’

He says it and I am tired. I am tired of death following me, so I wonder if it’s time for me to follow death. When he asked me to marry him, he held roses in one hand and a knife in the other.

To cut the roses with, maybe.

When Hamlet said to him, ‘I am too much i’ the sun,’ I thought to myself my child is burning. Some days he smolders, and some days he blazes, but his grief does not loosen its grip on his neck. When Hamlet said to him, ‘I am too much i’ the sun,’ I thought my child will not save himself and I don’t know how to help him.

For a month every single thing my son has done has made the king furious, and Hamlet keeps dancing on the coals.

So when the king says to me, ‘Gertrude, do not drink,’ I shut my eyes because I am tired. He will kill my son today, and I cannot change that. ‘I will, my lord; I pray you, pardon me.’ And I drink. I can taste it, just a little, a little more bitter than a good wine should be. I drink deep, and then I set the glass down and look him in the eye.

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Hamlet came to me as though mad and told me not to go to bed with the king, as though I have ever had a choice. As though I wanted to go to bed with his father, as though I ever wanted any of this. I look the king in the eye and I see that finally, I have taken something from him that he cannot take back.

When Hamlet said to him, ‘I am too much i’ the sun,’ I thought to myself my child will never stop laughing. He will die with a clever word on his tongue. His clever words will kill him. I can feel the poison spread through my veins, or maybe I’m imagining it. I think about Ophelia and I wonder if all of us, really, are the same. ☼☀☼ C.M. Green (they/them) is a Boston-based writer with a focus on history, memory, gender, and religion. They are a Flash Fiction editor at JAKE and a Prose and Hybrid Reader at Adobe Press. Their work has been published by Bullshit Lit, Roi Faineant, and elsewhere. You can find them at cmgreenwrites.com, or on Twitter @cmgreenery.

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I Heard They’re Beautiful This Time Of Year P. Henry Lucy spent her summer watching television. All her friends had gone off to work at secluded camps in New Hampshire and western Massachusetts where they would discover new relationships and sacred rituals of an ending youth deep in the night. Lucy never held the lustful desires of her friends and had trouble even thinking of what it was that she wanted to remember about her life during high school. Her desire was under the skin. It squirmed around and begged to be let free, to taste the open air.

Lucy couldn’t tell whether this yearning was of the physical or mental sensation, but she had spent long nights withering in discomfort next to the toilet waiting for it to pass. There were times when she thought her stomach would burst out of her chest, and whatever was inside would escape into the night to be free again.

One night, after her brother and mother had eaten their meatloaf-soaked-in-ketchup, Lucy spread herself across the blue and white tiles of their bathroom and braced herself for the incoming wave of something that wanted to break free. In an

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instant where her body jerked against her own inhibitions like a clockwork automaton, she sat up at an exact 90-degree angle, turned her head directly above the toilet bowl, and threw up red. It was too thin to be blood but did not taste like bile or any food she had recently eaten. At first, the strangest thing about the contents she spewed was the taste that lingered in her mouth. It was smokey and left her tongue with the slightest burn, a sensation she last felt when she had eaten a hot dog right off the grill on the Fourth of July. The toilet liquid had smoothed out and Lucy was able to view a perfect reflection of herself staring back outward towards her.

The features of her reflection were even more perfect than Lucy had ever thought to envision herself. Her cheekbones had been raised, her nose protruded out of her face the slightest inch, and her eyebrows were slanted at an angle that gave the reflection power in its stare. This was not the face of Lucy, but of something older. It was the something that hid in her organs and ruled her dreams.

Lucy went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. She felt the water dribble down her throat and cleanse her insides of whatever it was that emerged from within. With the clarity of hydration came the memories of her recurring dream. A dream of an old forest and an ancient ritual.

Downstairs, her brother and his little gang of friends were yelling about vanquishing a demon-spirit back to the realm of the damned. It was a part of a game called Dungeons & Dragons they had

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been playing all summer, and based on their screams a powerful force had been defeated. Lucy had attempted playing with the boys once before, but she became too immersed in the role of a holy paladin. After an hour of playing, she couldn’t tell where Lucy ended and Celeste of the Moon began, and she ended up committing the ancient Japanese art of Seppuku to save a soul caught between two worlds. The group loved her commitment to the role and always wanted her to play a full campaign with them, but Lucy was afraid of what would happen if their fantasies bled into her reality.

As the sun disappeared from the sky in a purple haze, she laid on the couch with a pint of mint-chip ice cream and turned on the television. The developing story was on the possible ties Dungeons & Dragons shared with Pagan religions and featured an interview with an elderly woman with thick-rimmed glasses that made her eyes look like mugs of black coffee. Her and the news anchor sat in brown corduroy chairs in a brown office with spotlights that enhanced the cracks among the dry skin which matched their voices. Lucy wriggled her body to find a way to ease out the discomfort the newscasters gave her, and even though she would’ve liked to change the channel, the remote had vanished.

The elderly woman was saying something about the ties between violent crime and media that produced satanic imagery.

“Last Friday I had to lock my daughter in her room to keep her from going to see a band called Judas Priest! Do you

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know what Judas Priest is known for Ken? They promote sinners!

They have a song calllllled Blood Rain! Bllllood Rain!

Blllllllllllooooooooooooo-” The television began to crackle with interference and after a moment of static returned to the same picture. “-ooooohhhHello Lucy. Are yooou feeling better?” The old woman was staring directly at Lucy through the television. She wasn’t blinking, the studio lights had gotten darker, and the image was frozen besides the movement of the woman’s mouth.

“Follow the mushrooms, Lucy. They guide us throoough the soil, they guide the dead underground, but weee have been known to slip above,” said the voice. At this point, Lucy knew that something was speaking through the image on the television from somewhere beyond her own reality.

The television shut off and left no sound but the lingering static while the screen cooled. There was a glass door across the hall from the living room that led to the backyard, where the moon cast a silver glow over the grass and the edge of the Pine Barrens.

Lucy walked over, slid the door back, and peered out towards the trees as a glint caught her eye. It was ruby red, reflected in the light of the moon, but it was something else calling out from below the Earth that drew Lucy towards the light. She walked out the door without stopping to put shoes on.

The source of the light was a mushroom cap slick with moisture and a set of maroon gills underneath. Unlike many fungi that grew together in clusters, these mushrooms grew in a trail that

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led deeper into the woods. Even when the moon was blocked by the trees the red glow stood out in the darkness. The ground was soft and cool and smooth despite the absence of an official trail path. Lucy was so naturally comfortable that she never stopped to think of this geographical oddity. The trail of mushrooms culminated in a patch where the fungus had overtaken the ground, spread up a circle of pine trees in an alcove, and the whole area sent a glow towards the sky and up the tree trunks. In the middle of the alcove was a portable radio blasting static into the night.

Lucy approached the radio and picked it up. She stared at the tuning needle which began to veer to the left, adjusting itself automatically until all static had disappeared and a deep voice came into focus.

“There are stories of a devil in these woods…” the voice said to Lucy. The glowing patch of fungus that she stood upon began to sink, sending a thick gas into the air that shrouded Lucy’s vision. She began to lose consciousness as she stepped onto the soft caps, passing out completely when she heard thick wings flapping through the air. Sharp talons gently curved themselves around her body and lifted her off the ground, although she didn’t feel a thing. The devil flew high above the forests holding her in its grasp.

Lucy did not perceive much of the journey from Pemberton Township, New Jersey, to the Blue Mountains of Oregon. The devil held her close to its chest for warmth. At their

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altitude the flight was only six hours, but the devil still had to stop somewhere around Salt Lake City so it could feed on a herd of sheep before they reached the destination. The devil arrived at an open maw of a cave by sunrise where it laid Lucy down at the entrance and crawled inside. The Mistress and the Fisherman were already awake by the time the devil arrived, and the Sage was in a meditative state next to the others, communicating with the spirit beneath the mountains. The cave marked the edge of a small meadow with a stream on the other side. No trees grew for a considerable distance around the meadow, and those that marked at the edge of the old growth forest were dead and weathered to husks of their former selves. Sunlight poured onto the meadow, made more intense by the presence of an intense shade in the woods. The forests of the Pacific Northwest were ancient beings, standing unopposed for millennia until discovered by the world of man, but the trees were not the only gods that breathed among these flowers.

Lucy began to stir just as the Fisherman left to gather ingredients for the ceremony. She was drowsy, still under the effect of the spores but the Mistress soothed her with herbal tea made with local mugwort and chamomile, and when she felt famished after her initial anxiety subsided she was given a meal of spongy Morel mushrooms that tasted smokey and lingered comfortably on her tongue. In the cave, the devil snored. Lucy heard the rumbling from the outside and at that moment knew she was no longer in a

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state of dreaming. What Lucy could not understand was that where she was at her present moment of reality was identical to a recurring dream she had all summer. Even the details of budding lilacs on the ground gave her a sense of deja vu, and the only difference was the body in which she inhabited within her dream was taller and upright. Her dream self moved with a sense of royal grace and when she spoke (although she could not remember what she said) her voice was deeper but so gentle each word landed on the ears of her subjects like a kiss.

Lucy knew that she should be worried about her safety, and while part of her continued to doubt her own sense of reality, all she could think of was the body in her dream. She wanted nothing less than to step into this new skin, and nothing more than to return to the dream so she could inhabit this form. The Mistress caught her eyes wandering off and knew they had her.

“If it makes you feel any better, none of us were brought here consensually,” said the Mistress to Lucy. “Now that you’re here, we only have to make it to the ceremony and we’re free to go.”

“You were talking to me last night, weren’t you? You were the voice on the TV telling me to follow the mushrooms.”

“Nooo, tHat woould Beee me,” answered the Sage. His eyes had now opened and a milky film covered them. He was still cross-legged on the ground. “I apologizZzZze if I frighteeeened

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youu, I sooought oNly to LEeeead You innnn the RighT direcction,” he spat out before his eyes closed once again.

“Whatever your scheme is, I would rather just go. I’m sure my family is looking for me right now!”

“I wouldn’t be too sure,” said the Mistress. “Last week you spent two full days in your room. You left only twice to go to the bathroom and ate in the night to purposefully minimize interaction.” It was true. Lucy’s family may have been concerned about her mental health, but they would not confront her. “As for this scheme you think we’re putting into motion, we want nothing more than to retrieve our original bodies. We seek freedom, not malice. If you want proof, talk to your neighbor in the cave. He was born in his original body two hundred years ago, yet he hasn’t killed a soul that meant him no harm. We want the same thing you do, I can see it in your eyes. You don’t stare at the flowers or the clouds in the sky. You stare at the image in your mind's eye, feel the sensation you know is your true self. I’ve seen it too, and every second I’m not in that form burns me. I want to rip my skin off just to break free of this suffocation.” Lucy may not have liked the Mistress, but she couldn’t deny the chance to see her ideal body realized.

The rest of the day was uneventful with the exception of cuddling next to a creature the size of a bear with the body and wings of a bat and the head of a horse. Lucy and the devil played presidents, she spoke to the Sage a bit more, but generally let the

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people work. When the Fisherman returned it was finally time to begin the ritual of transformation. There actually wasn’t much to do, the Mistress explained to Lucy, as the Sage had been communicating with the god beneath the Earth for several months now. The god, a network of mycelium running a hundred miles in every direction, would rapidly decompose their current bodies in order to release their true forms in exchange for the followers of the gods evolving to control the earth in the next millennia. “As if there’ll even be an Earth in a millennium,” she laughed.

They gathered in a circle and ingested another mushroom.

Lucy felt it sink to the bottom of her stomach, and the sensation that she had to pee immediately came to her mind. She did not look down, but it was as if she was releasing her bladder. Looking across the circle she could see the skin of the Sage begin to dry out, crumble away, turn grey, then wrinkle and break apart. From the tears in the skin emerged hundreds of flies that swarmed into a thick cloud in the air. The Fisherman started to run away from the circle towards the cave where a stream was located underground.

He tore the ground up with the last of his strength before his chest exploded in a mess of gore, and the form of a snake slithered outward into the water as the husk of his former body collapsed on the ground. The Mistress smiled at Lucy before horns burst from her forehead. Her hair fell off in clumps as tufts of fur emerged from the raw hide, and as she grew three feet in height the skin simply fell off her body like a discarded bed sheet. She turned

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towards the woods and walked into the darkness. Lucy was alone once again. She thought it was fortunate that she did not have such an extreme transformation, but looked down and realized that her old skin had fallen off as well, although it didn’t resemble skin so much as a rumpled coat on the ground.

They were covered in blood. The devil emerged from the cave once more and bowed to his prince of darkness. Lucy climbed atop his back as he spread his wings. They flew off into the night once again, passing through a rainstorm that washed the blood right off of them. They rose above to bask in a waning moon before diving back towards the woods they had left just one day ago. Lucy knew the way back and didn’t question how, and soon they were home once again, returning through the screen door at around sunrise.

They found an old Slayer t-shirt that used to be big on their old body, but now fit just right, as well as an old pair of baggy sweatpants that complimented their form. They walked downstairs where their brother and his gang of misfits were just starting a new campaign. The group of boys stared in amazement at the transformation but didn’t speak up out of politeness. This pause was broken moments later when the gang dove into adventure once again.

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☼☀☼ P. Henry (they/them) is a 24-year-old living in Brooklyn, NY. They have an affinity for mycology, collage art, graphic novels, and the films of Céline Sciamma.

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Narcissus’ Self-Love Workshop Beatriz Seelaender Location: Golden Ratio House, Styx—Tartarus Description: Learn self-love from the OG! This cozy corner of the Tartarus, right by the Styx Bay, is a phenomenal place to cultivate confidence! Customers can choose the package that best suits their needs, from the weekly check-in to the intensive course!

Don’t waste any time and sign up now! Feel better about yourself and where you are at death after just one session!

Relevant Customer Reviews “Washed-Up Celebrity Resorts to Coaching” A tale as old as time. When Narcissus isn’t constantly drunk on the Styx water, he murmurs about how below him this course is. He will leave the class to look at himself in the giant mirror in his adjacent house. He carries a portable mirror so he can look at himself at all times, but according to him it is too small.

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The splendid thing is, the workshop does have the desired effect: seeing how Narcissus lives (in death) has made me feel much better about myself. Other people’s unquestionable failures have made me realize how much better I am than them. It’s true, I have been setting unrealistic expectations for myself—I am more than enough as it is. 10/10 “The Boost I Needed” I don’t know how the man does it! While I’ve always been self-conscious about my appearance, dying has really worsened my anxiety—I was having trouble with the fact that I will look the way I do for the rest of eternity. Mr. N helped me with that! He said my nostrils are the exact same shape as his, which means I am beautiful by association. He helped some other participants with their own body image as well, always finding something of himself in them, then showering them with compliments! Simply knowing him, he said, already makes us special! Finally, what struck me the most was how he closed the lesson: “You must be your own reference, your own blueprint.” That really spoke to me.

“Just the Opposite” I feel a lot worse about my choices after spending money on this! All we did was look at different types of mirrors! One

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particularly daft activity consisted of staring at those amusement park funhouse mirrors for a really long time until we “forgot what we originally looked like,” and then seeing the undistorted version of our reflections. I suppose the point was to make us appreciate our original proportions, but it only brought me dissociation, my facial features floating like Picasso forms, not quite harmonizing figuratively. After that, our coach went around complimenting random things about everyone’s appearance (mine was the cleft chin, which, unsurprisingly, is the one characteristic me and “Mr. N” share). He looked extremely uncomfortable doing it, too—the lines sounded as rehearsed as the lines on his face, as if he’d been told to scratch all his true feelings off a review and keep only the small concession before the tirade. I left before completing the workshop so as to preserve at least some of my self-confidence.

“Twisted Methodology” This is the only self-love workshop in all of Tartarus, so I decided to give it a shot in spite of its sinking reputation. I don’t regret going because I know now what a mess it is: first off, it is very focused on external self-love: one session was based around learning his skincare routine, and another was a makeup tutorial. I thought the purpose of this kind of thing was not how much our eyeliner slays, but to learn to love ourselves as we are? The final paper was sort of about that, except in the most twisted way

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possible: it was a two-step activity in which we were supposed to point out things that we didn’t like about our fellow workshop attendees, then compare ourselves to them in a positive way. That felt mean and slimy, and I had to take a shower afterwards.

When I asked Narcissus the reason behind this method, he said, I kid you not: “You can either love yourself and hate the rest, or you can love the rest and hate yourself. This is a self-love workshop. If you were looking for the self-hatred workshop, come to our Open House on Wednesday.” ☼☀☼ Beatriz Seelaender (she/her) is a Brazilian writer whose work can be found in multiple literary magazines. She is the winner of both the Sandy Run and the Bottom Drawer prizes.

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“Citrus” L.M. Cole

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Orpheus at a Funeral Cyrus Quan

Death surely must be a man, for if all one knows is oneself, Death is all Orpheus has become.

No other could fear a descent to this knowing. Nor could sing of loss as he has slain songs mourning.

Authorities of mortal bureaucracy have limited her to an un-aged face, buried in smoking thorns.

Bitter laughter of the Gods as he cursed his longing, necrophilic fate. Unto Hades, he fell, in art & body.

Softened frozen rivers to frenzied heat, renewed berserk hellspawn to fetal sleep. He searched Underground stations, assuming immortality would merit a bygone king's rewards, who spoke: “Solitude for the dead, presence for the resurrected. Turn not on my word & leave if you leave unturned.”

Away two lovers climbed, accompaniment only assumed. Leaving without seeing how loss changes face.

“It's almost over,” Eurydice pleading to keep footing an a-front.

Keep my name in mind but verdicts withheld.

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The shadows of regret with two suns above, a shadow ahead, and a shadow behind.

Song returned, her breath on his neck, he turned & stepped, and forgot that which kept them separate.

He loved the muses only as far as his songs hung, now silent.

Proud & unseen in the light. ☼☀☼ Cyrus Quan (they/he) is a writer born and raised in San Francisco, with interests in poetry, experimental theatre, and decommodifying coffee culture. Their work has appeared previously in The Mandarin Journal, Matchbox Magazine, and Chinquapin Literary Magazine. They are currently based in Santa Cruz, where they study with the University of California, Santa Cruz, where they research the Carceral State and its Abolition, and the impact of art movements’ impact on radical politics.

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Thistle, Utah Devon Bohm The road hadn’t been paved anytime in this century.

Delia’s 1990 Jetta could barely make it over the buckled pavement as she dipped and popped, her head grazing the ripped fabric of the ceiling. Route 89 was supposed to be a major thoroughfare in Utah, but this stretch of highway was a small part of a trip, not any kind of destination. The ruts and bumps could be briefly tolerated, then forgotten. This part of the road didn’t have to enter into your memory at all.

Delia had always wanted to go to Thistle. She had heard stories about the town growing up in Salt Lake—scary stories and sad stories, bedtime stories and stories only felt through whispers in the dark—and those stories stayed with her. Delia tucked them into her chest somewhere between her lungs and the stories nestled there like turtle doves bedding down. They cooed with the rising sun, before she was fully awake, before she had a chance to open her eyes and see the white of her walls. They murmured their small, birdy murmurs in the place right before light.

They woke her.

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When he hit her, the stories were what created the space in her head for the thought to form, a bubble, and pop, release the thought: Get out, go, go, now. It wasn’t the kind of hit you see in a movie, no broken cheekbones, no bloody nose, and it was the first time, but still. Still.

Everything was still, silent, waiting, this far out. She had even turned off the radio, the tinny wail of pop songs sounding too desperate against the silence. Even above the clunking of the engine, Delia felt that she could hear her bones creaking, her stomach complain, the echoing, aching rush of her eardrums.

The rest stop that claimed panoramic views was empty.

Just like the road before it, it was in poor repair, signs hanging half off their metal posts, the guardrail bent and rusted. Evidence of the slump, what they called the massive landslide that dammed up the Spanish Fork River, was a scar etched into the face of the valley.

She touched her own face. The left cheek still throbbed, gently, like it had its own, individual pulse.

As she looked out, she could hear her mother’s voice in her ear: April 17, 1983 was no ordinary day. It was the day of two very significant events: the birth of Delia Constance Brown and the death of the town of Thistle. Delia shuddered as the wind turned itself over, crashed into her body. The tunnel the mountains made held the cold of late April bright and clean against the sun.

They had learned about this area in school, when Delia took geology at BYU, her one concession to the natural sciences.

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The Wasatch Plateau was a hellmouth of disaster, due for a massive earthquake any moment now. That was how Professor Egan had always said it, Any moment now… Always pausing before she began her new sentence, like a cue. Delia took a deep breath every time that pause lit up the basement classroom, studying the shape of the area, a smaller Utah inside the larger outline on the map.

Her mother used to tell her that it was the nature of maps to always force you to choose. And any choice meant discarding something else. Any way is a loss. Any direction. Any choice. Delia grasped her own hands together against the softness of her stomach, but it was no use. The body knew better—she was alone, nearing thirty and holding her own hand for comfort in the middle of nowhere.

That dimly lit room, fluorescents half-on to better view the projector Professor Egan preferred to the virtual blackboard behind it, was the same place Delia had seen Thistle for the first time. In the initial slides, it was a movie set. A town that looked ready for a gunslinger and a sheriff to have a shoot-out down near the saloon while the player piano whined on in the background. It was idyllic in the way that only a picture can be. And then, without preamble, the slides shifted and the movie Delia was watching had changed. Destruction everywhere, on a scale she had never seen in person. Most of the town simply wiped out. Water clogged buildings choked with shoes and papers and everything else the few remaining inhabitants had left behind. The aftermath, a scarred

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swath of landslide that marred the earth, cut through Thistle’s main street. Professor Egan’s voice rose above the images, as if the small, elderly professor were floating on the ceiling looking down: It’s about prevention. The surveyors had noticed the problem and failed to fix it because Thistle was no longer a strong revenue source for the railroads. The town had dwindled, so no one—not the state, the federal government, or the companies invested—thought it to be worth the time or money to fix the problem. The joke was on them in the end. Thistle was the most costly landslide in U.S. history. Factoring in inflation, when all was said and done, the oversight in geological planning cost $922 million dollars.

But Thistle wasn’t a grand disaster. It was no Pompeii. It was a ghost town, but there were no ghosts in it, no echo of tragedy. There has been no one caught in the slump. People had lived here and people had died here, and while Delia was certain that awful things had happened here, those awful things were no different from any other place. By the time she was born, by the time everything died here, only a few families were left. The town had never been more than 600 people at its height, and was a shadow of its former self when the slump ripped through. Her mother’s family had been long gone by then. Nothing linked her to the town in 1983 but some coincidental timing.

Delia knew all that, but still. Still she made her way down the slope.

Purple thistle cascaded down the incline, catching at the hem of her jeans. It was too early for the flowers, as they usually

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bloomed well into May. The resulting blooms were ragged and small, their usually sharp edges dull and unable to sting her through fabric. They were still sharp enough to catch Delia’s skin when she slipped and fell, skidding down the last half of the hill. Her engagement ring, which she still wore daily after eight years of marriage, turned on her recently thinned finger and cut into her palm. A small bead of blood rose where the setting had gone as far as to cut into her skin. Delia sat in the dirt for a moment, looking at the blood. It shone.

Delia wasn’t Mormon, though her ancestors had been, but she was a BYU legacy and got in early admission. Walking across BYU’s campus, all the Mormon couples were holding hands with one sparkling ring between them. Everyone she knew was engaged, if not by the end of freshman year, then soon after. There was wedding after wedding, shower after shower, modest bachelorette after modest bachelorette to attend. Delia had eight bridesmaids’ dresses in her closet, gathering dust, by the time she reached senior year. Each had their shoulders carefully covered. It bothered her.

Not that she wanted to get married. Not that she wanted a diamond. She wanted a man. Delia had always dreamed of a man with thick wrists and a slight frame, tall and willowy, but strong. A sylph of strength. Smart. Didn’t have to be kind, she didn’t want him to be good. Smart was enough. The BYU boys had a sweetness that made her feel corrupt and broken. She wanted someone who was harsher than her.

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Cue Aaron.

Delia stood up, shaking the blood from her palm and bringing it to her mouth. The taste of salt and iron on her tongue felt right, correct. As if her body wasn’t whole anymore, as if it should, somehow, be falling to pieces. She tried to stand up and felt a tenderness in her ankle, as if it wouldn’t be able to support her full weight. Delia winced once and walked on.

She couldn’t see Thistle from the bottom of the hill, but the scar was an undeniable pathway. The ground had been disfigured and it was somehow beautiful, the way it churned up and exposed what was underneath. The mica glinted in the weak sunlight that filtered through the clouds, her feet crushing it into finer powder. There was no specific color to the dirt, but instead a spectrum that whipped itself around her in the wind, dusting her boots and layering her mouth with grit. No roads lead to Thistle, and the train tracks were washed out in the slump. Delia had never seen a place so secluded, growing up in the city, going to school in the city, marrying and staying in the city. Only a geological blemish on the face of the earth was there to mark out that anything was there at all. Or had been.

Delia and her mother had always meant to go to Thistle together. Where her mother’s grandmother had worked at the train station during WWI. Where Delia’s grandmother had been born.

Where a long-ago piece of the puzzle that was Delia’s life had been formed, the precursor, the preface, the prologue. The town of the

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strange coincidence, as she had thought of it as a child, making it into a Nancy Drew mystery.

It’s not as if Delia had thought of Thistle every day for almost thirty years. No, it was nothing like that kind of burning obsession, that ripping and tearing kind of fascination. It was that it kept cropping up. The day she was born. Her mother’s stories.

Professor Egan’s class. Aaron’s historical research as a BYU associate professor. Thistle followed her. Thistle was the one obsessed.

Now Delia was here, alone, palms up and open and empty, limping and bleeding a little, but here nonetheless. Or almost here, her ankle whimpering and slowing her progress. She wished she had thought to bring a jacket when she ran out of the house this morning, but she had been running, literally running. And she felt lucky she had thought to grab anything besides what she was wearing at all. Though the jeans were too tight and she had boots, but no socks, she was warm enough, even as the sun was hidden behind a cloudbank.

Just as everything happens, suddenly, the town swam into view. It swam in wavy lines, like a heatstroke, like a mirage, as if it was being created in front of her. Delia couldn’t breathe for a moment, a moment so much like the pause Professor Egan used to make between now…and the words that followed after. A moment where something is expected, but nothing ever actually happens.

This day was no different, but so completely different. Because as

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the wind died down, the town of Thistle straightened out and there it was, it was right there in front of Delia. The stories in her chest fluttered their wings as if breathing again as Delia finally exhaled. A fairytale, a picture, a dream in reality.

It wasn’t much of a dream though, and not really fairytalelike at all. As for a picture, Professor Egan’s slideshow was based on much older snapshots, taken not too long after the slump and flood rammed through. Delia could tell, even from a distance, that the town had become even more ghostly and decrepit. It was the palimpsest of a place where people once existed, but only that shadow. Nothing living remained.

She came upon the train station first, the sign above the still-standing brick arch missing the “I” and “LE.” Welcome to THST. As if the name of the place was so deeply tied to the idea of the place that the sign couldn’t hold out. Delia turned her palm over and studied the still bleeding mark on her palm. Was that the same? Was the ring rebelling because she had run? Was Aaron’s digging into his skin too, after what he had done to her? They weren’t really Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright anymore, if they had ever been.

It had been illicit in the beginning, the senior coed and the young, dashing associate professor. And illicit always has an undercurrent of fun and danger and something special. It was the stuff of a romance novel, the cheesiest kind, the kind English major Delia and Historian Aaron would never stoop so low as to

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even look at. They ignored those kinds of novels as they perused the musty shelves of Salt Lake’s used bookstores, pretending they didn’t know each other, but brushing hands in the aisles to send up small puffs of dust. They took weekends out of town where they pretended to be married in small bed and breakfasts in the mountains. They had sex on the desk in Aaron’s cramped closet of an office with the door locked and his hand over her mouth to muffle any sounds he prompted from her. He was tall and lean and his wrists were about average. He was smart and he wasn’t sweet, or at least he was old enough to Delia’s eyes that it seemed like he wasn’t. He was enough. He was different enough.

Delia graduated, he proposed, she said yes. That’s what you did. When someone proposes and you love them or you’ve been sleeping with them for long enough, you say yes. Right?

Because Delia’s mother wasn’t around anymore to insist on a big wedding, the couple went to City Hall and dealt with it quickly and efficiently. And so it goes. And so it went, eight years. Aaron worked at BYU, Delia in one of the bookstores they used to frequent, writing late into the night. For eight years she felt the dust creeping inside her and she tried to breathe it out into the darkness, shake it out through a pen, a computer screen, a typewriter. But the stories stayed sleeping, the stories never came. Delia felt like a zombie, writing working fucking cooking cleaning, it was constant, all that living never stopped. But it stopped inside of Delia, even while her body still moved.

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She ran her hands up and down the brick arch, propped up on wooden stilts. She wondered what would happen if she pulled on the braces, if she would be buried or if the structure would hold. She just wasn’t sure it was corporeal enough to touch her. It was real. It was there, it wasn’t a mirage. But Thistle wasn’t really a town at all anymore or really a place. It was a place where something once was, a collection of ruins. On their honeymoon, Aaron and Delia had gone to Pompeii. That was still a place, somehow; there were still people in it. The mummified and the tourists, making Frankenstein’s monster out of the remains. It lives!

But there were no monuments here, no placards. Even the rest stop has failed to announce Thistle’s location, or previous location, or ruins. The world pretended there was nothing to see here.

Pompeii had been hot. They were there because Aaron wanted to be there, because of the history of it, as he would say.

When they had sex in the hotel after sweating through their clothes all day, Aaron was rough with her. As if in this place, so far from their normal, the façade he had carefully constructed fell away.

Even though his wrists were simply average, they were attached to hands strong enough to leave bruises on her wrists. His voice rasped in her ear, berating her, cursing her, telling her exactly what he thought she was. His hipbones slammed against her again and again, leaving bruises on the inside of her thighs. She felt nothing.

She floated up to the ceiling and looked down on the tiny, bird-like creature Aaron crushed underneath him. The stories glowed inside

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her chest, she could see them lighting up her bones. Delia smiled.

Delia knew what he wanted, he wanted to break her. Delia let him.

After, he held her and told her he loved her. She said it back, but she couldn’t hear her own voice in the closet-like hotel room. It was sucked up by the heat, the way their bodies stuck together. It was sucked up by how little there was to say anymore.

It was getting late. The sun was creeping down and the wind was picking up. The town smelled like fetid water, like weeds decaying slowly, stewing. Delia limped her way away from the arch, entering the town proper. Improper now, nowhere for anyone to live. Fireweed had overrun Main Street, mixed in with the flowering thistles. Here, they grew up to her hip and their thorny blooms were razors. They found the holes the weave of Delia’s sweater and sunk into her flesh. There was more flesh than she was used to, her stomach swelling slightly against her pants. She put her hands on it, lightly, as if testing its ability to respond.

A few storefronts still stood, stark against the valley behind them. Empty windows staring eyes, they watched Delia back. But there was nothing behind them. She wondered what she had expected to find here. Her mother? Her mother had been gone ten years. Delia had watched her die for nine months during her junior year of college, and then she was suddenly gone. Lung cancer. It was an easy thing to say, a harder thing to explain.

When Aaron hit her, because she was sad, because he was sad, because they didn’t know how to talk anymore, because

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because because, did it matter? When Aaron hit her, Delia thought of her mother’s face in the hospital that last time Delia had seen her. It was shrunken, etched out of bone, swimming above the sheets that were starched in a way that could only mean impending death. She thought her own face must have looked like that when Aaron’s hand connected with her cheekbone. Not shocked, not hurt, just dead, almost dying, lost forever. She couldn’t really even say what they had been fighting about. They weren’t yelling. They were just having dinner. They were just doing what they’d done for eight years. Done. Wouldn’t do anymore.

In the midst of the early spring evening, Delia was abruptly sure of that.

She wandered through the rest of the ruins. There wasn’t much to see, really. The train arch, a few buildings, rotting and rusted out, shells that didn’t know how to echo. The edges of evening were purpling the sky. She wouldn’t be able to see anything soon, unless there was a full moon. Still, Delia stood there, looking the reality of what had haunted her throughout her life. It was nothing. It was mentioned only because a railroad once ran through it, remembered only because it was a surprisingly costly landslide. No one died. No one mourned it too severely. Thistle was just a word now, the name of a particularly annoying plant. It wasn’t even a story.

The last building Delia came upon, at the farthest reaches of what you couldn’t really call a town, was still choked with water.

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Thigh-deep and murky, Delia put her palm against the liquid. It responded, sending concentric circles out into the dark. The structure looked like a fluid-filled lung, gasping for air. A face bloated from chemo, from a punch, like something that refused to leave the earth but stood, insisting upon its existence. Delia held her breath in the pause between the now…and whatever would follow after. But Thistle was silent. Thistle was dead.

April 17, 1983 was no ordinary day. It was the day of two very significant events: the birth of Delia Constance Brown and the death of the town of Thistle.

In the gathering dark, she slumped against the outside husk of what was once a home and began to suck in the slightly fusty air in giant, greedy gulps. The stars were winking on above her. There were so many without the light pollution of Salt Lake. If she floated away from herself now, there would be no way to come back. She would just keep floating, forever, up and up and up. She would bump into a star and burn out. She kept breathing, hard and harder until the cold air made her lungs hurt and she felt the space they took up in her ribcage as a clean outline.

The stories banged against her ribs, as if they finally wanted to vacate their warm spot in Delia’s chest. They no longer cooed, but screamed. The stories wailed and thumped in time with her heart, asking, pleading, begging. They were awake. They were ready to live.

Delia let them go.

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For a moment, she thought she could hear a voice, or an echo of a voice. For a moment, she thought someone could be, should be, maybe was there. For a moment, there was at least the idea of someone else, out there in the dark.

“Hello?” But Delia’s voice didn’t even return to her. No one answered. ☼☀☼ Devon Bohm (she/her) received her BA from Smith College and earned her MFA with a dual concentration in Poetry and Fiction from Fairfield University. She has been awarded the Hatfield Prize for Best Short Story, was longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top Very Short Fictions, and has received two honorable mentions in L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest—winning the contest in the 2nd Quarter of 2022.

Her work has also been featured in publications such as Labrys, The Graveyard Zine, Horse Egg Literary, Necessary Fiction, Eunoia Review, Spry, Sixfold, Hole In The Head Review, orangepeel, Helix Magazine, Sunday Mornings at the River’s 365 Days of Covid anthology, and is upcoming in boats against the current and Discretionary Love. Her first book of poetry, Careful Cartography, was published in November 2021 by Cornerstone Press as part of their Portage Poetry series. The collection was the recipient of the 2022 First Horizons Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Award, receiving the distinction for an outstanding publication by an academic press.

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“Ritual” Erin Bryant Petty

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Parasite/Psyche Robin Kinzer When we modeled together—two pin-up girls stripped to luminous bare, twining around one another, delicate and taut as thread—the name you took was Psyche.

I adored Greek Mythology, but didn’t remember much about Psyche. Later, after you left me for your cousin, I paged through acres of internet articles about her mythos. Tears drove down my cheeks at gale force. I discovered she was the daughter of silk-spun Aphrodite—human but just as beautiful. Her name meant breath of life, much how I once viewed you.

But I’ve long seen past the choking smoke and mottled mirrors you present, calling yourself empath, sensitive, insecure.

Swearing: I just feel everything. Psyche nearly died in the pursuit of beauty, was then saved by her lover, made goddess of the soul. You did love to be rescued. To sink your fingers into the meat of other’s souls.

I worshiped at your altar for seventeen years, but when finally my lenses were crystalled clear, I saw you as soulsucker rather than soulmate. As parasite rather than paramour.

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I used to sing you lullabies at night, backdropped by pop music; a really gay, romantic sort of karaoke. Taylor Swift, Halsey, Hozier. The week before you left, you made a playlist of every one of those lullabies. I wonder if you were archiving me in preparation for the end. Cataloging our seventeen year soundtrack.

Loving you was always a little like gazing directly into the sun. It seemed like a good idea on instinct, all that scintillate and shine. But you’ll burn right through your sensitive slivers of retina, and soon won’t be able to see at all.

Maybe all those hours laced together on my thrift store mattress, island on glossy black bedroom floor, I did stare into you like the sun. When your eyes gripped mine, I could see nothing outside of you. Maybe that’s how I missed the truth for so long.

You are not burnished sun or glorious moon, are certainly not seer of souls. You are just a really sad woman with bony ankles, full lips, and bronze-flecked eyes wide as an infant’s, worshiping yourself as false idol.

When we modeled together, my name was simply Bird.

You called me Pink Bird, Sweet Bird, my Bird, Lovebird. Wreathed spindly legs around my full hips, pulled me close.

Now I leave you wholly behind, pink and teal feathers pumping like full fist of human heart. I will not scald my wings to sun like Icarus. I leave you to fields full of palm-cupped supplicants, each of them as fooled as I was for nearly two decades.

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Each of them wide-eyed and quivering, convinced you are the very stuff of spirit.

I leave you to your abundance of orange bottles with labels scratched off. To your seventy-six year-old cousin who can write you prescriptions, who will leave you millions. I was sure you were goddess, but in the end, you were parasite—no dominion over anything but dried blood.

Psyche, lost love not because you cracked my heart to clay, but because you never actually existed.

Psyche, I did once believe your eyes were the vast brown moons I orbited— that if anyone knew my soul, it was you. Now I know you were just draining me of usefulness and spitfire, squeezing the blood-rich from me until you found a cushier option.

Psyche, I will never send you another poem; never write you another three a.m. love letter; never again run fingers through the pomegranate of your hair.

Only flight is left to me now. ☼☀☼ Robin Kinzer (she/her) is a queer, disabled poet, memoirist, and editor. Robin has poems and essays published, or forthcoming, in Cleaver Magazine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Blood Orange Review, fifth wheel press, Delicate Friend, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She’s a Poetry Editor for the winnow magazine. She loves glitter, Ferris wheels, vintage fashion,

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sloths, and radical empathy. She can be found on Twitter at @RobinAKinzer and at www.robinkinzer.com.

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To Fill Homes Thirsty Cracks Madalena Daleziou Laeta flinched as she pressed the salve on her nose. When she left her satchel on the coffee table, the corridor mirror revealed a pale line around her left shoulder and upper back where the leather strap had been. The rest of her skin was angering fast.

With a groan, she dipped her fingertips into more of the greenish ointment that soothed the pain but would help little when she shed half her skin on the bedsheets. Her head was throbbing like punishment for her ancestors’ sins—a constant, dull murmur behind her eyes. If wings and feathers could get sunstruck too, she’d swear hers were burning, though mother would say this was just sore muscles. It’s what you get when you don’t fly often enough.

Laeta’s hands left oily stains on the satchel as she dug into it the morning’s harvest; her palms were coated with salve more than any other part, but she could still hardly use them without grimacing in pain.

She had flown too close again.

And yet less close than anyone in her cohort.

After days and fortnights and years of failures, Leata had learnt not to sulk about her meager harvest. This didn’t mean that

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she was proud of the single fire bloom in her satchel, crammed between a poetry book she had forgotten to take out and the jar of ointment she carried everywhere. A single bloom, and rather battered, too. The spores it’d give would be nothing during the winter.

The sun wouldn’t subside when the summer ended. It’d still give Laeta headaches, and not even one flower as compensation. Which was cruel because the cold would still bury its teeth in the island’s flesh.

At times like this, she felt the guiltiest to be the chief’s daughter. If this weren’t the case, Laeta’s grandmother would have been all cranky because the Gardeners wouldn’t give them enough spores to burn. Chilblains would have grown on Mother’s hands, and Laeta’s little siblings would fail to warm themselves no matter how they rubbed their hands together.

For their sake, she was grateful not to live in the port town or the poor villages far north, to have been born on the chief’s mountain, with the world at her feet. For her own sake—well, she didn’t get to think of that. Sighing, she wiped the excess of cream on her tunic and took the bloom in her aching fingers, bracing herself for the Gardeners’ condescending smirks.

She almost bumped on Thomais, who walked without seeing what lay in front of her, sun-drunk and struggling to keep her satchel shut. It was swollen with blooms.

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Her eyes fell on Laeta’s sole flower. There was something forced in her smile when she looked up and locked arms with Laeta. “Let’s meet the Gardeners, shall we?” Laeta tried not to flinch. Even protected under thin flowy sleeves, her arms were tender.

“You got more this time.” Laeta said to fill the silence and pretend she could keep up with Thomais as they went down the marble steps into the fire fields. She hoped she didn’t say it jealously.

“I don’t know how. I didn’t train much or anything. It just… happened.” One could easily tell that Thomais was trying not to sound guilty.

She did anyway. ☼ At the creak of the gate, Gardener Arethas lowered his little round glasses in anticipation. He hobbled towards them, leaning a bit to favor his good side as he’d done ever since he’d broken his left wing some two years ago.

Laeta had never seen his thin lips break into a smile. But his eyebrows disappeared under the sparse hair of his forehead upon gazing Thomais’ harvest.

“All this? By yourself?”

His eyebrows returned, shading his hooded lids ominously when his glance shifted to Laeta’s lonely flower.

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“We got them together. A dozen or so are hers,” Thomais said quickly. “Her own satchel broke.”

“Is that so?”

Nothing in Thomais’ voice betrayed the lie but the Gardener didn’t seem persuaded.

“You should’ve seen how close she flew this time. Look how badly burnt she got.”

Gardener Atilia, younger, not yet as burdened, with two unbroken wings that still recalled her sun-romancing days, took the flowers cheerfully enough.

“No cohort has brought as much at once, let alone a single pair.” She was already on her knees piercing little holes in the ground to house each blossom. There, under the sun and rare autumn rain, they would come alive in reverse, unplucked, growing roots, and giving five or ten spores out of the single spore that, with the sun’s gaze, had birthed them. The better the bloom, the more the spores.

“Spores are spores,” Atilia murmured as if to herself.

“Who cares who the flower comes from?”

Laeta couldn’t prove that this was meant as a personal insult to her. But it felt that way. ☼ Leata’s skin fell in flakes over the days that followed. The shadow of the headache she got after landing cracked. Then it broke like a watermelon, until she feared her skull itself would split,

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spilling over the marble steps that led to the Inner Gardens where the fire blooms were already spitting spores.

Because of it, she missed the next couple of sun flights.

When the throbbing and the nausea subsided, she kept laying abed, shedding skin and making plans. The fog in her mind soon erased them from her memory.

When the fog cleared, she feigned illness for a couple more days, which she spent reading in secret. There must be another way for her to prove her worth. Another way to keep the island safe from the biting winters. Some plan that wouldn’t require her to burn. She was nearly certain she could find it if only they’d let her look instead of sending her up there.

Then again, she alone was struggling out of her cohort of two dozen. A pallid ghost since her infancy, where most of her people tanned into golden and brown undertones which only paled during the brief cold moon turns after the endless, scorching summer.

It hadn’t always been like this. Once, the sun had been kind. Once, even a human could fly on a summer day on makeshift wax wings. But no human and no makeshift wings had evolved enough to brave this new cruel sun and give him offerings. Not like Aetii had.

It seemed that Laeta’s was still too human despite her eagle-like wings.

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Her room had grown stuffy. She wiped a bead of sweat with her thumb. If she stayed shut any longer, she’d start thinking of her trial and how she was bound to fail it, what with headaches confining her on the ground one third of the time.

She threw a pale green tunic overhead and flew barefoot to the bay while the island was asleep. ☼ The night carried the scent of jasmine and lavender. The rocks, sun-baked throughout the day, were still too warm for comfort, though the sand was pleasantly humid from the tideswollen waves.

Laeta's eyes rested on the dancing private vessels where voyagers were sleeping, lulled by the sea. Once, when she was little, a captain from Astar had taken her along as she circumnavigated the island. She had never felt so alive as she had during the ship’s unpredictable rocking, with salt and water spraying her face. It was nearly as good as flying, and the sun had hardly bothered her; there was a room in the belly of the small ship, and a tent to go under when it became too much.

Now she walked along the pier, to where other, more elaborate vessels had made their temporary home. Under the night’s veils it was only when she got close to the edge that she saw another soul sitting there, legs dangling, eyes to the lighthouse.

Matt had come to the island not three moon turns ago, but it felt as if he’d always been there. An afterthought of ink, black

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clad and black haired, the rest of him as pale as Laeta, if not more so. He seemed to be everywhere; in the shadowy corner of the coffee room, where sun rays never found their way in; lounging at her favorite reading spot under the old pine; haunting the sleeping bay. His father was fixing ships for the island’s wingless humans.

“When else can I roam?” The two of them still laughed about how he once got only his left cheek sunburnt when he read on the same spot for too long.

“At least you can go from one shade to the other without people sending you up to the sun for errands.”

Matt sighed with longing before replying. “Well, at least you can survive those errands. Sun is a useless imp where I’m from when it bothers to come out at all. You don’t know how lucky you are. I’d let this country’s sun boil me if I could.”

He’d always voice something outrageous like that, as if to ground Laeta just when she was tempted to call him a friend.

As if a visitor could understand. He could lounge all he wanted from a safe distance in the sun’s balmy embrace. If it burnt him, well, he had nothing better to do than lie around on cool sheets and wait for the dizziness to pass. Non-islanders didn’t have to base their livelihood on the flaming orb’s whims.

“Boil, then. At least you won’t have to worry about being cold, when this—” she stretched her arms, encompassing the many

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foreign ships, and the rubbish they left in their wake “—is all over for the season.”

“I can’t imagine this land falling prey to winter.”

Laeta fought the urge to elbow him. His wingless kind always sailed into the sunset before things turned ugly. “Imagine harder.”

But for all her disdain, she had come to look forward to their encounters. Talking to her cohort only made her want to disappear in her room, blinds down until autumn finally deigned to show up.

The dying leaves, of course, would never mean an end to her struggles. As the days shortened, Mother would pace up and down in the halls, trying vainly to come up with ways to keep the island going. What would she do next? Send one of Laeta’s young siblings up to the sun? Go herself at her old age? If her eldest child was her cohort’s shame, how could the chief expect anyone to do their bit?

And then, there was Thomais. The cohort’s star, in love with the sun as much as Laeta was with this sweet late night, or the clouds that occasionally became her cloak and kept her a tiny bit safer—though they were not an optimal environment for spores to grow.

If one person could really help the island, that was Thomais. But she wouldn’t. Countless times, Laeta had seen her pretend to struggle, refusing to fly as high as she could. Waiting on

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her. And those rare times that she actually did something her potential, her cheeks would burn not with sunburn but with shame.

“Are you imagining harder?”

The words made her jump and almost slip into the water.

Matt chuckled. “You’ve been staring at the lighthouse the past five minutes.”

She had. Thinking was her one talent, apparently. Resisting the urge to pick at her peeling skin, Laeta took a flat stone between thumb and forefinger and threw it into the water with a rage that overtook her upper body and made her arm ache.

She could think all she wanted, chat with the tourist to her heart’s content but it wouldn’t help with her trials. Or keep the island warm.

“Can you find me a safe way to fly close to the sun before next spring?” she snapped, spitting his language back at him with a strong accent.

Matt leaned back on his elbows. He smiled all teeth. “I could come up with something.” ☼ Laeta screamed with wild joy for all the mountains to hear.

The tiny airship gave her stomach the sinking feeling of excitement she’d experienced many summers ago in the visiting captain’s vessel.

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It wasn’t much larger than a cabinet, with flaps that looked like giant moth wings and an engine that wouldn’t stop screeching.

There were sails and ship cloth on top, blocking the rays. In the sole uncovered side, spores lay on a bowl that Matt had glued into the airship’s floor.

“You made this? I thought you were only ever lounging about and reading.”

Matt grinned. “And what did you think I did when I had to hide from the sun?”

“How many spores did you use to fuel that?”

“Sixty-five, give or take. The old man at the open market charged me a month’s wages for it.”

Just as she was about to call him a friend. The expense was so huge that Laeta couldn’t even register it. More spores than she had ever made in any single year, enough to warm a house for a week. Unless Matt planned to give her his wages, too, this was never going to work. She still guiltily enjoyed the air that slapped her face.

“Now will you tell me what the trial is about?”

Laeta looked at him levelly. Part of her wanted to keep her people’s customs hidden from the visitors’ eyes. But it was no real secret. Besides, he’d be gone before the last jasmine blossoms died.

Before it was time to dry the season’s last figs or make jam out of them to last them the winter.

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“When an Aetius is about to come of age, they must travel to some far-off land and find another Aetius, who lives elsewhere.

If they succeed within the year, they come back as adult members of their people. But I didn’t think I could manage such a long flight until today.”

She was barely able to finish her phrase when the airship sank several meters down before settling at an uncertain, shaky floating. Matt messed with the levers and the steering wheel to no avail.

“You mean that a week’s supply of spores wasn’t enough for it?”

“How would I know?” he shouted against the complaining engine. “I’ve never—” At one his frantic motions at the control panel, the airship jerked upwards.

Heart hammering, Leata held on to one of the sails. They were rushing toward the sun. Biting her lip, holding the ship cloth like a shield with one hand, she took the spores with the other. Her people all had to go to the sun when they were young, as if their youth was an offering to the flaming orb. While Laeta needed some extra help, she could still present the spores with her own hand.

They were so close now. Not even the winds could dry their sweat. “Closer,” Laeta said. “Hold on for a moment longer.”

Matt’s knuckles were bone-white as he squeezed the steering wheel. Laeta stretched her arm an inch further. The sun almost touched the airship now. In her palm, the spores began to

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quicken. She had taken twenty, more than she ever dared before, for she had never managed to grow more than a couple of blooms.

Now it was as if it rained flowers.

One more and she would be the star of her cohort, only second to Thomais— The engine stopped screaming and the airship took another dive downwards. A burnt smell reached her nostrils. There was smoke in the air. She had little knowledge of the machines humans made to substitute for wings. But she needed no technical knowledge at all to know this wasn’t going to be an easy fix.

Laeta wasn’t strong, but she still had wings. “Hold on to me,” she screamed. Matt was too heavy to cling on her while she flew, but she could at least slow their fall.

When they finally sank, it was no worse that it would be had they dived off one of the high rocks around the beach. They surfaced breathless and laughing uncontrollably in spite of themselves. Laeta’s wings were twice their weight, sea-drunk, and the salt made her eyes sting. Yet, she hadn’t felt so alive since she got sent up there with a satchel and nothing else. Only moments later, when she found her breath, did she register the throbbing pain where her hand had gotten too close to the sunrays.

The back of her palm was burnt. Not sunburnt but scorched as if she had touched a candle flame.

Matt’s airship had been a good idea. But she needed a more drastic one.

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☼ That winter was the cruelest yet. Laeta’s red limbs and face returned to their old paleness before splitting bloody from the dry cold. It didn’t rain once; the sun never stopped showing its face. It smiled upon them, a toothy grin that prevented none of the north winds’ bite, nor the treacherous morning frost that made Laeta’s little brother slip and break his leg as he run down to the spiral gardens. The spores needed rain to grow, and the season yielded them none.

Before Laeta knew it was spring again and she was at the bay, satchel at hand, facing the sun that was already firing the ghost of a headache behind her eyes. In her satchel she carried dry beans and sunflower seeds and what little else they would import or grow in the cold draught. An empty backpack rested on her shoulders.

For whatever she was going to bring from the Aetius she was meeting along the way. And for the blooms she was supposed to carry home.

Next to her, Thomais was biting the chapped skin off her lips. There was a bead of blood in her mouth when she took Laeta’s hand. “We can do it, both of us,” Thomais said. We’ll become adults together and come back and serve the island together.”

“There’s more than one way to serve the island, you know.”

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Thomais could hardly stand in one place. Her legs were shaking nervously. “It won’t be that hard. We’ll stick together. I’ll hold an umbrella over you if I must, I will—” “What?” Laeta smiled. “Will you let me keep you away from the sun?”

Thomais hadn’t prepared an answer to that, it seemed. The roots of her long chestnut braids seemed one-note without the sun’s golden kiss. She, too, had grown paler over the brief winter, but her own pallor was still only a foreshadowing of the rich tan that would follow. Taking a step back, Laeta took in the rest of the cohort who were talking anxiously among themselves in small groups. Many were pale like her, but they all craved the warmth and none of them became incapacitated for days after a single harvest.

“We’ll serve this island together,” her friend insisted.

“Promise?”

Laeta squeezed Thomais’ hand until her nails got buried in flesh. “Promise.” She didn’t promise they would be together through it all. “Look,” she told her friend “I—” She swallowed hard. There was no easy way to say that your home can’t keep you.

“I—don’t worry if I’m late. North of here, and many countries up, there’s another isle. There aren’t many Aetii there, but my friend Matt has seen a few. There are clouds enough there to keep me safe most of the way and—and who knows? I might even find something new to help our people.”

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Thomais’ eyes widened. Her eyebrows came together, but she voiced nothing. She wasn’t as surprised as she might have been.

“I will come back,” Laeta went on. “Promise. But if I’m late, well—” it hurt to say the next bit. But it was about time.

“Don’t you dare say no if my mother names you her successor. She might have to. None of the cohort can fly as high as you. Don’t waste it because of guilt.”

Thomais ran the backs of her thumbs against her eyelids, both shut tightly. Laeta couldn’t get a single word out of her through her mother’s ceremonial speech. Only when it was nearly time to take flight did Thomais whisper: “But don’t be gone for too long.”

There was no time to answer. The silver bell on top of the highest mountain top filled the island with a melancholic ring that scared the seagulls at the shore.

“I’ll send your mother your love,” Laeta called at her friend before kicking the ground.

Thomais brought the back of the palm against her mouth.

This had always been the island’s rule; chief and second. One to keep the island in order, think of ways to keep it alive. The other to fly away, in distant lands, where, perhaps, some hope would wait hidden, if none could be found in the island.

Without waiting for her reply, Laeta threw her backpack at Thomais who caught it mid-air. She knew her friend would bring

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that and more if she didn’t worry about overshadowing the chief’s daughter.

Laeta turned her back before they could come after her, spreading her wings to fly, not higher, but further than anyone in her cohort has ever dared. To the opposite direction, no less.

It takes heart to fly too close to the sun. Sometimes, Laeta supposed, it takes more to turn your back to it and, perhaps, bring back rain to fill home’s thirsty cracks. ☼☀☼ Madalena Daleziou (she/her) is a Rhysling and Pushcart-nominated writer from Greece, currently living in the UK. Her work has previously appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Deadlands, and other venues. She can most often be found in a bookshop or in front of a keyboard, writing stories with too many ghosts. She tweets at @LBooklott.

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“On Fire” Sadee Bee

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One for the Road Deborah Zafer I think Gabrielle was the last person on earth to wear clothes.

They say that when children saw her, they averted their eyes, embarrassed.

When I met her though, she was beautiful. We both were.

It was the hottest day London had ever experienced and even with all the windows thrown open and the fan trying its best to move the air around, it was sweltering. I barely tolerated my vest but Chris, the manager, insisted.

“Let me tell you a secret my man Daniel,” Gabrielle said, clocking my name badge as I poured her pint, “there will come a time when you will have to decide what you stand for and you must not falter.” She banged the bar for emphasis.

“Uh huh,” I said. I’d not met her before but I was used to crazy talk and keen to earn tips, “tell me more.”

“It’s like this,” she said, taking a stool, “you see the way things are going? It’s the coming of the dark times is what it is. I’m telling you. And we will all need to pick sides one way or the other.”

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“I see,” I said, putting the glass down on a beermat in front of her and wiping around it where there were crumbs left by the person who had sat there before. “So, what will these dark times look like then, do you think?”

Droplets ran down the outside of the glass as she picked it up.

Offer to buy me one, I thought to myself, imagining how it would feel going down my throat, all cold and delicious.

“That’s the thing,” she said, seemingly oblivious to my thirst, “it won’t look like anything at first. It will just be a series of small choices one after the other that we all make until one day– BOOM–we wake up and we’re on the other side of the abyss.

Unless we’re careful, that is.”

“OK,” I said, unstacking glasses from the hot washer ready for the evening rush. “I get you, but if what you say is true, maybe it has already started. Maybe this is it now? Maybe you sitting here and me serving you and us talking like this is already part of the dark times. Have you thought about that?”

“I have indeed,” she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out a pack of cigarettes which she slid towards me.

“Nah,” I said, “not for me, thanks.”

“Back in a minute,” she said, sliding off the stool and going outside to smoke in the shade.

As she walked away, I noticed how small she was and how delicate. If I hadn’t been working, I might have gone outside too,

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for the companionship, but as it was, I went back to stacking glasses. My thoughts drifted away from the end times towards more pleasant things like what takeaway I might order that night or what I might watch as I fell asleep.

“Do you want to know the answer then?” she said, seeming to appear from nowhere. I turned to see her on the bar stool again.

“To what?”

“To how I know these aren’t the dark times yet. You know, like you asked?”

‘Sure,” I said, “enlighten me.”

“Well,” she said, arms on the bar, “think about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and how it was only after they ate the apple that they knew being naked was weird, right?”

“Uh huh,” I said, “I remember the story.”

“Right, well. The dark times will be here when we no longer know why we should be ashamed or even that we should be,” she said, throwing the glass back to catch the last drops. “It will be when we no longer even talk about climate change or war or any of that. Any knowledge we have evaporates. Poof. Buried in a haze of social media and press-of-a-button food. You’ll see. It will happen.”

“You mean like a reverse Garden of Eden?” I said, leaning back against the fridge, wondering if she was a mind-reader as well as crazy.

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“Exactly,” she said, “like we’ve put the apples back on the tree and said no thank you mate, no knowledge for me today. Just make me innocent again.”

“It doesn’t sound so bad though,” I said, “it sounds OK.” “Maybe,” she said, putting a fiver on the bar and climbing down off the stool. “But it’s not living, is it? Not really. Think about that while you have a drink on me.”

“I will,” I said, waving and starting to pull the pint as she went out into the heat, “thank you.”

I didn’t think about her again after that, to be honest. The years went by in a haze until she appeared on my TikTok feed one evening around nine years later.

Everyone had stopped wearing clothes by then. It was just too hot. We weren’t ashamed and I guess I thought it was beautiful the way our naked forms moved around the city unabashed. I could barely remember what it felt like to have anything between me and the sun or why I had ever thought it necessary.

Seeing her there gave me a shock though. She was standing on top of a hill wearing something I recognized as having once been a cloak and there were others around her cradling remnants like they were holy relics. She was slighter than ever but unmistakably the same person. More beautiful even, maybe.

I wanted to tell her to stop, to take care, but she had disabled comments a long time ago. She had too many followers I guess, all waiting to watch her fall.

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Instead, I raised my empty glass to her, wherever she was, whatever she thought she was doing as she leapt up, up, up towards the sun leaving her cloak lying on the ground like a pair of discarded wings. ☼☀☼ Deborah Zafer (she/her) lives in London. She mostly writes short fiction and is working (very slowly) on her first collection. Her writing has been published in 3am Magazine, Scrawl Place, Lilith, Jewish Fiction, and Janus Literary. She can be found on twitter @deborahzafer and at www.deborahzafer.com.

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Tavvauvusi: The Shaman’s Vision Shelly Jones Once we dreamed of ravens swallowing the sky, their black feathers crystallizing, molting ice. This was a time of prosperity: the nanuq fat, roaming the floes; the nattiq barking from their glacial homes.

But now we dream of weasels, their whiskers twitching, troubles surfacing from below.

In search of answers, we travel beneath the ice, journeying to Sedna’s sacred realm. We comb the goddess’s hair, skimming crustaceans and sea slugs from her black wave. We wash her feet with sand, dead skin sloughing to the bottom of the ocean floor before blossoming into sea lilies.

Sated, the goddess nods and we begin our supplication.

We open our minds to the islands, let them speak through us in a language lost eons ago. We feel the islands weep as they sink further into the sea, their voices drowning, garbled, soon: silent. A few have already been lost, sinking beneath the water, unable to staunch the rising tides.

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The goddess smiles pitifully, extends her hands, fingers shorn, empty.

We begin our journey back from the depths, our hearts studded with frosty disillusion. Our eyes flutter open and we watch another atoll slip beneath the surface forever.

We say to you here: the islands seek our strength, to keep them alive in our memories, in the stories we pass down, their names melting on our tongue like snow. Do not let them disappear as easily as our breath, as fleeting as the sky’s dancing lights.

Tavvauvusi, the islands weep goodbye to us all. ☼☀☼ Shelly Jones (they/them) is a professor at a small college in upstate New York, where they teach classes in mythology, folklore, and writing. Their speculative work has been published by F&SF, Apex, The Future Fire, and elsewhere. Find them on Twitter @shellyjansen or at shellyjonesphd.wordpress.com.

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My Formaldehyde Darling; or, A Redress for the Female Creature S.M. Hallow He once told me the story of Icarus was not a warning against ambition.

It was a warning against the limitations of wax. ☼ “Elizabeth,” says Henry.

I slice the scalpel down your throat, and the dead flesh butterflies open.

Beneath lay the secret cherry of your larynx, which once named me beloved. There, too, lay the trachea that gasped at my sweet touches. My incision cuts an aisle through the noose’s bruise.

“Elizabeth,” he says again.

The scalpel in my steady hand cleanly slits your windpipe.

The scent of the preservatives scorches my nose; my head pounds with each chemical inhalation.

My stomach quivers but does not sicken.

“Elizabeth, it is nearing midnight,” he says.

“I can finish the work alone,” I say. “Sleep if you must.”

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“Elizabeth,” he says. “For God’s sake—Elizabeth, look at me.”

I raise my eyes to find him in the flickering dark. Curls of his ragged hair stick up in every direction, teased there by ceaselessly worrying fingers. He always did love to worry, our Henry, but I doubt you ever saw him like this, with deep hollows hanging beneath the cratered moons of his eyes.

“I’ve already made an incision,” I say. “I’ll replace her trachea, then I shall rest.”

I do not know to whom this trachea belonged, but I thank this nameless stranger, robbed in death to lend you a new voice.

What will you sound like, I wonder, as I stitch you back together, thread by delicate thread. Will I still thrill when you pull me close and whisper, against my ear, that you love me?

“We need to discuss this,” he says. “It’s taking too long.”

“I’m working quite swiftly tonight,” I say.

“I meant,” he says, “the… resurrection.”

Undulating candle flames rust the room. Poor electricity ebbs in the sconces. Wallpaper peels in rat-scratched patches and spiderwebs dangle in the corners. It was the first out-of-the-way room Henry found, the first no-questions-asked nightmare we could transform into our macabre workshop. A macabre workshop that would be more suitable than the first disaster Henry saw fail.

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“It is taking longer than I hoped,” I admit, “but I will not repeat… his mistakes. Would you have been party to this, if you thought I were at all like him?”

“No,” he says at once.

“Then you must trust me,” I say. “Rest. And in the morning, we will be one day closer to restoring Justine to the life she deserves.”

If there is anything more he might say, he swallows it when I return to my work. He retreats, and relief edges into my shoulders now that you and I are alone again. Soon, my love, my dearest Justine, I promise. Soon ours will be the love that conquered death. ☼ Behind the closed door of the water closet, Henry vomits.

Meanwhile, I open your chest.

We learned anatomy with each other’s bodies. Sometimes I think I learned to count by kissing your fingers, by trailing my palm up your ribs. When you kissed me, I measured my own heart as it pulsed for you rabbit-fast. Now here I am, warring against time, replacing your liver with someone else’s, tucking it inside of you and sewing it in place, as if it were a hidden pocket in a skirt.

This work can drive one mad. Tend to the liver and the stomach starts to go. See to the calf and the shoulder withers. By the time you’ve fixed the fingertips, the tongue is rife with rot.

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Labyrinthine, in a way: around every corner, another horror, with no way to the exit.

Henry emerges from the water closet, wiping bile from his ashen lips. He says, in a tattered voice, “I cannot do this anymore.”

My hands still in the midst of suturing your abdomen.

“But we aren’t finished,” I say.

“It is time for us to surrender, Elizabeth.”

No, I think, but my voice won’t come. No, don’t take her from me again.

It was Henry who told me this was possible. Henry who stole the notebooks and the diagrams. It was Henry who saw the original workshop, who found a place where we could replicate what had been done. All this time, every new organ, every piece of flesh, has been because he sought what I required from the charnel houses and delivered it.

“If you care about her,” I say, “don’t do this.”

“If you care about her,” he says, “then we must end this and bury her properly.”

“If you care about redemption,” I say, “we must see this through.”

I swallow hard.

“If you had told the judge what you knew,” I venture, “we would not be here now.”

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He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. A grimace twists his mouth, and his shoulders wrack with a sob. He knew of the daemon, glanced it in the shadows, fought it off with a torch.

He listened to the mad rambles of its creator. If he suspected the true murderer, he said nothing until you were already swinging from the gallows.

Either you tell her or I will.

That was the ultimatum Henry gave him, and it was no mere bluff. When you died, Justine, I could not fathom a world without you in it, and Henry promised I would not bear your absence long. Now I promise you: we will not be apart much longer.

“This thing that motivates you to such lengths,” he says, and swallows— “Can it truly be called love?”

I soften. “Henry,” I say. “It can only be called love.”

He drags his hands down his face. His bloodshot eyes glisten. It is brutal work, and we were raised on the downy feathers and flower petals of all things sweet and delicate this world.

“For love, then,” he says.

As we work upon your body we speak of our memories, hoping each word may soak beneath your skin and remind you who you are. You are more than the girl whose mother couldn’t love her, who poor fortune thrust through our doorway. My aunt saw you as my mirror image, my perfect parallel, but that reduced you to my secondary, my spare. You are the girl who ran with me

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and Henry through the undulating fields of wildflowers, the girl who rolled her eyes at his poor attempts at poetry. You are the girl who held my hand in the rain as we ran through the storm-laden streets of Geneva back to my uncle’s home. You are the girl who danced on Henry’s arm every year at Christmastime, who winked at me across the hall. You are the girl who believed I deserved better than a fiancé who flew too close to the sun. You hated my fiancé long before he forgot who you were and what you were to me. You are the girl Henry and I loved.

You are the wax holding me together. ☼ A fly perches upon the open sphere of your eye. Henry bats it away while I work inside your chest. We are in the midst of our rough work when a fist pounds against the door.

My fingers freeze around your ribcage. When we sought out lodgings for our task, Henry delivered us to a cold, belowground basement. No one has bothered us here. Even the landlady avoids meddling in our business, so foul is the stench of our quarter. My eyes rise to meet Henry’s. A question rises into my throat, budding with panic, but I dare not speak. The knocking comes again. Henry flinches.

“Elizabeth?” says the voice on the other side. A voice I know as well as my own. Deep, luxuriating, erudite. All the panic inside me transforms to rage, and a primal, crazed anger awakens in me.

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“You didn’t,” I say, knowing he did.

The locked handle wobbles. “Henry, are you in there?”

“We needed help,” Henry confesses.

He abandons me to answer the door. In my hand, the scalpel blossoms with possibility. One lunge into his renal artery— but no. No. I inhale to disperse the idea like a cloud of dust. I inhale to make myself a different person. Your blood on my hands should mark a change in my autonomy, my capacity, yet the moment Victor Frankenstein breezes over the threshold, I am reduced to the shadow at his heels, the plaything, the pet.

“Elizabeth,” he says. “My first friend, my beloved. I’ve been so worried.”

To look at him is to look at Icarus as his wax body eclipses the sun.

To look at him is to look upon your death.

“Henry,” I say, “we do not need him.”

“Please,” says Henry, closing the door. “Please, just—to see it through. To end it.”

“We can do this without him.”

“I know that you can,” says Victor. “Of that I have no doubt.”

Of course he knows. It was the two of us, always, dissecting frogs and rabbits, pulling apart their soft bodies to learn what lurked within. Once, exploring the woods together as children, we came upon the vulture-stripped remains of a fox. We

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spent the afternoon observing what little meat was left, taking notes, admiring the scraps of its fur. Its skull still sits on my shelf at our home in Geneva, a token from another life. My aunt and uncle encouraged me to pursue his interests so that I would be his perfect match, his assistant, the mind he could pick when his grew dark with the tangles of self-doubt and despair. It was the two of us who peeled back the skin on this world, but only he made a wretched triumph of it.

“I did not come to undermine you, Elizabeth,” says Victor.

“Nor to stop you. I came to beg your forgiveness for what I’ve done. What I’ve failed to do. Let me atone, Elizabeth.”

My jaw clenches. Atone. I think of you, Justine. I think of little William. Two dead, because of him and his pride. Yet here he stands, in his gentleman’s cravat and a frock coat, a wave in his hair, a plea in his eyes. What remains of this life if there is no mercy? What are the guilty to do if denied their chance at redemption?

“Very well,” I say, and swallow down the uneasy sense that I have betrayed you. ☼ Within days our workshop functions more smoothly, and the electricity—once a finicky uncertainty—runs with a humming guarantee. The rats, my Sisyphean nuisance, decrease in number.

Jars containing liquid green as absinthe line the shelves, one brimming with eyes, another with ears, another fingers. Victor

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relieves Henry of the butcher and the graveyard, and returns with cases full of ice and fresh organs. While Henry ventures out of doors and into the bright new day to see if he can remember who he was before we were monsters, I pull out the ropes of your intestines, then sew a fresh coil inside of you.

Victor does not touch you. He does not try. He follows my instructions like a man assured his absolution lies in my hands; he hedges his suggestions, and I do not know if he condescends to me with this newfound desire for my approval or if he wishes to stroke an ego I do not have. Is this how a man makes amends? Or is this simply the face of the fallen Icarus—the Icarus blistered by melted wax, who has tasted the drowning sea?

Sometimes the careful way he catches my eye is enough to make me ache for him. Beneath my surges of sympathy, there is still the thorn wedged inside the nail bed: nothing he has suffered compares to your suffering. My flashes of tenderness are interrupted by stony resolve; I am water in the early spring, thawing and freezing between morning and evening as the earth vacillates between death and life. Would you forgive him, Justine? I would not say my feelings have advanced so far—but I understand him better than I like, having been raised beside him, my almostbrother, wetted down like clay and remolded until the shape of my soul echoed his. When I was born, I was my own; my love for him was trained into me until it split me apart.

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I will credit him at least for the ways in which his foul expertise hastens our progress.

But he views you with the clinical objectivity that was trained into him during his years of study in Ingolstadt: to the academics and anatomists, a body is nothing more than a machine with parts that succeed or falter. To the poets, like Henry, and to the lovers, like me, a body is quite a bit more than that.

Ever your devoted surgeon, I remove your heart. I hold it in my hands for a long moment, this heart that I caused to race, this heart whose beating I helped to cease. Most of your organs I have simply discarded, but your heart—your heart I seal in a silver case, to keep forever, to give back to you when you wake.

Together, Victor and I prepare your capillaries, your arteries, your veins.

“Tell me one thing,” I say. Victor wipes mercury from his hands with a rag that smells of turpentine. He raises his eyes to mine.

“How could you say nothing?”

I must hear him say it, if I am to be satisfied.

“I am a coward,” he confesses. Vindication swells inside me. So does disgust. “I was afraid.”

“You could have rendered all of this unnecessary if you’d spoken a single word.”

“I did not want to be correct. I did not want my wretched hands…” He pulls his lip under his teeth and lowers his gaze to

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your face. “I did not know what it would do, if I spoke against it. If it would kill a hundred more.”

“It,” I say. “Not he?”

Victor’s ashen eyes meet mine again. In the gaunt hollows of his cheeks, a hundred specters hang. “No.” For the first time, he tells me the truth. A halted, stunted truth—a truth that darkens his underarms with sweat, a truth that makes his fingers quiver. A truth as raw as meat. Though Henry stole his notebooks and diagrams a long time ago, though this is a truth I already know, he confirms it, piece by piece, like relocating a bone into its joint. He tells me of the daemon, the wretch, the blasphemous creation he wrought, his upside-down Adam. He tells me of the night he brought it—him?—to life, just before Henry arrived and nursed him through the fever with all the fondness I’d expect. He tells me it was the fiend who killed William, who framed Justine. In that moment I approach the precipice of forgiveness, that glacial mountain, ancient and cold, and finally see a path forward. In that moment, I imagine how frightful it must have been for him to create something with the intent to undo his mother’s death only to stain his hands a deeper crimson. In that moment, I take Victor’s hand.

But for all he tells me, there is one thing he omits.

What his Adam asked of him. ☼

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On the night of the season’s first violent thunderstorm, I submerge your body halfway into a tub of water.

And we wait—Victor, Henry, and I—until the thunder chokes out all other sound, until lightning spits across the sky like a bright insult. Then, and only then, as the gathering clouds signal apocalypse, does Victor pull the lever.

Electricity crackles across a series of metal wires. He draped them across the ceiling, anticipating this night, and attached their ends to you, to the tub of water. Water and electrical signals: who might have ever imagined our bodies and brains could be reduced to such simple materials? What easy work we must have been for a laughing God, and yet— When you gasp your first breath, it is no less a miracle. My heart cracks open and I fall to my knees at your side, all my strength sapped, replaced by the satisfaction of nothing more than hope and grit.

Like a babe newly entering the world, you test your fresh set of lungs with a wail that could crumble the walls of Jericho.

Your arms—stitched together at every joint—flail about, searching for the rim of the tub. I clasp your hand, and when you toss your head back, when your skull knocks against the tin, I call Henry to my side, and we raise you higher so you cannot hurt yourself.

“I am here, Justine,” I say. “My love, I am here.”

Agonized with rebirth, you writhe and the water sloshes. I anchor one arm across your clavicle, holding your head to my

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shoulder. My other hand clasps yours, though your fingers do not bend to caress mine. I did not expect a gentle awakening, but neither did I expect such torment. When I turn toward Victor in question, he smiles tightly and bows his head.

“Congratulations, Miss Lavenza,” he says. “You have accomplished a most remarkable feat.”

Remarkable.

Yes, my love. You are remarkable. So full of life, after being so cold, so inanimate. Tears spring to my eyes, and I tuck my face against the crown of your head, hiding my emotion and kissing your hair. All may be forgiven, and whatever happens next may be of our own design. There is no reason why we should not all be happy now; after all that we have done here together, it cannot be another way. What is the point of resurrection if not to pursue freedom?

Distantly, I am aware of the door slamming open. Of masculine voices whispering. Of Victor’s placating tones, and Henry’s sudden silence.

Yet I do not understand any of it until he looms over us, his shadow swallowing us in darkness. A hanging light swings behind his head, creating a fractured halo whose brightness burns my eyes.

To behold him is to behold your predecessor, imperfect yet immaculate—immaculate in the way Christ was immaculate, conceived by a single parent and given life with God’s methods.

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The macabre patchwork of his face. His jaundiced eyes. The rictus mouth stretched into a gruesome smile. A he, not an it, no matter Victor’s convictions. A monster of a man whose very countenance invites all to look upon my works, ye mighty—and rejoice what works might be achieved.

“My bride,” he says, in a gravel-rough hiss of satisfaction.

I hold you tighter. You are still screaming your way out of the grave; you are not here, not properly, and there is only me to shield you from William’s murderer, the beast who framed you.

Victor and Henry’s silence may have killed you, but this daemon sent you to the gallows in his stead.

“Victor?” I call, but he does not come. He and Henry stand at a distance, each of them with their hands behind their backs, neither of them meeting my eyes.

“You must be Elizabeth,” says the daemon. “Do not worry. No harm shall come to you now.”

He bends down, and runs his fingers—stitched less expertly than yours—along your jaw.

“She is everything I have longed for,” he whispers, almost reverent. “A female of my own species, with the same defects.”

“Take her and go,” says Victor.

“What?” My stomach plummets into my knees. I snatch the daemon’s hand away from your cheek. “No—no, she is not yours.”

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“We have an agreement,” Victor warns, before the daemon’s temper can flare to life. “A wife for a wife. Do not hurt mine and I will not hurt yours.”

It happens too fast: I pound his chest with useless fists, crying that he cannot have you, yet my hands are useless again. He lifts you from the tub, carrying you close to his chest the way any groom would carry his bride over a threshold. Henry, weakling milquetoast poet Henry, holds me back so that I cannot chase after you, and the creature, with those hands that strangled a child, absconds with you.

“No,” I sob, and it is Henry who restrains me while Victor slams a needle into my arm that makes the world bleed dark. ☼ If I had known Victor’s intentions.

If I had known why he wanted you alive.

The real reason.

What would I have done?

I think of Henry answering the door when Victor first arrived. I think of the scalpel in my hand. A hundred worlds permute from that moment: the world where I plunge the blade into Henry’s spine, then slice open Victor’s carotid. Or: the world where I hold a pillow over Victor’s face, and threaten Henry into silence. Or: the world where I hold a pillow over Victor’s face, and present his fresh meat as a gift to your body. Or: the world where I

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hold a pillow over Victor’s face, and dispose of him before Henry learns of my transgression.

In those worlds, I am a different Elizabeth, an Elizabeth whose brutal life made her brutal in return. In this world, the only brutality I ever knew was losing you. Maybe there is a world where I am clever, where I am quicker with my wit than with my forgiveness, where I do not sink so easily into old habits. In that sweetest world of all, I send Henry and Victor on a daylong errand, and in their absence, I revive you. In that world, we abandon the chamber of stone and gore. In that world, I steal you away to South America, to the Sahara, to the Arctic, to the widest and deepest pits of the Earth where no one will ever seek us, to a place where we will be together, where no man will use our bodies to make a bargain and pay a debt.

I lean my head against the back of the carriage seat. The rotations of the wheels upon the cobbled road vibrate through my still-throbbing temple. At Victor’s behest, we are driving straight back to Geneva, with orders not to stop. Victor and Henry sit on either side of me, keeping me away from the carriage doors, lest I try to escape.

I won’t try. I know what will happen to me if I do. No one will believe what we accomplished. Anything I say would be dismissed as the ramblings of a madwoman. Poor Elizabeth, Victor will coo. Shall we send you away to a place where you can rest and recover?

And there I’ll stay, unless and until I agree to behave.

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A full moon rises over the trees. Does he show you the moon? Does he sit with you under the stars, and remind you of their names? Does he touch your jaw, or tuck your hair behind your ear? I hope to God he does not. I can’t stand the thought of his hands reaching for you, as though you were his right. As though all your life amounted to was wifedom to a chimera.

“Please know, this is for the best,” says Henry.

“Don’t speak to me of what is best,” I snarl. How dare he speak of best. This is not best. It is a return to the softer world he craves, a normalcy that buries horror and pretends it does not exist.

“You are a coward.”

But am I not the coward, Justine? Over and over I relive your first resurrected moments, which were our last moments together. My bride, he called you, before he even knew your name.

Nameless himself, perhaps he did not realize such a thing carried immense value. And there I was—shocked stupid, too rattled to think of anything I might have done to save you. All those surgical tools, and I did not reach for a single one to fend him off.

I wish he’d killed me. I would have died trying to save you.

Now, whether I die two weeks or two decades from now, I will die Mrs. Victor Frankenstein. ☼ On my wedding night, as Victor locks the bedroom door, the perfume bottle begs me to break it and gut him with the shards.

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The hatpins in my drawers simmer with power; they beckon me, whispering possibilities. Femoral, subclavian, abdominal.

“You mustn’t be cross with me any longer, Elizabeth,” he says.

He touches a ringlet at my ear. I jerk away from him before he can tuck it away, before he can make me neat.

“It was to protect you,” he says. “Now that I have satisfied the daemon’s request, we are free to live as we ought to.”

“As we ought to.” My laugh is hollow as a skull. “You mean as you want to.”

“Elizabeth,” he says, four cloying syllables that entreat me to see reason, which, of course, means to see things his way, to capitulate, to break like a bone under the weight of him and heal myself in the shape he desires. “You have wanted to marry me since we were children. Should we not be happy now?”

Years ago, when he went to university and did not write me even once, somehow I still wanted him. Wanting him was my life’s purpose: Victor’s loneliness was the sole reason my aunt cared for me after my parents could not. My life was built around him; even once I fell in love with you, Justine, Victor was my duty, my expectation. By the time I was five I was promised; my wedding vows were practically sealed. Now I want to asphyxiate him when he falls asleep. Any pillow will suffice. Now I’m strong enough to do it, if he is foolish enough to stay the night with me.

“I will be happy when you rot,” I say.

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“Elizabeth.” His sterner tone, now. The one that serves as my warning. “Don’t begin our marriage this way.”

“You began this, daemon.”

His eyes darken. A frown pulls at his mouth. He takes one step closer to me, and just as I brace for the slap, blood sprays across my cheeks. Victor’s heart, frenzied and rabbit-like, pulses inches outside of his chest. Crimson stains his groom’s wear, turns him sticky and shining in the candlelight. His grimace—of shock, of pain—lasts for only a moment before he slackens.

Like a scarecrow, he stands only because your arm uprights him.

Your arm burst through his chest. His heart in your palm.

“Strange,” you say. “I did not think he had one.”

Your new voice is deeper than before, and I melt upon hearing it. The pitch may differ, but the intonation is the same.

Your fingers—how strong and agile they are!—squeeze his heart to pulp, with a slick sound of blood and muscle collapsing. When you drop it, it is no different than the meat scraps the dogs forage from the kitchen.

You remove your arm, and he falls, face first, into the heirloom carpet. While you gaze at him, my eyes never leave you.

My miracle. My formaldehyde darling. How adept your musculature, how superior your stitches—in every aspect you are a marvel among marvels, my once and future love.

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Made out of stronger stuff than wax and feathers. Born of my grief and my love. Look at you.

“I did the same to my mate,” you say.

“And Henry?”

“And Henry.”

You step closer. Tentative, at first. Inching, as though I’d bolt. I do not close the distance; I do not know if you want me to.

With the finesse of a jungle cat, you roll toward me, and take my chin in your bloody hand.

“Elizabeth,” you say, for the first time in your new voice, with your new lips, your new lungs, yet it feels ancient, as though my name is at the root of you. “My creator.”

“Beloved,” I whisper. The breath hitches in my throat.

Tears prick my lashes.

“Will you mourn him?” you ask.

“Mourn him!” I laugh, and that makes you smile, your rictus grin more beautiful than I could have imagined. Maybe I will ache for what we were, the four of us, when we were children, before we cracked open the world and bent it to our will. Maybe I will ache, for the rest of our days, that only you and I remain, but no.

No, I could not mourn him. Not now.

“I saved your heart,” I say. “In a little tin case. But I…” The tears spill over. Victor did something to render me unconscious, and I do not know what happened to the workshop.

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To the tin with your heart safe inside it. The dearest part of you, and I could not keep it safe.

“I lost it,” I confess.

You brush the tears from my cheeks. Your jaundiced eyes—so lovely I lose my breath—soften when they meet mine.

When you kiss me, I raise my palms to your face, caressing the patchwork panels I sewed myself. Your flesh, cold and dead, makes me shiver as you pull me close. Your bloody hand finds my hip, staining my dress with your fingerprints, which is how it should be.

You step back, tugging me with you. Your other hand, the clean one, takes mine. And we dance, slowly, across the carpet, around his body, through the puddle of his blood, our skirts collecting vermillion like yet another secret, the deep night syrup-slow, your kiss the vow I make. ☼☀☼ S.M. Hallow is a Pushcart Prize nominee, part-time fairytale witch, and full-time vampire. Hallow’s stories, poems, and visual art can be found in CatsCast, Baffling Magazine, Final Girl Bulletin Board, Prismatica Magazine, Seize the Press, and Taco Bell Quarterly, among others. To learn more, follow Hallow on Tumblr & Twitter @smhallow.

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“Hades and Persephone” Masie Inman

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Entombment to the Myth

Haley Wartalski

Some think I was taken, stolen against my will but that’s not accurate. A king doesn’t ask for permission from his prize but I’m no concubine. I came willingly, as a Queen should. A Queen does not bow nor recede in the game of chess, a Queen uses her moves expertly and with strategy until finally, she captures the King. I made him run to me, he saw beneath my skin and flesh, he saw what others were too afraid to, he saw that I was part sunshine and death incarnate.

My beauty didn’t draw him near like many assume, he felt danger and darkness in the air. Not an ounce of innocence but bitter warmth and calculation. Darkness was his realm, his prowess and when he saw me, he felt an affinity. He saw my strength and shadows and it matched his own demons, like calling to like.

When he offered me his palm, I took it with intention and willingness. He never once forced the union as many like to assume.

Because why would sweet and naive Persephone ever willingly enter the realm of death with the king of death himself, a monster. Yet, no

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one realized I was a monster all along, manipulated and man-made from You, the gods. Sweet and naive Persephone could never be what you all so desperately try to hide behind your timeless exterior.

He offered me his kingdom but I would’ve seized it nevertheless. I knew I belonged alongside him and his subjects, subjects with everything and nothing to lose. Sound familiar? At least in this case, I was the one to choose because I had nothing to lose. If I didn’t, then I’d lose the possibility of everything.

The sweet song of death called to something deep inside of me, welcoming me with girlish whispers and a loving embrace.

Calling to power to bring life to the dead and death to the living. I pulled out my carving knife and sliced the fruit, shredding each individual Seed out with intention and hunger. I willingly ate those Crimson Seeds, devouring all six of them with a feral smile, glistening like drops of blood flowing relentlessly down my chin.

The Crimson Seeds that kept me among the dead for six months of the year, giving them beauty and life while death prowled up above for those sixth months amidst the living. More than aware of the consequences, I chose to rule this path knowing exactly what it entailed.

I became the Queen of nothing and everything, life and death, not a path for the bleeding heart which I never once claimed to be despite the common misconception that I’m weak and

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needed saving. I gave steel to my name. I willed it in the form of a curse, daring only the willing and the wicked to utter its epic. ☼☀☼ Haley Wartalski (she/her) has a BA in Classics and English from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and is currently a graduate student at Emerson College for Popular Fiction Writing and Publishing. This is her very first piece for publication! She specializes in writing mythology retellings and fantasy romance—her current WIP is a dark academia fantasy romance. Follow Haley on Twitter at @hwartalskii and Instagram at haley__w.

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The Strings That Bind Us M.K. Hale “Why do you keep cutting the line?” Icarus asked as he pressed his fingers against the inside of Asterion’s wrist. A bundle of red string hung there like a bracelet, a severed tail dangled limply where his teeth had cut it time and time again. The young man rolled the frayed end between his fingers as if to bind it back again.

It was a gift from the Prince’s sister, Ariadne.

Asterion shook his head slightly, looking at where Icarus’ fingers grazed against him.

“She has gifted you the world and you refuse for—for stone walls and endless nights?”

“My hands are not gentle enough to hold such a precious gift,” Asterion admitted, curling his fingers into fists. He squeezed until Icarus’ hand dropped from where it held him. “It is safer here, in the dark.”

Icarus was uncharacteristically quiet as they looked at each other in the dim light of the labyrinth. They were sitting in the center of the maze—a circular area where Asterion ate and slept— as they did every day. It was something like a room that Daedalus

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gifted the Prince when he constructed the prison. Though it wasn’t the room itself or the sliver of light that came from the opening above that was the gift, but the humanity of giving a semblance of comfort in his endless torment with nothing in return.

A room.

A bed.

An Icarus.

“What makes here any more safe than out there?” He took Asterion’s hands as he asked and pulled at his large fingers so his palms were open. Icarus pressed his own hands there, flat, their palms kissing. They both looked down at where they connected— the juxtaposition between man and monster.

Icarus could, maybe, wrap his hands around two of Asterion’s fingers. His hand was dwarfed as they pressed together, the porcelain white of his fingers only coming to the second knuckle of the Prince’s hand. It was hard to look at sometimes, to see how fragile he really was. How easily their tender touches could turn to bone-crushing pain. Asterion worried—he always worried—that he couldn’t be trusted to care for something so delicate. His hands should be just as small, pale, and forgiving as his friend’s, Asterion thought.

The Gods are cruel.

He puffed air through his nose. It was loud, animalistic, and embarrassed him. Asterion replied shyly, “Different.”

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In the labyrinth, Asterion was in control. He knew every crack, stone, and turn—there was nothing he could be surprised by, he never had to guess. Even with Daedalus, Icarus, his sister— they knew him and weren’t afraid.

But what about the people that lived under the light of the sun? The people who knew not of a prince with the maw of a bull and body of man? Would they press the tips of swords into the meat of his chest as the palace guards did? Would they cower and spit at the floor like their King, his father, Minos?

Not everyone is as kind as Icarus, Daedalus had warned him.

Not everyone approaches the strange and unusual with an open, kind hand. Most people approach different with closed fists and fear.

“Different?” Icarus let out an exasperated breath. He removed his hands from Asterion’s to put one to the Minotaur’s chest and the other to his own. Their hearts beat steadily, connected by soft fingertips. If Asterion concentrated hard enough, perhaps he would feel his friend’s heart beat under his own ribcage, nestled beside his.

“You may be a little bit taller than me,” Icarus grinned, “but we are no different. Your heart beats the same as mine, and it breaks the same too. You feel joy and sorrow, you have desires— you love…”

The man looked determined, his eyes sparkling under the fading light that came through the ceiling’s gap. He always knew the feelings that hid between the carefully chosen words that

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Asterion tried to hand him. But Icarus always refused because he knew better. And Asterion could feel them. He could feel Icarus’ words flowing through his arm, to his palm, spreading through his fingertips, and into the Minotaur’s body. Asterion’s chest swelled and collapsed with the sheer weight of it.

“The only difference between you, and people out there, is they hide their brutality under the guise of man. Inside they are gorgons, they are sirens—perhaps even Scylla on land itself. But you, my dear Prince, you may have been cursed to resemble an animal, but your heart—” Icarus pressed his palm firmer against his chest, pushing Asterion back slightly, “—is made of figs and honey. Pure sweetness. And your hands, like goose feathers, have held me ever so gently.”

When Asterion was young his sister would whisper stories to him through the barred entrance of the labyrinth. A metal cage that separated him from them. His Icarus reminded him of the story of love, Ariadne’s favorite—one soul living in two bodies destined to walk the earth until they found each other again. He felt it, then, as their fragment of daylight was put to bed and the blanket of night dropped them into darkness.

Affection. Adoration. Love.

Icarus had loved him, and Asterion couldn’t help but love him too.

Perhaps, in his own way, Icarus was a beast of man locked away just the same. His kindness was overwhelming, his smile far

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too brilliant. He has never, the Prince thought, been less afraid of man. Their souls twisted, braided, knotted like the red string that dangled from his wrist. Their string that he would never cut. He would follow its path into the darkest corners of the maze because he knew that it would lead him to the boy who burned brighter than the sun. If brought to his lips he would curl his tongue over his teeth and kiss the line, praying that its strength would last lifetimes.

The Prince of the night.

The boy of the day.

Figs and honey.

Asterion removed his hand from Icarus’ chest and put it over the one that punctured his beating heart. He looked down and let out a puff of air, pleased at the warmth those words wrapped him in. This must be what the sun feels like.

“The poets would be embarrassed at your waxing prose.”

“Are you?”

“No.” The Minotaur’s eyes shone like stars, “Never.” ☼ Asterion began thinking of the string that bound them often after that. How similar they were and although the differences were stark, their hearts still beat as one. He thought, also, of how Icarus and his father were locked away in their tower.

It may not be a labyrinth coated in darkness, but it had a taste of the world pouring through their window and onto the floor.

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A taunt.

A tease.

Icarus spoke of it frequently; how he leaned out their window to feel the sun caress his cheek and take deep breaths of the ocean air, filling his lungs with salt and the fields of white poppies that painted Knossos. He tried to describe the feeling to Asterion but the words never quite struck. But he did imagine what it would be like to see Icarus escape and live out there where he belonged.

When Asterion tried to picture the sun—warm, bright, golden, giving life and joy to everything it touched—all he could see was Icarus’ face.

How, he wondered, could people be so cruel to the boy whose heart was made of sunrises and sunsets? (They can be pink, orange, and red, Icarus told him. We will watch the colors bleed down the sky one day, I swear it.) If they are beasts—Daedalus and Icarus—they are not like the Minotaur. They do not bare their teeth at those who stand on the other side of barred doors or crush brick in their palm in fits of pathetic rage. They do not cry and wail into empty halls with throaty, guttural moans of a cow or demand the Gods answer angry pleas of: why. If they are beasts, it is because the people up there—that walk along the marble halls and the roads of Crete—are frightened of tender hearts and merciful hands.

He wanted to string those words together into poetics as Icarus had. To whisper them in the safety of darkness and press

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warmth into his flesh just as the man had done to Asterion. But it was weeks before they saw each other again. What was once daily visits had disappeared under the weighted proclamation of adoration, and he couldn’t help but feel it was his fault. That Icarus, perchance, had realized the error of his decision to be soft hearted with the Minotaur.

Along his room he had tallied the days that Icarus had been gone. When the light disappeared and night returned, another mark was made on the dirt floor. When the numbers doubled in digits, Asterion began to lose hope that his friend would ever return to him.

On that tenth day, he decided to stop marking, yet his mind tallied the sun rising and falling just the same. Even when he turned his back to the light and wandered into the dark, he counted. He told himself he would stop, pleaded for his heart to be merciful. He told himself that Icarus had surely left his tower, somehow, and that he should be elated that his friend could run through orchards and fields and feel his feet cake with dirt and dust for the first time. But in the far depths of the maze, where no one had ventured as light could not reach, Asterion fell to his knees and sobbed helplessly.

On the twelfth day, when the sun had reached its peak and the light shone through the ceiling, something had entered the labyrinth. He stood quietly in the center where he knew he was safest, but the sound of shuffling and dragging was growing nearer.

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Dirt and loose stone moved and a horrific sound overwhelmed him; flesh on flesh gliding, or maybe it was an animal's fur rubbing together at its arms. He backed away towards one of the arches that led into the maze as it drew ever closer, the sound grew louder and louder until it stood at the other arch.

A feather fell through the air and landed under a beam of sunlight that dappled the floor. It was white with a little mark of gray. It glowed like a star.

The creature came forward, Asterion was ready to turn and flee into the depths of the maze, until he saw him. Icarus smiled, cheeks rising to pinch the corners of his eyes, and Asterion noticed his back had grown a pair of wings. Feathers cascaded down so far that they dragged the ground behind him. Wax covered his chiton and stray feathers latched onto the fabric and the soft parts of his inner arms.

“I’m sorry I was gone for so long. I was busy.”

“I see.”

They grew quiet but Icarus smiled all the same. He took another step forward and came under the light. Shadows cast down his face, masking his expression, but the rest of him glowed.

Asterion spoke first, surprised. “If I didn’t know any better I would think the rumors were true, O’ Son of a Harpy. A beast, just like me, though more pleasing to gaze upon.”

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Icarus laughed, loud and unapologetic; he leaned over slightly to touch his stomach as if he were trying to hold his joy there. The Minotaur blew a pleased breath through his nose.

“Perhaps I just needed to be what they expected of me so I could find my strength to leave.”

“Leave?” Asterion stepped back into the center of the labyrinth, crowding Icarus, who looked up at him.

“Yes, we have decided to leave. We can’t stay here any longer, it’s torture.”

“You and your father are leaving your tower. Leaving…”

He wanted to say me, you’re leaving me. The words hung on the tip of his tongue but he couldn’t muster the courage to utter it. Asterion knew it was selfish to want to keep them all to himself, but he couldn’t help the pang that rattled his chest. They didn’t belong down there with him.

“You are coming too, my dear Prince!”

The Minotaur let out a deep moaning noise that was meant to be a laugh. Exasperated, astonished.

“I cannot leave, Icarus. I am trapped—” “—You know the way out. We have been to the door and seen the fields that lie just beyond the King’s palace—” “—I will be hunted and killed if I leave, I cannot go out there. The Gods gave me life so I may bring misery to King Minos’ kingdom. My living is a punishment for him and me. I am not meant to leave this maze. I am not like you.”

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Icarus came forward to grab Asterion’s arms. His fingers, like pins, dug into his flesh like he was trying to hold him in place.

Asterion’s jaw was clenched and eyes were sharp; Icarus had no intention of backing down from this fight. He had made up his mind and Asterion was a fool to try to change it.

Stubborn as a bull, he thought affectionately. He wished, desperately, that the world could see him through Icarus’ eyes.

Maybe he never would have severed a single line.

“Why do you think I grew wings?” His fingers dug in deeper, “There is an island not far from Crete that I will fly us to.

We can live there and be happy and safe, away from people. My father told me that no men are there.”

Asterion looked over Icarus’ shoulder at the wings. The wax was thick against his skin and the feathers piled upon it, layer after layer until they were thick like a bird’s. Daedalus was a master inventor, one of the most intelligent men in the world, there was bound to be a contraption within them to allow Icarus to fly.

But he would not be able to carry the weight of the Prince Minotaur.

His heart felt like a marble slab in his chest as he realized this was where their string—that would never touch his teeth, that was meant to last eons—was to sever.

“What would we do on the island everyday?” He asked quietly, body becoming pliant and weak under Icarus’ grip.

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“We will swim every morning, and hunt during the day.

We will take naps under trees and run, until our lungs burst, through fields of grass and olive groves!” Icarus smiled so hard that it nearly split his face in two, “I will soar into the clouds in the evening and pull the sun to bed, and every night you will paint the night sky with stars. And we’ll lay in the poppies to watch as they shine, whispering to each other about the wonders of our day.”

“Won’t the Gods be angry that we’re stealing their duties?

Pulling the sun, painting the sky…”

Icarus laughed and laughed, throwing his head back and rubbed his hands up and down Asterion’s arms. “They will thank us for giving them a break, of course. Who would be cross with two young men who want to do the labor? Maybe they’ll even reward us handsomely with gifts beyond our imagination.”

The line began to fray in the middle, spindling hairs stuck out to show its weakening, though Asterion held on with all his might. Like his love and strength alone would change the course of their fate.

He huffed a breath, “You do have quite the imagination.”

Icarus’ smile softened around the edges, nearly looking sad. Asterion felt the marble slab in his chest grow heavier, making his shoulders sag and curl in until he was surrounding Icarus completely. The man looked into his eyes earnestly, “Promise me you will follow me into the sun.”

“Icarus…”

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“Promise me you will follow me, Asterion. Promise me you will not leave me in that world alone; I couldn’t stand it if you do.”

He swallowed harshly as Icarus’ eyes grew glassy. His smile looked broken, and it hurt Asterion so. Because he knew—they both knew—that it wasn't the teeth of a bull that would tear the red threads to nothing. But the claws of the passionate harpy.

“I promise I will follow you, Icarus. I would follow you anywhere. You will never be in this world alone.”

Icarus smiled wetly and came forward to take the Prince into his feathered arms. They held each other there as if time would surely stop and give them just one more moment. But there was no warmth in the stone walls, the Gods did not see their desperate embrace or hear their prayers, time kept moving.

The sun set, as it did everyday, and their string, bleeding red into the dirt floor of the maze, had broken beyond repair. ☼☀☼ M.K. Hale (they/she) is a 25-year-old writer and poet from the East Coast. They are constantly testing the bounds of genres and storytelling with queerness and self-reflection. They are currently working on their first novel.

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☀ Biographies ☀ Kyle Ross (he/him) is an award-winning, published author who specializes in creative nonfiction. A graduate of Emerson College with a BFA degree in Creative Writing, he hopes to one day be able to publish his creative thesis: a hybrid memoir that encapsulates childhood grief and trans identity. His published prose can be found in The Underground, EveryDayFiction, Gauge Magazine, Wack Mag, Vocivia Magazine, and more. Currently, he’s a copywriter by day and editor by night. Visit him at www.thekyleross.com.

Elizabeth Zarb (she/her) is a writer of multiple mediums and a huge fan of Gothic horror. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in 2021, is working on her MSc from the University of Edinburgh, and now spends her time split between writing and making literature-meme videos on TikTok for both herself and SparkNotes. After two difficult familial deaths, Elizabeth set out to reconcile with loss and published her first flash collection entitled, A Meditation on Mortality. Find her book and more at her website: www.elizabethzarb.com. ☼☀☼ Devon Bohm (she/her) received her BA from Smith College and earned her MFA with a dual concentration in Poetry and Fiction from Fairfield University. She has been awarded the Hatfield Prize for Best Short Story, was longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top Very Short Fictions, and has received two honorable mentions in L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest—winning the contest in the 2nd Quarter of 2022. Her work has also been featured in publications such as Labrys, The Graveyard Zine, Horse Egg Literary, Necessary Fiction, Eunoia Review, Spry, Sixfold, Hole In The Head Review, orangepeel, Helix Magazine, Sunday Mornings at the River’s 365 Days of Covid anthology, and is upcoming in boats against the current and Discretionary Love. Her first book of poetry, Careful Cartography, was published in November 2021 by Cornerstone Press as part of their

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Portage Poetry series. The collection was the recipient of the 2022 First Horizons Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Award, receiving the distinction for an outstanding publication by an academic press.

Sadee Bee (she/they) is a queer artist and writer inspired by magic, strange dreams, and creepy vibes. Sadee is the Visual Arts Editor for Sage Cigarettes Magazine and the author of Pupa: Growth & Metamorphosis (Alien Buddha Press) and Magic Lives In Girls (kith books). Her visual artwork will also be exhibited by Influx Gallery.

Sadee can be found on Twitter @SadeeBee, on Instagram @sadee__bee, and on the web at linktr.ee/SadeeBee. Danai Christopoulou (she/they) is a Greek speculative author drawing inspiration from the myths she grew up with, as well as her experiences living abroad. Danai’s nonfiction has appeared in lifestyle magazines such as Glamour and Marie Claire since 2008. She is a submissions editor for Uncanny magazine, a proofreader for khōréō, and an intern at Tobias Literary Agency. Her short fiction is published in Etherea Magazine, Haven Spec, khōréō, and others. Her novels are represented by Lauren Bieker of FinePrint Literary.

L.M. Cole (she/they) is a writer and artist who uses archived books and newspapers to create digital collage work. Her art has appeared or is forthcoming with Selenite "Floriography", Bullshit Lit, Surging Tide, Roi Fainéant, and others. She can be found on Twitter @_scoops__.

Madalena Daleziou (she/her) is a Rhysling and Pushcartnominated writer from Greece, currently living in the UK. Her work has previously appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Deadlands, and other venues. She can most often be found in a bookshop or in front of a keyboard, writing stories with too many ghosts. She tweets at @LBooklott.

Kath Giblin (she/her) is a writer, English teacher, and Arts Festival director, based in South Wales, UK. Her passion is writing and

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promoting a love of literature. She is particularly interested in how literature is transformed for each new age and her previous postgraduate research centered around this idea of adaptation in the works of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlow.

C.M. Green (they/them) is a Boston-based writer with a focus on history, memory, gender, and religion. They are a Flash Fiction editor at JAKE and a Prose and Hybrid Reader at Adobe Press. Their work has been published by Bullshit Lit, Roi Faineant, and elsewhere.

You can find them at cmgreenwrites.com, or on Twitter @cmgreenery.

M.K. Hale (they/she) is a 25-year-old writer and poet from the East Coast. They are constantly testing the bounds of genres and storytelling with queerness and self-reflection. They are currently working on their first novel.

S.M. Hallow is a Pushcart Prize nominee, part-time fairytale witch, and full-time vampire. Hallow’s stories, poems, and visual art can be found in CatsCast, Baffling Magazine, Final Girl Bulletin Board, Prismatica Magazine, Seize the Press, and Taco Bell Quarterly, among others. To learn more, follow Hallow on Tumblr & Twitter @smhallow.

P. Henry (they/them) is a 24-year-old living in Brooklyn, NY. They have an affinity for mycology, collage art, graphic novels, and the films of Céline Sciamma.

Craig Hinds (he/him) lives and works in Newcastle, UK, where he is often mistaken for his identical twin brother. He graduated from Newcastle University with a first-class degree in English Literature, and a Distinction in his English Literature 1500-1900 MA, for which he was awarded two prestigious scholarships, the School Bursary Award and Excellence Scholarship. His fiction has appeared in Lackington’s Magazine and The Broken Spine. Twitter: @CraigHinds_

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Ellen Huang (she/her) is an aroace folklore enthusiast and whimsical gothic dork. She reads for Whale Road Review and is published in 100+ venues including Lumiere Review, celestite poetry, Ram Eye Press, Sword & Kettle Press, Crow & Cross Keys, Lucent Dreaming, Moss Puppy, warning lines, Amethyst Review, Exhume Journal, and The Medusa Project by Mookychick, among others. She is also working on an ace horror collection. Follow @nocturnalxlight on Twitter.

Masie Inman (she/her) is a freelance illustrator based in Michigan.

She is a recent graduate from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI, where she received her BFA in Illustration with a minor in Art History.

Shelly Jones (they/them) is a professor at a small college in upstate New York, where they teach classes in mythology, folklore, and writing. Their speculative work has been published by F&SF, Apex, The Future Fire, and elsewhere. Find them on Twitter @shellyjansen or at shellyjonesphd.wordpress.com.

Robin Kinzer (she/her) is a queer, disabled poet, memoirist, and editor. Robin has poems and essays published, or forthcoming, in Cleaver Magazine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Blood Orange Review, fifth wheel press, Delicate Friend, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She’s a Poetry Editor for the winnow magazine. She loves glitter, Ferris wheels, vintage fashion, sloths, and radical empathy. She can be found on Twitter at @RobinAKinzer and at www.robinkinzer.com.

Molly Likovich (she/her) is a queer, disabled, proud Marylander with a BA in Creative Writing from Salisbury University. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in The New Mexico Review, Shore Poetry, Rust + Moth, Bluestem, Boomer Lit Mag, Tattoo Highway, Seven Circle Press, and Dreams & Nightmares Magazine. In 2017 she won Honorable Mention in the AWP Intro Poetry Journal Award and the Glimmer Train Short Story Contest for New Writers. In 2020 she won Silver Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. Her indie poetry collection Not a

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Myth, co-authored by Marcia Ruiz, was a #1 New Release in Women’s Poetry on Amazon and her indie romance novella Riding The Headless Horseman was a #1 New Release and #2 Bestseller in Erotic Horror on Amazon. She currently works as the head playwright for A Cow Jumped Over The Moon Theater. You can find her on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube @magicalmolly.

Claire McNerney (she/they) is an actor, student, and writer from California, where she currently attends UCSD. She enjoys, among other things, busking poetry on her 1930s typewriter. Her writing appears in Los Suelos, Proton Reader, and Cossmass Infinities. Follow her on Twitter @claire_mcnerney or Instagram @o.h.c.l.a.i.r.e to say hello and see what she does next!

Heather Meatherall (she/her) is a poet and writer from Canada.

She finds a lot of inspiration from quotes, music, and nature. Her work has been published in magazines such as Poetry Undressed and Mythos Magazine. Heather is currently studying Computer Science at Ontario Tech University. You can find her on Instagram under the handle @heathermeatspoetry.

Orion O’Connell (they/them) is an aspiring novelist and not-sosecret poet whose work has recently been featured in publications such as Ink (2021), Tell Your Story (2021), and Endings (A Fix-It Zine) (2022). Orion believes in love, kindness & happy endings, and can be found on Twitter @orionoconnell.

Erin Bryant Petty (she/her) is an artist and writer living in Michigan. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Corporeal, Zero Readers, The Primer, Gastropoda, and others. She appreciates the uncanny, the weird, and the overlooked. Find her on Twitter @ebryantpetty.

Cyrus Quan (they/he) is a writer born and raised in San Francisco, with interests in poetry, experimental theatre, and decommodifying coffee culture. Their work has appeared previously in The Mandarin

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Journal, Matchbox Magazine, and Chinquapin Literary Magazine. They are currently based in Santa Cruz, where they study with the University of California, Santa Cruz, where they research the Carceral State and its Abolition, and the impact of art movements’ impact on radical politics.

Beatriz Seelaender (she/her) is a Brazilian writer whose work can be found in multiple literary magazines. She is the winner of both the Sandy Run and the Bottom Drawer prizes.

Haley Wartalski (she/her) has a BA in Classics and English from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and is currently a graduate student at Emerson College for Popular Fiction Writing and Publishing. This is her very first piece for publication! She specializes in writing mythology retellings and fantasy romance-her current WIP is a dark academia fantasy romance. Follow Haley on Twitter at @hwartalskii and Instagram at haley__w.

Deborah Zafer (she/her) lives in London. She mostly writes short fiction and is working (very slowly) on her first collection. Her writing has been published in 3am Magazine, Scrawl Place, Lilith, Jewish Fiction, and Janus Literary. She can be found on twitter @deborahzafer and at www.deborahzafer.com.

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Special thanks to all who supported us on this (long-time coming) flight, including but not limited to: Professor Alyssa Greene for bringing us together; Fern and Grey for supporting our hearts; Elizabeth’s family and Kyle’s chosen family for believing in our dreams; our cats Simba and Tetra for demanding we take breaks; and last but not least, our incredible contributors for creating exactly the type of work we hope to share with the world.

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