A 2021 Finalist for the WSFA Small Press Award From the Thirty Years’ War, sung as a lullaby to orphans: Maikäfer flieg!Der Vater ist im Krieg,Die Mutter ist im Pulverland,Pulverland ist abgebrannt.Maikäfer flieg… Fly, ladybug, fly!Your father went away,Your mother died in the pulver’ed lands,Those pulver’ed lands have burned to ash.Fly, ladybug, fly… Chiron in …
From the Ashes Flew the Ladybug, by Alexandra Seidel Keep Reading »
My lover is full of holes. I unwrap their bandages and apply fresh unguents and try not to mark the disease’s progress. I cover them again with gauze and blankets, and when I finish, they fall asleep. Their body is laced with tubes—colorful, dead, makeshift limbs that maintain their grasp on the world. Restless, I …
I was seventeen when I got my first ghost. It goes without saying it was night. I was driving down the state on Highway 59, the two-lane one that’s narrow and desolate and mostly straight and’s had some shoulder work done recently. But back then it hadn’t had, not yet; back then, it was narrower …
She Sleeps Spiders’ webs stitch shut her lips. Dirt weights her eyelids. Her hair has long turned to mold and leaves. The forest shifts around her, cycling through the seasons. She thaws. She freezes. She sleeps. Her roots tangle with those of the trees. One spring, her toe pokes its way out of the leaf …
In the first golden weeks of autumn, when las monarcas descended into el Valle from the mortal world, Elvira finished her weaving as quickly as she could. She put down her shuttle and spent a moment stretching stiff limbs, relishing the heat of afternoon on her brown arms and light cotton dress after a long …
The Kingdom of the Butterflies, by Isabel Cañas Keep Reading »
They call it hipster heaven, where all the cool kids go. I walk the dark street alone, searching for the entrance, but no one I pull aside will give me any details. None of them look me in the eye. They shake their heads, shuffle their thrifted boots, and tell me no in a way …
I met the bear hunter the night my mother died. I was a hospice care worker myself, though not in the facility where my mother spent her last months—I couldn’t have borne that. I knew some of the doctors and staff at her hospice, though, and professional courtesies meant my mother was taken care of …
We learned as each of us came into being that all castles have hearts. This castle has three. We still have our hearts, but our bodies were taken. Our hearts are the flames alight in the candles. They are the curtains and stained glass windows. They are the stains beneath our breasts, cold and withering, …
The scarred man sits on the water fountain ledge with his back turned to me. His hair, long and straight, spills down his back. His hand grips the side of the ledge, and he peers into the dark water without speaking. They say everyone sees something different reflected in those waters. “What do you see?” …
The Shadowed Undertows, by Natalia Theodoridou Keep Reading »
So it begins. And the play is conducted upon the gears of a clock. Constructed inside this ancient cathedral the bright artifice of turning brass was by necessity laid flat to provide a stage; it looks wrong but it all works to keep time. There is a bell, though it does not strike the hours. …
