Volume 4, Issue 1 (2019)
MULTI-FORM PROSE
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"The other ants—their thousand-fold legs incapable of care—trample over their immobile peer until it too is dead and finally is dragged down to the busy depths beneath. That many-legged destiny—the ant’s and the grasshopper’s and the rabbit’s and the other ants’—represents fate at its most miniscule, and yet it is still more miraculous than all of the physics at work in three suns. And you, a pale and partial creature, idle in your chair and with but two idle legs, hope to possess knowledge of that march."
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SHORT FICTION
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"It was an unwritten law of the land that no dead person was to be buried until his left buttock was properly stamped with royal seal by the officials in the capital. Those who buried their loved ones without the royal approval were punished severely—the buttocks of the guilty bereaved relatives were publicly branded with a red-hot iron—and the dead were disinterred and denied proper burial for good. The exhumed corpses were hung high above the gates of the capital for everyone to see and learn the intended lesson. But it happened very rarely as the people of the kingdom were very docile, patriotic and law-abiding."
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PROSE POETRY
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"In the name of said attenuation and the King of San Francisco I do hereby claim this wasted space. I etch unbending ethics on the hearts of matters lest they live between their means. To certainty, let quantum probabilities collapse, as who among the subatomic particles would dare to spin the other way? A foolish youthful planet, an abandoned well of gravity – now what could possibly go wrong?"
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SHORT FICTION
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"‘And how very typical of the body,’ thought Katka, ‘that it should be the stumbling block, that which we cannot pass over.’ For there it was: unmoving, facing the ground covered with various grasses (carefully trimmed, for this was, after all, the oldest public garden in the country) – the body which none of them could phase out. The headphones were taken off, unplugged, one by one: the music was gone. An old woman came down the left path, dragging her feet and her lazy dog, which sniffed here a plant, there a cobble, then sniffed no more but trotted in semi-circles round the place where everyone was now standing, eyeing the body behind the wooden fence by the stream."
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Customized illustrations for all published pieces are provided by Evgenia Barsheva.