Fiction
The Singers
by Sydney Sackett in Issue Twenty-Five, August 2026
The anomaly was narrowband, centered at 1.3 gigahertz. Our automated minder had flagged a layered whisper of static from the Goliath system. I yawned and tipped back coffee dregs before I keyed a command to slew the telescope off-axis. If it was interference from our own satellites or aircraft, like always, the signal would remain.
Instead, it vanished.
I rubbed my eyes. Three AM at the observatory. Every intern had their own Wow! signal moment on too little sleep and too many fantasies of reenacting Contact.
Another command returned the disc’s focus to the system. The spike came with it. No ...
The Forest, the Sea, & Those Caught Between
by C.G. Aubrey in Issue Twenty-Five, August 2026
“Once, now, and always,” begin all of her Zaza’s tales. Bren knows every one by heart, but she still loves the rise and fall of every sun-drenched, salt-crusted story, Zaza’s rich voice rolling like waves. “Three children drift on a cold, dark sea.”
This is Bren’s favorite. Even her brother Walt, who at fourteen sees himself as far too old for such nonsense, stops on his way to bed and leans in the open door of Bren and Aggie’s bedroom.
“Were they lost?” Walt asks, lips twitching. He knows they were. Knows in some ways they still are. The sea is in their blood, on Zaza’s side, but the forest ...
Proliferation
by J.A. Bryson in Issue Twenty-Five, August 2026
Elizabeth finds the bur in Alex’s bedsheets and somehow manages not to completely lose her shit. It’s just a bur. It could have come in with Georgia, their border collie, or on a sock or pantleg. Epizootic dispersion. Plain and simple. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It doesn’t have to mean the worst thing. Gently, she pinches it loose and holds it to the light.
It’s probably nothing.
And yet…
Elizabeth isn’t in the habit of tidying her twelve-year-old’s bedroom or stripping his linens while he’s off at his father’s for the weekend. Her sprucing up is a ruse, a plot she’s been hatching for ...
Like Water
by E.M. Linden in Issue Twenty-Five, August 2026
In exchange for two large cod, the wise-woman extracts Minke’s first language and wraps it in a piece of sailcloth. Her milk-language, her mother-tongue. It’s only spoken here, on this chain of islands. Each of them a few acres wide, and each with their own particular accent and god.
The parcel shifts in Minke’s hands like a waterskin, cool and smelling of gutted fish. When she lifts it to her ear it calls back to her: gulls, the lilt of a bone-whistle, and under that, something crying.
The old people always say the language of Minke’s island is like water. Still, Minke expected something blo...
Crown Shyness
by C.M. Fields in Issue Twenty-Five, August 2026
You first arrived in the woods when you chose a new name for yourself: Cindy. Cindy had no past, only a future. You cut yourself from your body like it was a diseased limb and left it to rot. When you opened your eyes, you were here, in the world inside the world.
There are many ways to do this, although you did not know them then. All involve a choice, a decision. A grasp for a place that hasn’t been born yet.
You ended up here because you no longer felt like a person, but a fungal sprout of tombstones. You left your body behind because it was not really a body but a graveyard, a sallow fiel...