Winter, 2024

Volume 2.1

CONTENTS

Across Lands by Amuri Morris

the whale band in the sky by lae astra

Eco-warriors by Alicia Hilton

The Rot by Erin Jamieson

Tombstones to the Wind by Ali Abbas

A Future of Madness by Kika Man 文詠玲

head fuel by Amanda Yskamp

Poor Unfortunate Souls by R. Thursday

(Multi)Lingual.io by Angela Acosta

Extant & Stasis by Yamille Moss

Next Stop by Gretchen Tessmer

Illumination Finds the Android Promise by Christopher Collingwood

Fair Winds Travel by Jason E. Maddux

Mother Maple's Children by Crystal Sidell

Timeless by Amuri Morris

The Person in the Moon by Avra Margariti

Soundscape of the Deep Woods by Brian U. Garrison

What Kind of Name is Hitchcock Blonde by September Woods Garland

the time travel treehouse takes its final bow by Claire McNerney

Letter from the Editors

Dear Sprawlers, 

Do you hear the “vibrato of starlight” or the “millenia-old song” of trees?

In this volume, we have collected pieces that explore the constant work of placemaking and the courage it takes to find a voice. 

The music of the natural world stitches together a number of these pieces. In lae astra’s poem the whale band in the sky, music marks the entrance into a space that is safe from destructive forces. In September Woods Garland’s short fiction, What Kind of Name is Hitchcock Blonde, music becomes an expression of revenge against the patriarchy. And in Crystal Sidell’s poem, Mother Maple’s Children, the song of the trees transforms into vengeance in the face of unfettered resource extraction. 

Music roots us to place and allows us to alter an atmosphere; to foster shared experience. Music is a form of communication that can express solidarity. Pieces from this volume examine language and communication between generations and species. In Avra Margariti’s poem, The Person in the Moon, the speaker examines ways of communicating with land and waiting for a response. In Angela Acosta’s poem, (Multi)Lingual.io, the revitalization of “las lenguas antiguas” is made possible through cyber connection. 

Finally, this collection is an expression of our desires to preserve our homes, and our resistance to abandoning the places that are most meaningful. From the protection of an oak tree in Central Park in Alicia Hilton’s poem, Eco-Warriors, to uninterrupted sleep as “ashes fall from the sky” in Erin Jamieson’s poem, The Rot. These pieces explore stubborn loyalty to place. Obligations to place are distinct for each individual. Ali Abbas’ short fiction, Tombstones to the Wind, invites us to witness intergenerational tensions created when a son harnesses the power of the natural world, changing the conditions of his ancestral home in the process. 

We hope that, among these stories, you will “jazz and joke with flora and fauna” “where trawlers & cruise ships can't ruin [your] vibe.”

​From our bit of space rock,

Mahaila and Libby

Across Lands

by Amuri Morris


Amuri Morris is an artist based in Virginia. She recently graduated from painting/printmaking and business at Virginia Commonwealth University. Prior to this, she studied art at a Center for the Arts in high school. Throughout the years she has acquired several artistic accolades, such as a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship. She aims to promote diversity in art canon, specifically focusing on the black experience. You can find her work at
www.murisart.com or on instagram under @miss.muri.art.

the whale band in the sky

by lae astra

 

gathers to work on
their next hit single,
where trawlers & cruise ships
can't ruin their vibe.

swirls of stardust 
enter cavernous mouths
that send shimmering comets
flying into black hole

record players. each note
is well rehearsed after
50 million years on earth,
a speck that from this distance

they sometimes mistake for
the flicker of a moon 
jelly rushing past 
dense galaxies of ocean life, 

dodging whole constellations 
of asterina, all to get 
front row seats for 
the whalesong concert.

lae astra is an artist and writer who calls Tokyo home. Find them at laeastra.com/links.

Eco-warriors

by Alicia Hilton


Eco-warriors march to Central Park.
Old and young, armed with shovels,
rakes, worn gloves, and determination.

A grandmother’s arthritic hands grasp extraterrestrial ivy.
Gnarled knuckles tug and yank, battling
the invasive vine clinging to an old oak’s trunk.

Sweat beads her forehead, shoulders strain.
Each aerial root that tugs free, a victory.
She bares bark, creating a ring around the trunk.

An emerald-faced insectomorph stings her forearm.
She screams, tightens her grip on the vine.
A ruby rivulet drips down wrinkled skin.

Another extraterrestrial hornet buzzes closer, seeking
to suckle the eco-warrior’s blood.

A teenage boy from the Bronx jumps into the fray.
He swings a shovel, whacks insectomorphs, chops the vine.

The old oak tree sighs in relief,
finally able to breathe.

Alicia Hilton is an author, editor, arbitrator, professor, and former FBI Special Agent. Her work has appeared in Breakwater Review, Creepy Podcast, Dreams & Nightmares, Eastern Iowa Review, Litro, Modern Haiku, Mslexia, Neon, NonBinary Review, Not One of Us, Vastarien, World Haiku Review, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Volumes 4, 5 & 6, and elsewhere. Her website is https://aliciahilton.com. Follow her on Twitter @aliciahilton01 and Bluesky @aliciahilton.bsky.social.

The Rot

by Erin Jamieson


ivy crawls over your
eyelashes but still you sleep
under a mildew-stained mattress
as ashes fall from the sky
still you sleep

I brew mushroom coffee
& salvage what I can
from the rubbish
in the alley behind

bruised oranges
& apples
sliced thin
cooked down
to hide
the rot

Erin Jamieson (she/her) holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University. Her writing has been published in over eighty literary magazines, including a Pushcart Prize nomination. She is the author of a poetry collection and four poetry chapbooks. Her latest poetry chapbook, Fairytales, was published by Bottle Cap Press. Her debut novel, Sky of Ashes, Land of Dreams, came out November 1st, 2023.

Tombstones to the Wind

by Ali Abbas

Shuki shrugged back her shawl and crouched beside her grandmother. It was breathlessly late-autumn warm on the hilltop. Their vantage point looked down on motionless lakes below. Clouds were perfectly mirrored, and for a moment a scattering of birds was doubled in precise formation. 

“I remember when the whole valley was houses, as far as the eye could see. Bright laundry dancing on the rooftops and swaying trees in the gardens,” Dadi said, “and my Dada told me it was all farms when he was a boy. All gone of course. I don’t expect it’ll change much now, though.”

“Why not, Dadi?” Shuki had heard similar tales from her grandmother several times. She’d usually turn up her ear clip and tune Dadi out, but not today. Today was different.

“Well, I can’t see the waters going back any time soon, and it’s not like the ice caps will re-freeze. Anyway, by the time you’re my age you’ll be on Mars, and your grandkids will all have gangly arms and legs from being born in lower gravity. They’ll need special suits to live there and special suits to come here.”

“But you keep telling Papa he should have gone to Mars.” Shuki nudged her grandmother to show she was teasing. She adjusted Dadi’s light scarf, pulling it from her shoulders to cover her thin, silver hair. 

“And I stand by it. Land of opportunity, it is. Nothing left here, just look at the valley. Neighbours, bakers, schools, all gone. You might not be able to breathe on Mars, but it’s hardly better here with all these.” The old woman pointed to the rows of wind turbines that staggered down the hillsides and snaked along the ridgelines. 

“The turbines are because of the rising water, Dadi.”

“At my age I don’t have to choose my sorrows. I can mourn the drowned landscape as much as the violence these have done.”

Shuki had read her grandmother’s views on windfarms at school. Knowing her, her tones and rhythms, Shuki found a more complex relationship to the slender towers than others chose to read into her grandmother’s words, or that Dadi herself would admit to. Tombstones to the Wind, her grandmother had called them. In certain circles, the name had stuck. Climate change deniers and landscape preservationists had found uneasy common cause against the work Shuki’s father did installing wind power all over the world. The quote from his own mother, a well-regarded poet, was gold to them.

They didn’t hear what Shuki heard in other lines. There was a warning that turbines had stilled the storm and stalled the surge, but there was also a note of pride in her son’s achievements, and indeed a little awe. 

“You’ve never felt real wind on your face, have you, dear?” The question came with a pat on the hand and a look somewhere between vindication and resignation.

“No, Dadi, I suppose I haven’t.” It took Shuki a while to reply. She dismissed the simulators; her grandmother would scoff at those. There was also the time that Shuki and her brother had taken their e-bikes up to this viewing point. They’d unplugged the rechargers on the batteries and freewheeled down the hill. 

Two-thirds of the journey was glorious. There was a wildness to it, her hair streaming behind her, face pummelled by air that moved only by natural forces. The final third had been pure terror because their bikes didn’t have manual brakes, and the rechargers weren’t designed to be disconnected. Her brother had lost two front teeth going over a low mud brick wall. Shuki herself had lost the soles of both sandals and ended up in a hedge. 

Her father had taken Dadi’s blame for that one. “If you didn’t want the children to chase the wind, you should not have killed it,” she’d said. 

Best not mention that one. It would either backfire or throw her father under the bus. This was not the day for either. 

“The wind up here used to pick you up and throw you off your feet if you weren’t careful,” her grandmother said. “We’d come up here to watch the sunset. The wind would make us feel alive, like we were part of the earth and the sky and the ocean, because it was reaching out to grab us and hold us and dance with us.” She gave a sudden, incongruous chuckle. “Every year tourists would climb up here, hoping to find some ancient wisdom, or just themselves, and one or two would get blown down the hillside.” The merriment faded as quickly as it had arisen. “Don’t get them anymore, of course. Who’d want to come up here to look at all these?”

The turbines were everywhere, no one needed to travel to see them. Besides, Shuki thought they were beautiful. Gracefully curved blades like ballet arabesques turned lazily, adding a background thrum to the otherwise still air. Above each a green and red light alternated. Green to show the turbine was operational, red for air traffic control. 

The design, which could achieve great height on uneven ground, was her father’s invention. Shuki hadn’t been born when the first one went up here outside their own hometown. Flooding in the lowlands had led her father to build where his ancestors had grazed their goats. A defiant gesture that divided his people. 

Not that there were any choices. Not after the seas rose more than most climate models had predicted and untold people died. Not after the UN banned the burning of fossil fuels. Shuki had been born in the early years of the Post Oil Period. POP kids grew up not knowing the baseline miasma of pollution, or the strength of more than a gentle breeze. Turbines filled the oceans and towered above landscapes the world over. 

Her father joined them on the hilltop. He hunkered down, one arm resting on the wheelchair beside his mother. Behind, the whine of an electric engine signalled the departure of his guests. 

“Well?” Dadi asked him.

“They haven’t signed yet, but I think they will. No shortage of wind on Mars, and this design has stood the test of time,” he replied. His tone was light, but Shuki knew every wrinkle and crease on his face. Tension wound tight inside him. He was not worried about the contract. 

Dadi must have sensed it too because neither of the responses Shuki was expecting—that the towers would be better toppling into the sea or that her father was always working—never came. Instead, a wrinkled hand reached out on each side. On the right to cover her son’s, on the left to cover Shuki’s. It wasn’t in Dadi to say something soft; not saying anything hard was enough. 

“How’s the weather, Papa?” Shuki asked, pushing the words past a lump in her throat.

“Still on track, pigeon. Any moment now.”

He tapped his phone with his free hand. In a line leading out towards the ocean, the green lights on the towers blinked out, and the ballerina-blades slowed to a standstill, holding their final positions perfectly. 

She felt it then, edged with brine. A push against her hair first, a tickle on her nose. It grew. A tugging on her shawl, an encouragement to drop her knee and stabilise herself on the ground. It swelled. She felt the shove, filled with the memory of hurtling down the hill. But this time it was not Shuki who was in motion. This was nature, primal and uncaged. Her hair pulled free of its clips. It streamed away behind her, a victory banner. She wanted to throw out her hands and laugh, but the laughter dissolved in an uncontrollable urge to weep, both held like a weight in her chest that stalled her breath.

Dadi’s hand tightened on her own. It was the wind pricking tears in Shuki’s eyes. Through them, she saw Dadi’s other hand pat her father’s once, twice, then go still. It was all the praise she would give him. It was all the praise in the world. 

Shuki blinked away the tears. Above, one by one, the green lights began to wink, and the ballerinas began to turn, and the wind died.

Ali Abbas is the author of two novellas: Silent Running is a hard sci-fi thriller published by Lost Colony Magazine, and Like Clockwork is a steampunk mystery published by Transmundane Press. A full list of published works and free to read stories is available on his author site at www.authoraliabbas.weebly.com. Ali maintains a blog at www.aliabbasali.com.

A Future of Madness

by Kika Man 文詠玲


The most I have seen of the future
is on tv. A star whale transporting 
a fallen empire across space, despite the torture.
The same train model returning
on land, through starry skies.
I have seen the titanic fall out of space,
setting a course to the palace of dead queens.
One time, I saw the moon break open,
birthing yet another pre-astronomic creature
that, instead of leaving earth to be flooded,
left another egg to take care of the waves.

Elsewhere, I have seen how the same tram
never stopped announcing its arrival.
The same city in ever-changing struggles
but with the same ding-ding welcomed with open arms. 
Temples change into skyscrapers with only their tops left over.
To keep culture but make it sustainable, minibuses are transformed 
into green-roofed yellow monstrosities.

In order to change, to revolutionise,
maybe the past is not the answer.
Maybe the cultural heritage of old kings and empires 
has to make space for the livelihood of the heirs of those colonized.
Maybe queerness will really explode once we break
with old language norms.
Maybe the future lies in something different, something mad.

Kika Man 文詠玲 (they/them) is a writer from Belgium and Hong Kong. Kika writes about their mixed heritage, mental health, about music and blueness. They grapple daily with the question of where one community starts and the other end, they emphasize tenderness and platonic affections above all. They are one of the founding member of Slam-T (spoken word & slam poetry platform) and a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Kika is the author of Let the Mourning Come (Prolific Pulse LLC, 2022) and they have been published in Capsule Stories, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bridge and others. You can find Kika on Twitter and Instagram @kikawinling and further on kikawinling.wordpress.com.

head fuel

by Amanda Yskamp


Amanda Yskamp is a writer and a collagist. Her artwork has appeared in such magazines as
Black Rabbit, Riddled with Arrows, and Stoneboat. She lives on the 10-year flood plain of the Russian River, teaching writing from her online classroom and serving as a librarian at the local elementary school.

Poor Unfortunate Souls

by R. Thursday


In 1891, Hans Christian Anderson was informed the man he was in love with 
was getting married . . . the next day. The groom was worried Hans would make a scene, but 
luckily he only absolutely justified that by reciting extended passionate poems 
about the man in front of God and everyone. The bride didn't even have the decency 
to be anything but lovely, so gentle, he couldn't even hate her for being with someone
Hans claimed he loved as a woman, his longing forced to be secret, that is, silent. 

In 1989, I see my first movie in theatres: The Little Mermaid. Picture me 
holding a minnie mouse doll, legs lost in a sequined fin, my 4-year-old frame obscured
beneath pink nylon with shiny purple shells, a smile so broad from a mouth so big 

it is the widest gate to barrel an army of insults through, the softest target. 
My first conviction, condemned to be labeled repeat offender.
“You talk too much.” 

You know the story right? She doesn't listen. She wants a body she wasn't born with, 
goes to a drag witch, sacrifices speech to be seen without drowning. It's obvious, 
when you think about it. I have written so many poems apologizing 
for their own noise and others where I pretend to be proud of their volume. When I cried, 

my voice splintered exactly like my mother's, exactly how she earned the nickname Squeaker, a
not-gentle-enough judgment, which never stopped her from calling me 
big mouth. We have always loved like oceans. Which is to say, crushingly.

Hans sent the man a handwritten original draft. The soft femme. The separated lover. 
The silencing. In the first version, there is no redemption, just the fall 
into the sea, just the foam and oblivion, too bleak to publish so after, the added promise 
of heaven, the potential for a more real self the next go around.

I don't have long straight hair or the need to cover my chest with any shell 
except what armor I choose, but when my mother asks if “losing my beautiful 
voice” is a trans thing, I am on the ocean floor, barely tethered. I am afraid 
if I open my mouth, the tidal pull of decades being mocked, dismissed, 
indicted for the squared volume of my words will rip all the forced silences from my secret
grottos and spill them across her floor. I want 
her to stop apologizing for all the witches who have shown me magic. But the question is 
a conch shell curling infinitely with generational history, and it has stolen my voice.

In the story, every step on tender new legs is agony, but the mermaid dances 
for the Prince anyway. We are never allowed to complain about the wreckage of getting 
what we asked for, no matter who leaves us, no matter who lets the silences 
swallow us in the surf.

R. Thursday (they/them) is an educator, historian, writer, and all-around nerd. When not teaching, they can be found reading, playing video games, cooking spicy dishes, or writing about monsters, queerness, comic books, space, wizards, space wizards, and on really great days, all of the above. They live in South King County, Washington, with the world's most copacetic cat.

(Multi)Lingual.io

by Angela Acosta


Four generations too late,
they became giddy children
clucking along with pollito, chicken,
cohete, rocket, estrella, star, 
un abecedario, an alphabet of translations. 

They recovered a language from audio files,
feeling for tendrils of morphemes and vowel sounds,
relishing in tongue twisters, exercising unused muscles.  

Four generations too late,
they had to make sense of how thick hair
and brown eyes came from somewhere,
how they themselves were already inhabiting el más allá.

They savored the new horizons ancestors spoke for them, 
holding back tears when they started 
rolling their rr’s and doubling ll’s. 

Four generations too late,
but right on time for a (Multi)Lingual.io
revival of las lenguas antiguas,
la langue et la parole, a metalinguagem do português,
Nahuatl and Quechua catching a ride on their names.

Mistakes were made aplenty, awash in stardust,
slippages and translanguaging rocking, but never 
shaking the foundation of their capacious syntax. 

Angela Acosta (she/her) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Davidson College. She is a 2022 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers Finalist, 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest Honorable Mention, and Rhysling finalist. Her writing has appeared in Shoreline of Infinity, Apparition Lit, Radon Journal, and Space & Time. She is author of Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness: Poems of a Fabled Universe (Red Ogre Review, 2023).

Extant and Stasis

by Yamille Moss

00:13
Friday

Claudia, there’s something in the vents, and I can hear it scuttering around in there as I’m doing my rounds. It sounds like its claws are scraping against the sides: a shrill and metallic grating that swallows every other fucking sound.

It reminds me of when we were kids in our bedroom, back before you got your retainer. You would grind your teeth all night, and it drove me crazy. It felt like the loudest sound on the planet, that itchy back and forth collision of your wet, exposed skeleton. Some nights I thought for sure that you’d get up and walk over to my side of the room and bare fangs, revealing you’d been sharpening your teeth the entire time. You never did. Instead, you’d look at me so apologetically in the morning, making your already miniature stature smaller until you all but disappeared into yourself at the coffee table. “I’m sorry I kept you up all night.” Your voice barely above a whisper.

I wonder if you’d be louder now that you’ve kept me up for months with the way you’ve disappeared for good. On this damned ship of all places. Or off it, I suppose. You’ve left me with this god-awful discordant grating sound, lacerating every fiber of my being day in and day out.

This ship is too big. 1000 feet is the size of 36 football fields, and I’m supposed to inspect every wire on its many, many machines. The other space-sea submarines have AI do this. They just program them to walk along the route of the ship, routinely tweaking the systems on board. In fact, I don’t even think any other space-sea submarine has this many systems on board. So many cameras, Claudia. Cameras that fly off and dock at certain ports on the ceiling. Cameras that go outside. Cameras that are hidden in the floor, that have body scanners, that alert Elite Executives when someone’s sick. Cameras that line the walls near the exits and see who takes what and puts what back. They’re all fully operational and terrifying.

I spend an absurd amount of time with these cameras. “They’re more like scanners,” a supervisor tells me in the lab. “Or little friends. Can we add smiley faces? Can we make them ask how your day is going? How about a polling function?” another eager, overbearing overseer hounds. Yes. We can add anything we want to them. We can design anything you want. We can program anything you can imagine and there’s no one to stop us out here wherever we are. Idal Corp is well above the law, and even if it weren’t . . . who’s here to stop us? Humanity’s never been here before.

I think about this all the time as I’m working, Claudia. Like tonight, when I had to stand under a drafty vent to fix one of ‘our little friends,’ I thought about the deep space-sea. It’s an endless, bottomless void. It’s not even water really, it’s something else entirely. It’s liquid technically, yes, tiny particles moving around on top of each other. Vibrating against each other near constantly, but it’s not water. What’s out there is poison, and we call it a sea because there’s so much of it and so much in it, but—

*

09:00
Tuesday

Claudia.

This morning I saw a glimpse of what hides inside the vents. 

The cameras have been updated to humanoids. They stand on two feet when they emerge from walls and crevices. They wear little blue, nonthreatening smiley faces like the kind we used to send in texts. They make a noise when their scanners pick up certain heat signatures. It’s akin to the whirring of an electric drill. I test it repeatedly throughout the day to make sure the whirring goes off when I light a candle or fake a fever. This morning it went off without any outside stimulus.

The schhhhrrwwww noise starts abruptly. I am panicked, overworked, and tired. I need to fix its wiring, I think. So, I cup its face like a child, shushing the machine as if it will respond to that: as if I have given birth to some subatomic appliance that finds solace in my touch. The schrrrwwww continues. It gets louder and louder until I have to push myself away from the robot, have to stand on the wall across from it as it looks around wildly. 

It twitches like a wounded animal. Without arms to swing around, it gyrates its neck in every direction, spinning 360 degrees. It whistles like a coffee pot as it flashes red. We didn’t program it with speech, and still it articulates slowly, with the cadence of a rock against a cheese grater, “H . . . . h . . . h-heat . . . signature . . . error . . . ERROR.”

It does this until it’s yelling. Until I’m equipping my toolbox and realizing I’m alone. How am I alone here on a ship with 900 people? But it keeps going, Claudia. Until it stops and it’s looking up. Its smiling face stares upwards at the ceiling.

Directly above it, hanging out of the vent is a ghastly creature with translucent skin and reptilian parietal eyes too far apart. There is another eye in the center of its forehead, but this one opens the wrong way, it sits vertically and takes a cuneate shape. 

The creature and the robot stare at each other. The former with its mouth open, the latter with a pile of drool accumulating on the top of its head. Then there are footsteps as someone rounds the corner. The creature startles, making the vent shake. It disappears back into it and leaves us there.

*

The robot turns to me, and its perpetual smiley face is still there, though I half expect it not to be. It doesn’t make another noise as it slowly backs into the wall it belongs to. It camouflages itself the way it's programmed to.

But when I touched the wall afterward, Claudia, there was a damp spot right where its eyes were.

Do you cry wherever you are, Claudia? Are there tears in death?

We’re out here to study this vast, terrible ocean and everything inside it. But all the time it’s moving around us, and I wonder if we’re being consumed—swallowed whole. 

Yamille Moss is a Black sapphic Bahamian writer currently in the second year of their MFA program at Fresno State. Their pronouns are she/they. They are an Editorial Assistant for The Normal School and also a member of the San Joaquin Literary Association. They served as the Editorial Assistant for Fresno State’s Young Writers’ Conference and have published several articles on Fresno State’s College of Arts and Humanities blog. She was also the Social Media Intern at this year's CSU Summer Arts.

Next Stop

by Gretchen Tessmer


she’s read the brochure
scribbling nervous notes
in cramped margins—

any how town (to borrow the phrase)
any why bus stop
any what glows
any when wonder
any which spaceship
any where goes

“don’t think, just go!”

as they say
fortune favors the brave
and the grass must be greener
on the other side of space
those asteroid-sized monsters
that she’s read about
can’t be worse than the leviathans
of fear and indecision
all swimming and diving inside
the Olympic-sized pool
in her poor and aching head

they frolic, they keep themselves well-fed

her feet are rooted
her hands wringing
as the bus driver asks, again:
“Ma’am . . . are you coming?”

she grips that brochure
until it shreds

Gretchen Tessmer lives in the deep woods of the U.S./Canadian borderlands. She's published more than 100 short stories and poems in such venues as Nature, Bourbon Penn, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and F&SF.

Illumination Finds the Android Promise

by Christopher Collingwood


Chris was born and raised in Sydney Australia. He completed university in Sydney and graduated with a degree in business studies. Chris has devoted his spare time to writing, with works published in
Not One of Us, Andromeda Spaceways, Abyss & Apex, Hexagon, Shoreline of Infinity, Jersey Devil Press, State of Matter, Smoke in the Stars anthology, and illustration in the recent JOURN-E 2.1, among other dimensionally unstable places.

Fair Winds Travel

by Jason E. Maddux

An electronic chime sounded as the man pushed open the glass door. He paused as a blast of cold air hit him in the face. 

The all-glass outer wall of the Florida strip mall shop allowed in plenty of sunlight to the front half of the store, leaving the back half in shadows. The store was decorated like most travel agencies. Airline destination posters lined the walls. A couple of giant cardboard cutouts stood like colourful sentinels advertising all-inclusive Caribbean resorts. Two even larger cardboard partitions covered in travel advertisements divided the store in half, leaving only a narrow opening to what lay at the back.

A woman—the only visible occupant—sat at one of the two desks in the front. She looked to be in her sixties, with long sliver-grey hair. “Welcome to Fair Winds Travel,” she said, standing to greet the man. She wore a colourful sweater and black pants, which she smoothed down as she stood. “Where would you like to travel today?” 

The man—slender, almost six feet tall with black hair and a dark complexion—took a hesitant step forward. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I was hoping you could help me.”

The woman motioned to one of the chairs facing her desk. “I’m Barbara. Please have a seat.” 

He nodded and did as offered. “I’m Charlie. I work next door at the Pizza Palace. My coworkers and I were wondering what exactly goes on in here.”

“Always happy to satisfy the curiosity of a neighbour,” Barbara said, smiling. She waved at the paraphernalia adorning the office. “I’m a certified travel counsellor, and this is where I help people plan their dream vacations.” 

Charlie scratched the back of his head. “That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t explain the weird sounds—and that eerie glow we see from next door sometimes.”

“I don’t know what to tell you about that,” Barbara said, cocking her head. 

The door chime sounded again. Another man walked in. Though he could have hardly been out of his teens, he was a mountain of a person. Any of the pro sports leagues would have welcomed his services. He nodded to Barbara, who nodded back as he passed through to the rear of the store, a wheeled suitcase trailing behind.

The newcomer’s arrival had thrown Charlie off his line of thought. He shook his head to reign his mind back in. “You know what I think,” Charlie said, bolder now. “I think this is a travel agency and you are a travel agent, but I also think this is a front for a secret government operation. I think you have a teleportation portal back there, and you use it to send government agents all over the world instantly.” He crossed his arms over his chest, daring Barbara to contradict him.

She let out a soft laugh. “I think you and my youngest grandson would get along.” When Charlie’s posture didn’t soften, she continued, “Look, that’s a great story and shows you have a wonderful imagination, but I only sell travel here.” She picked up a couple of brochures off her desk. “If you’re interested, several airlines are having sales to popular spring break destinations. Maybe you’d like to take these hotel brochures to see if anything catches your eye?” She offered the papers to Charlie.

A whirling roar came from the back of the store, followed by a bright yellow light that poured through the opening between the cardboard partitions. Just as quickly as they started, both ceased.

Charlie’s mouth fell open, followed shortly by his arms falling to his lap. Gathering himself, he stood. “You—you—see! That’s what I’m talking about. That man just took your portal to a secret destination in someplace like Russia . . . or China.”

“He did nothing of the sort,” Barbara said, the smile returning to her face. “Come with me.” She led Charlie to the back of the store and in front of two doors on the right wall. The bright light appeared again as the tall man walked out of one of the doors, drying his hands on a paper towel. “Charlie, I’d like you to meet my oldest grandson, Joey.”

“Hello,” Joey said, holding out his hand. Charlie remained motionless.

“Joey, would you mind opening the other door there?” Barbara said, pointing to the second door in the wall.

Joey shrugged and pulled open the second door. Inside stood a stacked washer and dryer unit. The suitcase Joey had rolled in sat rattling on the washer lid.

Barbara put a gentle hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “Joey’s apartment doesn’t have a laundry, so I let him use the one here.” 

Charlie’s mouth resumed its now familiar open position. Barbara used her hand to steer him back to the front of the store and to the door.

“You think on what I said about that spring break trip and then come back and see me, all right?” Barbara said, opening the door. 

Charlie left without a word, trudging back to the Pizza Palace. His coworkers—having heard the sounds and seeing the strange light—greeted him with a barrage of questions. 

The excitement of Charlie’s return caused them all to overlook the sharply dressed couple walking by, both carrying small, shoulder-slung duffle bags and wearing unusually heavy coats for October in Florida. Joey held the door open for the couple as he left the store. 

The couple stopped in front of Barbara. “Mr. and Mrs. Ruhlig, is it? The portal is already warmed up for your trip to Moscow.” She nodded behind her. “Just be sure to head to your left. You wouldn’t want to end up in the restroom.”

Jason E. Maddux is an aviation attorney, who writes speculative fiction as a creative outlet each night once his two daughters are in bed. His short stories have appeared here and there in various magazines and anthologies, and many were finally corralled into We're Here to Help... Ourselves: Short Tales of Time, Space, Aliens, and Paperwork. After spending his youth moving around the southeastern United States, he now resides in northern Virginia. Follow him at www.jasonemaddux.com and on Twitter @Jason_E_Maddux.

Mother Maple’s Children

by Crystal Sidell

I.

The trees seek revenge. We
keep to ourselves—bolt doors, cross shoulders, mouth no
when the rotting ones rattle our panes. The hours stretch; night is longer
without the cicadas’ lullaby. Voices carry as if spoken through a tin can
strung across property lines, faint and static-filled. We squint our ears to hear.
At dawn, we see what remains: the cockiest of the
murderers, armless; their seedlings’ vocabulary simpler than a cuckoo’s.

II.

The trees communicate through millenia-old song
branches bending, reaching until the topmost leaf skims the
ground. After the marauders strike, they cast their leaves into the rivers,
collect water to nourish their thirst. The time has come. Sighing, crying: no,
we will not sacrifice ourselves any
longer.

III.

It is seven minutes after the thirteenth hour. We are 
waiting for the clouds to part, patience fixed upon the ghost-silver
above our bed. We are waiting and wanting, hungry with
the flavor of vengeance. We fling up our green-veined fingers to catch fish
raining from the sky; they close-open their depthless eyes and
shed their slimy-sharp scales. The time has come. We have all we need to punish the
ax-wielders. We release our anger into the wind.

IV.

The trees orchestrated their revenge; there is
no other way to describe it. I was a pup then (it’s true), a 
child-witness to their anger, their determination, their brute
force. Their sap-breath infected the guilty, sent old and young thrashing
and screaming into their own hearths. Unable to tamp down
their hysteria, they suffered as the Great Mother Maple had suffered, until the
Great Forest had de-rooted them and flattened them like unwanted heather.

A native of Tampa Bay, Crystal Sidell grew up playing with toads in the rain and indulging in speculative fiction. She draws inspiration from the natural world, travel, and all things spooky. A Pushcart Nominee, Best of the Net Nominee, and Rhysling Finalist, her work appears in 34 Orchard, Apparition Lit, Eye to the Telescope, F&SF, Frozen Wavelets, Haven Spec, On Spec, The Quiet Ones, The Sprawl Mag, Strange Horizons, and others. You can find her on various social media platforms @sidellwrites.

Timeless

by Amuri Morris


Amuri Morris is an artist based in Virginia. She recently graduated from painting/printmaking and business at Virginia Commonwealth University. Prior to this, she studied art at a Center for the Arts in high school. Throughout the years she has acquired several artistic accolades, such as a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship. She aims to promote diversity in art canon, specifically focusing on the black experience. You can find her work at
www.murisart.com or on instagram under @miss.muri.art.

The Person in the Moon

by Avra Margariti


We lean over their craters
Honeycombed darker than their shaded
Side, the wounded perforations
Of flag poles, spaceship detritus—
Shallow graves for fallen
Rovers.

We promise the person
In the moon we will tread
Gently on their sterling surface,
Lunar luminosity.
We are here neither to colonize
Nor vacation. A refuge

Of liminality, humbly asked,
Graciously granted.
We stare into the mired
Craters like scrying mirrors
Begging to be told our fates.
To wash our world weary
Dust off premature wrinkles,
Whitened hair.

And in those craters, we will watch
In seas of tranquility
Our true faces reflected, will
Speak a heart-name the person
In the moon has safeguarded
For us since before
The earth was born.

Did you know there was water
Here after all?
All we thirstling, starveling
Children needed
Was to quietly, adamantly
Ask.

Avra Margariti is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Rhysling-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Vastarien, Asimov’s, Liminality, Arsenika, The Future Fire, Space and Time, Eye to the Telescope, and Glittership. “The Saint of Witches”, Avra’s debut collection of horror poetry, is available from Weasel Press. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).

Soundscape of the Deep Woods

by Brian U. Garrison


Out where the forest folk chat with the frogs.
Where tree spirits masquerade under wild winds.
When the jukebox serenades the sapling grove,
the surging mudmen swim up-creek to seek
their long-lost partners of the swamp.

Tall pines unfurl their legs, revealing
dark marks and the memory of fire.
But a shimmering, calming balm arises.
Strands of silky mist wrap tight to form
a dress for a full night of waltzing.

The ambience oscillates, unknown to human ears,
casting timbers that scratch the immutable,
weaving harmonics that entangle the soul.
The transient vibrato of starlight coiling.
The opalescent resonance of synchronous salamanders.

The madcap mushrooms, in their perfect stillness,
cause the moss to totter and toss a toxic vortex
of spores—a careful chaos that mesmerizes even
forest visitors who cannot hear it. A ragged cacophony,
it drags the wayward mudmen trundling back.

Abandoning their hunt, they gurgle a marshy tune.
They jazz and joke with flora and fauna until
on the horizon, rising, the rays of daylight
devour the crystal mists, and the pines
return to swaying like plain old pines.

Brian U. Garrison (he/him) writes poetry for children, adults, and grand adults. His work has appeared in Asimov's, Ember Journal, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Haikuniverse, Science Write Now, Star*Line, and elsewhere. His first chapbook is New Yesterdays, New Tomorrows (self-published) and his second is in the works, Micropoetry for Microplanets (Space Cowboy Books). He serves as Managing Editor for the online quarterly Eye to the Telescope. Find him in Portland, Oregon or online. www.bugthewriter.com

What Kind of Name is Hitchcock Blonde

by September Woods Garland

“Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”
- Alfred Hitchcock

Eva and Grace and me were on tour, playing shitty club after shitty club, making just enough scratch for gas and food and the occasional eighth of weed when our van broke down somewhere east of Boise. The night was bitter cold and country dark. Troubleshooting the best we could, we guessed the fuel pump had gone out, but not one of us knew how to fix a damn thing on that van. We were punks, not gearheads. 

Maybe we can hitch, Grace said. 

With all this gear? said Eva. 

Nah, I said, sniffing a hint of exhaust in the winter air. We need a new rig.

A set of headlights came into view, slowing as they neared. A lifted F-150 pulled over behind the van, and we braced ourselves for the encounter, wordlessly taking position. When a crew of rednecks piled out, I knew we were in for a fight.

The driver stepped close and lit a smoke. The light of the match cast a shadow across his pock-marked face. I watched him take in the view of Eva and Grace and me, arms-crossed, the F-150’s headlights illuminating our band name, airbrushed across the side of the van.

What kind of name is Hitchcock Blonde? he asked. His cohorts stood laughing at his side, but we didn’t say shit, just let his words hang there in the Idahoan night air.

The big one pushed me aside and opened the door to the van. 

Looky here, he was saying as the group eyed our equipment: 

The Marshall half stack.

The Peavey.

The Ludwig maple drum kit.

This gear’s ours now, said the driver as he smiled big with a rotted grin.

You inbreds even play? Grace said, giggling between tokes of a heady sativa. 

The look she gave Eva and me signalled this was one of those moments in every woman’s life when she must decide. That night, Eva and Grace and me were in agreement. 

The transformation was rapid. We’d been doing it a while now, with or without the power of the full moon. Fishnets ripped, tank tops tore, Doc Martens and Converse high tops burst at the seams. Our blonde locks grew wild in the night. We snarled and howled and when the metamorphosis was complete, we stood before the men: a formidable pack. Eva and Grace and me lunged. We scratched and bit, and the boys cried out. The driver pissed his Wranglers as I took a chunk out of his forearm, the squish of his flesh in my fangs invigorating. In under a minute the boys fled whimpering into the darkness, leaving a trail of blood atop virgin snow.

We returned to human form and loaded our gear into the truck. The rednecks had left a carton of smokes and a loaded .45 on the bench seat. I emptied the clip into the van’s windows and tires—just for kicks—and we abandoned the old rig there on the side of the road.

As we headed to our next gig in that lifted truck, heat and Bikini Kill blasting, the question about our name echoed in my mind. I wished I would have answered the guy. 

That night we played to a rabid crowd of rural freaks. Hair stained with blood, I howled like the beast society forced me to become. I thought I spotted one of our would-be oppressors in the pit, pumping his fist and banging his head to the driving bass line. I winked in his direction as I growled, throwing myself around the stage. Here’s your answer, I was thinking, in all our raging grit and glory.

September Woods Garland is an emerging writer from the Pacific Northwest. Her flash fiction has appeared in Black Sheep Magazine, Idle Ink, Hello Horror, and elsewhere. She is currently in the query trenches with her debut novel. www.septemberwoodsgarland.com

the time travel treehouse takes its final bow

by Claire McNerney


the treehouse is on fire
and there’s nothing we can do,
no time we can go to fix it—
we drank all the water from the permian seas
during the last long drought,
saving ourselves, leaving all of history waterless

and the treehouse is on fire
so we can’t even go back
and pretend it wasn’t the only choice
we ever could have made.

burning boards tumble to the forest floor
and the treehouse glitches out,
making one last trip without us,
going somewhere to die.
we feel an emptiness, half-ghosts—
the skies open into rain
as we wonder what we’re doing here,
in this quiet forest we’ve never been before.

Claire McNerney writes, creates, and performs in her home state of California. Their writing appears in A&N's 'Gargantua' Anthology, Los Suelos, and Cossmass Infinities. She also guest edited the 50th issue of Eye to the Telescope. She enjoys, among other things, the glint of sunlight on the ocean. 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!