EDITOR'S NOTE
A year ago, this note opened with an admission: “The world is changing fast – faster than our time of reaction – and we haven’t a clue where it is heading.”
The picture is clearer now, and it isn’t a reassuring one. What our writers found in it anyway – and this is what the title through the haze points to – looks, tentatively, like new energy; their stories belong to this uncertain moment.
Several pieces in the Sidetracks section are about small moments that turn into something larger. A Sunday trip to the beautician by Loren Le Quesne turns into a humorous lesson in self-awareness; a walk in the rain by Elizabeth Kelly turns into a cleansing of sorts; and Renata Teran, not a smoker, learns to give Romans a light. Elsewhere in the section, Elizabeth Dagestino writes about Giulia Tofana, the seventeenth-century poisoner extraordinaire, whose murderous potion dispatched over six hundred cruel husbands. “She was seen as a witch and a devil but to me she is a hero,” Dagestino declares. Between them, Kelly and Sophia Hurtado offer poems of remembrance, self-discovery, and strong evocative verse; Hurtado also contributed this year’s cover.
The fiction section is especially rich this year, opening with McKenna Parker’s poignant piece on grief after a mother’s suicide. Much of what follows is darker still, or stranger: Dagestino gives us a gripping vampire story set in New Orleans, with desire, danger, and no shortage of blood; Meagan Bonney revisits the Greek myths with a punishing fable and its unambiguous moral – never mess with the gods; Hurtado’s Genevieve, moving into a new flat, finds the resident rat is the least of her problems.
Sofia Zanin’s spooky tale about a cold, inhospitable town closes things out – and ends, unexpectedly, on a flicker of light.