Once lived a woman wrapped in a magenta skin so brilliant she glowed, but the story doesn’t start like that.
Prose
Browse submissions from past editions, web exclusive content, author Q&A, and more.
The Seed and The Stone
The Arbor tells us stories of a time before, when all the dead were kept in orchards that rolled endlessly, and had always been there, and people tended to them constantly in gratitude and respect for their ancestors.
a disappearance beside the yatsushiro sea
Margaret Morri was the name Yoshikane Araki used when referring to an apparition who squeezed under the doorway or window mesh or rose between barrack floorboards to haunt the hot desert air above his straw mattress.
Sleeping Beauty’s Daughter
The day her husband died, Sleeping Beauty gave back to him the kiss he had bestowed upon her consentless lips sixty years before.
No Girls Allowed
A blue-painted drawbridge. A frog pond moat. A two-story clubhouse on its own island deep in the vine-strangled woods, six bear cubs peering out from the wooden slats of windows and a lone green door.
Oyster
Out of oxygen, algae, and a grain of calcium carbonate, the oyster came to be.
Juniper
The dream collectors’ truck stopped at each house on our street. There was a system: Mondays recycling, Tuesdays dreams, Wednesdays general trash.
Gifts from the Sea
At summer’s end, the seaside town celebrated its annual festival. After all the bathers had gone home, some men carried the mikoshi shrine through the streets, while others beat the taiko drums.
The Girl, the Wolf, the Crone
More than once there was a soon-to-be-old woman who had a loaf of bread, held it in her hands she did, and it was inconvenient to have a loaf of bread always sitting in her hands…
Blue Funk
People love my city for its brasseries like hothouses, ardent and perverse, its breezes that smell of coffee and of the sea.
