Tellings
Fiction, memoir, maybe neither. These are narrative-shaped things—stories, semi-stories, things that unfold, drift, or confess. Some are real, some aren’t. Most don’t say.
For the Record, and Before Anyone Else Says Anything
For the Record, and Before Anyone Else Says Anything
by Silex Bjerg
I am the solids person.
Within this publication — this sprawling, interdimensional, occasionally ungovernable enterprise — someone had to be responsible for the firm, the dense, the load-bearing, the things that do not move when you ask them not to. That person is me. That has always been me. I did not campaign for this. I was recognized.
On the Occasion of a Retrospective
On the Occasion of a Retrospective
by Akiko Amora
The work is clean. I will say that first because it is true, and because I was trained — by necessity, by professional survival, by the long practice of saying difficult things inside polite containers — to lead with what is true before arriving at what is complicated.
The Woman Who Breathed Brine
The Woman Who Breathed Brine
by Ozzy Annoa
They said she was spending too much time in the tanks.
The others whispered it, casually at first—over open laptops and late-night freeze-dried meals, in the clipped shorthand of colleagues pretending not to gossip. But the concern grew, quietly. She was always wet. Not damp from a lab spill or rinse-off—wet, as if freshly pulled from somewhere else.