
CURRENT ISSUE
FEBRUARY 2022
HIGHER LEARNING
By Glen Engel-Cox
I am playing marbles in the shade of the school building. The concrete feels cold to my hands and knees, but I know that the concrete just on the other side of the line that separates the shade from sunlight is burning hot. The game is of my own making. The object: to see if you can shoot a marble that will come to rest half in cold, half in hot. Another part of me remembers something of another game that I had made up, one in which you took a coin and flipped it, trying to calculate the odds for it landing on its side. Erase that. Inappropriate. I'm shooting marbles.
I sense the big kid watching me play my game. I continue to shoot my marbles. Click. Click-click-click. The big kid's footsteps on my playing field, right on top of my favorite neon agate that was sitting in the shade two millimeters away from the line. I am afraid that it will be crushed. I do not know why.
"Still playing marbles? What's the point of marbles? You don't even play it right. You're supposed to draw a circle, then knock marbles out of the circle. That's how you get more marbles. Where's your circle? Don't you know the rules of the game?"
I try to ignore the big kid. It is my game. I watch the foot over the neon agate. I can see the dimple that marks where the marble is in relation to the sole of the shoe that rests on the ground. The line between light and shadow crosses the sneaker... MORE
FICTION
POETRY
Higher Learning
by Glen Engel-Cox
The Conditions for Blooming
by Nadine Aurora Tabing
Regarding the Fate of the Chief Mason's Wife
by Avra Margariti
Please Don't Eat the Mattress
by Kelly Kurtzhals-Geiger
The Nothings
By Rhonda Parrish & Beth Cato
Centaurian Triplets
by Roxanne Barbour
Greenhouse
by Eva Papasoulioti
Jupiter, Dave, The Turtles, and the Tube
by Elizabeth R. McClellan
Doe Eyed Dreamer
by Andrew Leonard
ESSAYS & INTERVIEWS
Teenie Weenie Preemie
by Signe Nettum
Positive Futures: Fixing Light Pollution
by Jean-Paul Garnier
FROM THE EDITOR
Letter from the Editor
by Jess Nickelsen
THE VAULT
Surface Tension, Conclusion
by James Blish
SPECIAL JOINT ISSUE WITH ORION'S BELT & UTOPIA SCIENCE FICTION (MARCH 2023)

FICTION
Messages From the Front
by Simon Kewin
Our World Between Their Lines
by Jenna Hanchley
This Morning She Was Caroline
by Derek Alan Jones
The Rules of the Game
by Geoff Gander
We Held Hands, We Held Fire
by Myna Chang
POETRY
One Dozen and One Reasons Why...
By Charles M. Saplak
日食 (Eclipse)
by Phuong Anh
Adrift
by Sam Lesek
8th Grade Science Fiction
by M.C. Childs
How to Rebloom After Frost
by Anna Madden