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CURRENT ISSUE

FEBRUARY 2022

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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 Ma
ttress
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)

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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

ESSAYS & INTERVIEWS

The Need for Utopian Fiction
by Joshua Fagan
Cover Art Credit: Wayne Agnew

FROM THE EDITOR

Letter from the Editor
by Joshua Fagan


Letter from the Editor
by Tristan Evarts
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