Editor’s Note

The world is always ending. That’s part of what I think all these pieces are trying to tell us. This issue—perhaps more than any thus far—started around that particular theme and continued to accumulate and grow in the way apocalypses tend to do. It’s not a challenge to look out at the wider world and see destruction and decay, to feel as if things are speeding out of control. Those are the times when we at Vast Chasm find ourselves returning to art, to stories that remind us that every change is a kind of ending, a kind of apocalypse.

When the world ends, it can do so in ways both big and small. The pieces in this issue explore apocalypse through a range of scales. There are deeply personal experiences, cataclysms of the inner world: the implosion of a relationship or the solidifying walls of isolation or the upheaval of one’s own body. There are also larger destructions: capitalism’s endless grind, the alienation of uncaring healthcare systems, the looming specter of a changing climate.

Even in the apocalypse, there’s beauty. These works remind us of that as well. Change is dangerous and unstable and can mean improvement all the same. This issue is full of whispers, prayers, rants, fever dreams that find beauty in the end of the world. These voices are desperate and insistent and necessary if we are to see the glimmers of hope around the edges. Read on toward the world’s end. Read on toward a new beginning.

Table of Contents

Title	Genre	Writer
To the House Wren that Sang Once on My Patio	Poetry	Dyani Sabin
capturing a real live black hole in HD	Flash CNF	Christa Lei
progress	Poetry	Scott Taylor
Ariba, I am but a child at your feet	Poetry	Katie Berger
How to Survive the Apocalypse	Flash Fiction	Anne Louise Pepper
Screentime	Flash Fiction	Angeline Schellenberg
On the Beach	Poetry	Felix Grygorcewicz
Memory Match	Interactive	Vast Editors