Editor’s Note

For one reason or another (you can probably guess), I’ve been thinking about what it means to be disappeared, snatched up and vanished by larger forces in the world. I have this recurring sense that gravity is failing and we’re all on the edge of tumbling upward into that gaping emptiness.

It’s like being adrift on a nighttime ocean, broken shards of moon flickering on distant waves, everything too small, too incomplete. There’s no context to the void, no sense of scale with which to measure all that darkness.

Here at Vast, we’ve always hoped to help each of our contributors shine a “V” of light into the unknown, lend their own illumination to all that emptiness.

In this issue, the writers explore the isolating dark, they crack its claws and slurp the meat. They cut its strings and watch it fall from beyond the atmosphere, from a different time, generations away. In coffee shops or yurts, they explore the isolation, seek connection in the void.

More and more, it seems important to cultivate those connections, webs of relationships woven into neighborhoods or found families or fierce friendships. That is the fabric that keeps us from getting disappeared, that gives us the strength to say, “fuck off” even when that’s the harder choice.

I hope that, like us, you connect with these pieces, with the lovely language and the aching underneath. I hope that you, like us, feel a little less alone.

Table of Contents

Title	Genre	Writer
I’m in Our Coffee Shop	Poetry	Matthew Roy
To All the Crabs I’ve Loved Before	Flash CNF	Juliet Way-Henthorne
The Bleeding Edge	CNF	Sara Sherburne
I Am the Twitch in the Family Line	Poetry	Carrie Farrar
By My Own Hand	CNF	Zach Edson
When the Sky Tumbled Down	Flash Fiction	Ian Li
Connections	Interactive	Vast Editors