Editor’s Note

We’ve had record-setting rain in the Midwest, days and weeks of downpours and drizzles as we creep toward an election.

We shelter our small hopes beneath rickety umbrellas or whatever’s close at hand. We fog up the windshield glass and keep our straining eyes on the path ahead. Everything is unprecedented, uncertain, and we’re just trying to survive. The characters in this issue are no different, all weathering storms of their own, some more literally than others.

They flee the clouds or chase them, whatever form they take: an elusive skateboard trick, a tobacco tin full of teeth, salmon rotting as they swim, an impending prom, a final text message, and, of course, the uneven stab of lightning across the sky.

These pieces are warm and cold fronts slamming together, a collision of forces, of contrasts. In them, people are challenged with grief and loss and inner truths they can’t quite face. And when the winds die down and the clouds break, we are left with something new.

So come, grab your jacket and boots, take a steadying breath at the door, then open the issue and enter the storm.

P.S. to our U.S. readers: Please cast your informed vote and together perhaps we can turn the tide.

Table of Contents

Title	Genre	Writer
Storms	Poetry	Brian Gotta
S>E>X>S>C>E>N>E	Fiction	Annie Johnson
The Things We Keep	Poetry	McLord Selasi
Resolving	Flash CNF	JR Fenn
Gone	Flash CNF	Christopher Wiley-Smith
End of the Line	Fiction	Jamie Hawley
Weathering the Storm	Interactive	Vast Editors