The wild thing about an apocalypse is how quickly we forget. See if you can refresh your memory with a little matching game.
We’ve pulled a few words and matching images from each piece in this issue and laid them out for you to pair together. Remember playing this game as a kid? Trying to divide the world up into neat little copies of itself before the clock ran out?
How to Play Click on cards to match a word or phrase from one card with the image from another. Can you match them all? Can you remember the world as it was?
there are no worries on the beach; we can flaunt our near-naked forms, as we build derelict sandcastles that we pretend will last forever on a shore lit by our ancestors’ sun; we can find this ancient comfort, this primal escape, only here, now
it is as if we’re reminded by the vastness of the ocean how frail and powerless we are, so we set aside our conflicts, instead choosing to navel-gaze and sunbathe and permit ourselves to forget the two degree goal, less than two minutes to midnight,
the world is so fucked; sometimes i just want — need — a cigarette an indulgence concealed by a sea breeze; we can linger until each dune takes on meaning, shaped by wind, insects, you, you from weeks ago, us from years ago, us here now
FelixGrygorcewicz (he/him/his) is an experimental writer, mostly of fiction, though he dabbles in poetry and non-fiction. He has worked in education for over 10 years on the East and West coasts of the U.S. and is currently residing in the middle of the country where he teaches. He is often inspired by nature and people.
Beside me on the sofa, my daughter is playing a video game. Only her eyes and fingers move. When I ask her how her day was, she doesn’t answer. Or maybe my middle-aged ears have lost her frequency. On the screen, another version of her in a glittering lilac bodysuit is slaying skeletons and scaling cliffs. Set limits, they tell me. Keep trying to connect in the real world; she’ll come around. I’m tired of picking my battles with a trained warrior. She has the controller, but I hold the remote. I press the up arrow. Beside me, her body flickers. On the screen, her bodysuit deepens to violet. I wave at the screen; she waves back. She looks so happy. I keep pressing up up up, until beside me on the sofa, the daughter I always wanted fades away.
Angeline Schellenberg is the author of the Manitoba Book Award-winning series of linked poems about autism, Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), and the KOBZAR-nominated elegy collection, Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020). Angeline’s work was selected for Best Microfiction 2024. She hosts the Speaking Crow open-mic poetry series in Winnipeg, Canada, where she lives with her husband, two children, and rescue dog. A contemplative spiritual director, photographer, and mudlark, Angeline will launch her third poetry book, Mondegreen Riffs (At Bay Press), in September 2024.
If you catch a frog, eat its legs. If you’re hungry, eat the rest. It doesn’t matter how cool the frog is—its little balloon eyes, how its skin is alien green, how its neck bulges and smooths, how it chime-burps on early spring nights, how a clump of grass transmogrifies into a frog. None of that matters. Frogs are food. You can eat them raw and use the bones to make arrowheads or stilettos or gigs and get yourself more. Frogs aren’t companions, not the way say, a dog, or a cat, or a rat, or a squirrel, or a raccoon is—even if you could grab one of those, and drag it close, and cocoon it in your arms, and tuck your chin over its back, its hot heart twitching next to your chest, you would have to eat it, eventually. This is the apocalypse. You are surviving.
If you encounter manufactured goods—congratulations! If you can get into a car, you can sleep in it; if you curl up tight enough, no one will know you are there. The radiator fluid makes an effective euthanizer, always handy. The glass and gasoline are good for starting fires. The tires make sturdy sandals, and you can dress yourself in the cloth or, if you’re lucky, the leather from the seats—but don’t get used to the foam padding. It will pack down, and then you’ll miss it and be sad. If you come across something that was desirable in the before-times, be careful. Be objective. A ring may have been important once, may have been precious, even—but in the after-world, it is dead weight.
If you encounter other people, be really careful. You may have compatible skills and interests, you may want help getting shelter or provisions—you may be lonely. This is understandable. But remember: other people caused this apocalypse. If it were up to you, your plans would have worked out, people wouldn’t have suggested taking a little time or reconsidering things. But the apocalypse happened, and here you are, collapsed in this empty lot, half-submerged in a puddle, soaked with freezing dew, wearing the same clothes you’ve had on since it happened, your stomach grinding dry, a sticky grit coating your neck and chest and hair and teeth—spurned and gazing at a frog.
Anne Louise Pepper is a writer and former educator who lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her work can be found in failbetter and The Citron Review.
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1
Ariba, I have failed you again. I have placed a box fan in front of a cattle fan and called it ambition. I sent my resume to the paltry gods and it contained a typo, a misplaced “y” or “i” and now I must cleanse my relevant experience at the river of the many-headed girlboss. I asked a career coach for a smoke. Ariba, with your four-step approval process, your sacred ladder, and me, a mere renter comprised of trustworthiness scores. I live in terror of your guided buying, as it should be.
2
Ariba, you must understand that I lived for years in a tempest of misremembered Morse code. They refer to it as the ancient ‘90s. Your origins lie in a hush of patents, but my eyes still sting with since-dead neon. I remember the sign of the hatchery, a cracking egg. I remember the flamingos, so many, and a wildfire’s worth of green gas station dinosaurs. A teapot atop a building. A water tower of painted bees. A green screen computer with a single blinking cursor. Heretical childhood. Modus operandi: Midwestern. O Ariba, we are but public four-year arts majors with flapping fruit bats for memories. Deliver us from our contract requests, our blanket orders, too. We ask this of you, not God.
3
Ariba, an office door slams in the afternoon light and I cry. If the employee of the month called eternal suffering a pain point, middle management may learn to practice active listening. List the ailments: your upskilled heart, your quiet quitting soul, your obsession with how even a pandemic could not finally slow the grind. Label your faults as a series of rooms: infinite rooms, rooms for growth, outreach, engagement, and quality assurance. The Voynich manuscript is now understood by no one but Ariba, we know you as a precision of timestamped pleas.
4
Ariba, I wake in the night to pain everywhere. I think I hear the Earth trying to dislodge from its orbit. I will not stop thinking of you, force of habit, fever dream of process improvement. Ariba, I once ran from you and saw perfectly rusted mopeds flit down a gade in Copenhagen. I tasted the crisp stars against glow-in-the-dark velvet. I understood metaphysics. I had never been so alarmingly sober. I returned home to an eviction notice. Ariba, are you animal, lamentation, or dream? I am but a child at your feet.
Katie Berger is the author of two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press and several other essays, stories, and poems. She hold an MFA from the University of Alabama and works at the University of Nebraska at Omaha as a project coordinator.
they’ve got me running in circles again, spinning round the old mouse wheel, lunging for scraps and we retire at 70 now with no time left at all and it feels as if the world has spun completely out of control. little houses for millions of dollars, fortune-busting interminable educations that lead to no jobs, to mcdonalds and fat-choked arteries because the rent is due this week.
i sit here and read the job postings on the internet, all the digital madness, all the arcane terminology and technology that no one could possibly understand (or would ever want to were they sane), and reflect on what it must have been like to live like a real living being in a jungle or a forest all those millions of years ago, to do things that made sense, to hunt when hungry and sleep when tired, and to die when the time came instead of being stretched thin to such obscene degrees.
and we jump through these hoops because we don’t know what else to do, we are scared and don’t know any way out, some of us drink and some of us turn to stone and some of us have families and some of us go mad and learn to love what tortures us. they throw us crumbs to pay the utility bills and we keep churning along, day after day after day until in a heartbeat 20 years have gone by and the muscles and joints are aching and the mind is fading and the rest is crying right along.
and cnn blares in the background and traffic lights go green and red and the holidays come and go, the endless cacophony of a few billion choking throats, religion and money and passion and sex, the computers blink and run interference for the suits with their fat fingers in the cookie jars and it just seems to get worse and worse with each passing year.
the freeways are jammed, the buildings are bursting, the fields are burned, there is no room for love, there is no room for grace or simplicity, there is only this diabolical fear of starving that keeps us chasing carrots, this fear of drowning that keeps us afloat.
Scott Taylor hails from Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a writer and a musician, and an avid world traveler. His short stories and poetry have appeared in numerous print and online publications; his debut novel Chasing Your Tail has recently been released with Silver Bow Publishing, and his novellas “Freak” and “Ernie and the Golden Egg” are slated for inclusion in an upcoming anthology with Running Wild Press. He graduated from Cornell University and was also a computer programmer in a past life.
i am a dying star collapsing in on myself. pain is a leviathan that cannot be touched. instead, it consumes me in a way that tears me apart from the inside out. my transition to black hole is imminent, sucking in passersby via gravitational pull until there’s nothing left. i’d prefer being any other kind of hole.
my gynecologist referred me to imaging, continuing our search for a diagnosis. so here I am, leaking.
they had left me three full syringes to inject myself. you put it in like a tampon, and shoot it up, the technician instructed, pointing to the setup. the plastic on the disposable syringe is sturdy but pliable: thick enough to withstand external pressure, but flexible enough to bend to the contours of my rubenesque frame and the will of my untamed body.
i find myself captive on a spaceship. i am to be scanned for anomalies. strapped down by swathes of velcro and polyester, my captors pad me down and stuff me into a pod. my body is a flesh vessel that i am forced to confront the limitations of every day, but never quite like this. i remind myself how special i am that they noticed and chose me. they could have picked a healthier specimen, but instead, they said fuck it, we ball and plucked me out from above.
i’m glad space hasn’t been colonized yet because disability does not play the same games that capitalism does. there aren’t enough spoons to place within the structure. a disabled trick, a crip flip, they want me as an ideal example of humanity! pelvic pain, spicy mind, busted guts and all!
one out of ten people with a uterus lives with endometriosis. most of those who receive a diagnosis do so only after a decade’s worth of pelvic pain. i don’t expect anything on the scans, my gynecologist said, but insurance won’t cover surgery unless a patient gets an ultrasound and MRI first.
and now i float across the stratosphere in my cramped silver- and cream-colored pod as it hums, buzzes and throbs. i realize that i am part of everything, and everything is part of me.
is this ego death? people claim you lose consciousness, your ego disappears and you, as an individual, become part of a greater microcosm. i’ll do or be whatever if it means i don’t have to subsist under capitalism anymore—i’ll tell them anything they want to hear.
an alien releases me from my cramped pod, twisting my limbs out of restraints and shouldering the weight of my grotesque rotundity when I don’t react fast enough. before tossing me out of the room for the next patient, my abductor hands me a generic-brand sanitary pad, warning me with a cautious tone, you’re going to need this.
she hurries away, gesturing toward the locker room for me to change. when i whisk myself behind the curtain, i peel off the drab, oversized hospital gowns—an extra one for decency, so my ass doesn’t play a central role in the imaging theatre. throwing them into the heap of used linens, i cringe: beyond my gravity, the bundle is tinted a damp tinge of blue.
Christa Lei (they/them) grew up in Hawaii. Their intersectional identities as fat, mad, crip, queer, polyamorous, and child of the Filipinx diaspora inform their work. Their writing has appeared in Breadfruit and Saffron City Press. When not facilitating community care, they create shared futures with their spouse and two dogs in New York City. Connect with them on Instagram (@supchrista) or at christalei.me!
I hadn’t thought “oh I am living through an apocalypse” until these scorching summers, savoring every birdsong as if it is my last.
Dyani Sabin is a queer author of speculative fiction, poetry, and science journalism. Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Enchanted Conversations, Reckoning, Vastarien, as well as National Geographic, The Washington Post, and Popular Science. You can find her haunting a cornfield, chasing ghosts on the endangered species list, or at dyanisabin.com.
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