Waking, I stir beneath the soft warning of another aubade slipping deep into the moist soil of my corporeal shape. Beneath the glimmer of my bedsheets, I am a dreaming animal dissatisfied with breath alone. And I still want to ride the silhouette of earnest sleep until the world returns to green. I wink and…

A crowd gathered the day before Sushi Maekawa closed.

So Ayami wanted to say. In reality, only four people lingered outside the glass storefront. If Sushi Maekawa still drew crowds, they would have soldiered on instead of closing.

She glanced at the tank on the counter and met the gaze of one of the fugu. Its round dark eyes seemed accusatory, though whether it wished to say Why would you eat me? or Why won’t you eat me? Ayami couldn’t tell. Considering the number of fugu they still had in the back, this one was unlikely to be consumed today.

She rubbed her right hand—beginning to show wrinkles—against her forehead. Had she become as sentimental as her mother? Twenty-six years a fugu chef, and never before had she assigned thoughts to her fish.

Toshi, his uniform starched and spotless, flipped the sign from Closed to Open. He unlocked the front door, but not one among the four-member crowd entered.

Ayami glanced at the clock. Were they opening already? 10:00 a.m. So, it was opening time. More and more, time had become the domain of digital clocks and flashing numbers rather than the world outside, where nights were starless and days endlessly smoggy. During Sushi Maekawa’s last major renovation, they had changed the dark cherry wood tables for a lighter finish to give some illusion of light.

All three fugu turned away from Ayami. They were torafugu, with black blotches on their sandy yellow backs and some of the deadliest poison to go with their exquisite taste. One of them nuzzled the glass, round eyes directed at somewhere beyond Ayami.

Ayami followed its gaze to the man seated behind the counter. Maekawa Gen, proprietor of Sushi Maekawa. Arms crossed, eyes hidden behind ever-present sunglasses, bald patch gleaming beneath the LED lights—another concession from their last renovation and one Ayami had suggested. Most would mistake the sunglasses for some outdated fashion statement, but Gen had confessed to her that even indoor lights hurt his eyes these days.

Ayami reached out and tapped Gen on the shoulder. “Sit there brooding for too long and you’ll scare off all our customers.”

Gen turned. Ayami knew him well enough to read his expression behind the sunglasses: annoyance, mild. “Look at them,” he said, gesturing at the gawkers outside.

“I know. Milling around the door, not coming in when it’s their last chance.” She forced a smile. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”

“No. Look at him.”

It took Ayami a moment to figure out who Gen was talking about. A young man in an oversized t-shirt leaned against the storefront glass, unzipped backpack at his feet, Quickscape helmet in his hands. The helmets didn’t offer the full Dreamscape experience—their nodes weren’t that powerful—but they were immersive enough if you wanted a quick break from reality.

The man slipped the helmet over his head and sat down on the sidewalk. He fell still, reacting no more to the people around him than the glass did.

“Can’t he read?” Gen growled. “‘No Dreamscaping.’ Says right there on the window.”

“He’s not inside the restaurant yet,” Ayami pointed out. Nor will he ever be, like the millions of others lost to the Dreamscape.

Gen snorted and turned away. No matter how Ayami felt today, he must’ve felt worse. Sushi Maekawa—once Fugu Maekawa, before changing its name in a futile attempt to attract tourists—had been in Gen’s family for generations.

The bell—an old-fashioned one, for this Gen had refused to give up—rang. Two people Ayami recognized pushed past the three gawkers and one Dreamscaper to enter. Uehara Reiko was around Ayami’s age, her grey-streaked hair knotted in a bun. Her son Minoru was in his twenties and updated his hair like other people updated their multi-tabs. Today it was cerulean blue and spikey. Over forty years ago, when Ayami was in second grade, her older brother had returned home sporting a similar hairstyle. Their mother had chased him around the house with a razor. Nowadays, Minoru’s peers would consider him a dinosaur; who bothered with flesh-world styling when it was easier to make a cool avatar in the Dreamscape?

Reiko’s eyes fell on the fugu tank as Toshi led them to their usual seats by the window. Ayami couldn’t remember them sitting anywhere else recently since their table was hardly ever taken. Gen had offered them private rooms at no extra charge, but Reiko had turned down the offer, saying she preferred the window even if the sun rarely broke through.

“What are you going to do with those guys?” Reiko asked, gesturing at the fugu. Toshi shrugged and muttered something noncommittal. Ayami could’ve answered. The fugu would be sealed in locked containers and disposed, like their poisonous parts were. A waste, but at this point shrinkage was the last thing Sushi Maekawa cared about.

Reiko waved away Toshi’s attempts at handing her the menu. “We’ll get the torafugu five-course meal. I’d get the eight-course one, but all my invitees refused to come.”

Toshi nodded and made his way to the curtain. Ayami had heard the order, but she listened as he repeated it. After, as she turned to walk deeper into the kitchen, she heard Reiko say, “I admit, I expected more of a fight to get in. That’s why I said to come early. Not that I have much else to do with my mornings now.”

Ayami’s hands curled into fists. Reiko had worked at a local onsen for nearly three decades, only to be dismissed at age fifty, as the resort ran out of reasons to exist. Reiko had accepted an early retirement. She was one of the lucky ones, with savings and a son who supported her.

Ayami forced her fists to unclench as she turned to the tank. Nine torafugu swam within. It had been ten yesterday. More shrinkage. Despite their best efforts, fish sometimes died before they could be served.

Ayami washed her hands and laid out her equipment: the cutting board, the knives reserved for cleaning fugu, the tray marked with “Dispose” for the parts she would cut away. She scooped the largest torafugu from the tank. It wiggled as she lifted it from the net, but before it could even attempt to inflate, Ayami inserted her knife into the top of its head.

The fugu stilled. Decades ago, when Ayami first started her training, many had questioned why. She should’ve felt as out of place as this fugu did, lying lifeless on a wooden cutting board. She hadn’t been born in a family of chefs, had never even eaten fugu in her childhood. She’d been an excellent student, had gone to university at age sixteen. Only to wind up in one of those glass-and-concrete offices: answering calls, filing documents, bringing tea to company execs.

She’d watched her fellow women shatter themselves on the shores of ambition. Passed up for promotion or settling for singledom. Bombarded with Japan’s declining birth rate and how it was their fault. Get married, have a child, find yourself bound by the shackles of motherhood. Unable to return to work, or returning to slashed pay, confused peers, and the label of an inadequate mother.

Ayami had said, No more. Not me.

She raised her knife. Now came the part she’d trained three years for. The part that required an examination where two-thirds of examinees failed, the part for which she was the last practicing chef in Shimonoseki—and indeed, the world.

Chop off the fins. Split the skin, peel it away. Remove the insides—liver, intestines, all filled with tetrodotoxin. She placed them on the “Dispose” tray. She worked quickly, with practiced ease. No part of fugu preparation surprised her now, not even those pollution-mutated fugu with their organs in the wrong places.

Perhaps it was good she had been born then, and not now. In that world of restriction, she had rejected corporate life and found the fugu.

She’d remade herself into something no one expected from her; in all her years growing up, she’d never heard of a female fugu chef—though now she knew they’d been there all along, and she wouldn’t label herself any sort of innovator, no matter what the magazines said. She’d drawn more than a few odd looks during her apprenticeship, sometimes studying alongside youths who’d worked in their parents’ kitchens their whole lives. But in the end: a license, a test. Standards that didn’t depend on drinking or socializing or singledom.

She’d passed the exam. She’d been that one third.

Ayami glanced down at the pale fugu flesh. Removing poison was just the first step. She had fugu-chiri to stew. Milt to grill and season. Sashimi to cut and arrange in the shape of a chrysanthemum. During Fugu Maekawa’s height, Ayami had three, four assistant chefs, though none of them were allowed to touch the fugu. Now she had just Keisuke, and he wouldn’t be in until noon.

Ayami smiled as she parted the torafugu flesh into thin, translucent sashimi slices. There had been golden years. Every table in Fugu Maekawa filled come dinner time. No one could get through the door except by reserving days in advance. Interviews with Ayami received full-page spreads in Shimonoseki Life, the city’s leading magazine at the time (now folded, not even digital). Gen, not so grumpy then, gave Japan Profile writers access to Fugu Maekawa’s kitchens and bragged about Ayami and the restaurant.

Eventually, the golden years ended. First came the non-toxic fugu, made by isolating the fish from tetrodotoxin-laden bacteria. Ayami closed the lid over the simmering stew and sighed. And we thought that would be the worst we’d face. Lobbyists asked the government to relax the ban on fugu liver, to relax the fugu preparation test itself. Shimonoseki sniffed in disdain, then raged, then panicked.

Ayami sprinkled seasoning over the milt. No, the problem had come with Synthfood, then Dreamscape. The former gave you the day’s nutrients in an easy-to-swallow packet, and the latter lets you enjoy the world’s delights in a virtual space. No calories, no accidents, no expensive plane tickets. The real world became obsolete. Virtual treks up Mount Fuji outnumbered real climbs many times over. Osaka Castle, built and rebuilt over centuries, stood empty in the height of summer, its continued maintenance a subject of budgetary debates. Shimonoseki’s aquarium closed last year, shipping as many fish as possible off to Okinawa.

Restaurants shut their doors. Some chefs jumped ship, worked with Dreamscape developers, opened virtual restaurants. Ayami, too, had offers, but she had no wish to leave Sushi Maekawa, and Gen had refused to even contemplate a virtual branch. “It’s not the same,” he’d said. “The Dreamscape, no matter how much it improves, can’t rival real life.”

But for most people, it seemed, the Dreamscape was better. And who could blame them, with the real world polluted and stifling and sunless? The falling demand made fugu—both traditional and non-poisonous— unprofitable to farm. The pollution in the seas made them difficult to catch. Ayami felt a prickle of pride knowing she’d outlasted them all, those safe-farmed fugu and their under- trained chefs.

There would always be people like Reiko and Minoru. The question was, would there be enough of them to support chefs like Ayami? The answer, ultimately, was no.

The first reporter—the first flesh-and-blood reporter, as drones had been buzzing around the building since morning—showed up at 1:30 p.m. Ayami allowed Keisuke to grill the shrimp while she sat down for her final interview.

He was a foreigner. Ayami wasn’t surprised. Since the restaurant’s golden years, western reporters had loved her, the office worker who became a fugu chef—a female fugu chef. She’d felt a vague unease when reading through machine translations of those articles; some of them seemed to treat her as a symbol more than a person. But today Ayami reserved her annoyance for those Japanese reporters who hadn’t come, who’d sent drones for the closing of the last fugu house.

“Do you mind if I turn on full Dreamscape recording?” the reporter asked. His Japanese was excellent, with only a hint of an accent.

“No,” Ayami said. She had little love for Dreamscape formats and interactive news, where viewers would be able to poke her virtually rendered skin, smell traces of cooking oil on her uniform. But if she refused, he’d create his report solely through memory reconstruction and that would be even more inaccurate.

He picked up a piece of fugu sashi with chopsticks, dipped it into the sauce, plopped it into his mouth, and chewed. A line of English text crawled across his multi-tab’s holographic screen. Notes to enhance his interactive video, probably. Maybe some stupid comment saying “tastes like chicken” or “doesn’t taste like anything at all, just the sauce” on the little opinion sidebar. How could a thirty-something foreigner understand things like texture and subtlety? At least he handled chopsticks well and didn’t drop the sashimi in the stew like one reporter had long ago.

Moments after the thoughts surfaced, Ayami pushed them down. She was not being fair to him. She didn’t know what he’d written, and he hadn’t done anything to earn her disdain— except to show up on this day when she was losing everything.

He ate more sashimi and drank a gulp of fugu-chiri. Then he said, “There is no tingling.”

Ayami raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

He leaned closer as if to share a secret. “I’ve eaten fugu in the Dreamscape. It causes a tingling sensation to the lips. The virtual server said it’s to imitate the remaining traces of poison, and the tingling is part of fugu’s charm.” He frowned at his sashimi chrysanthemum and the petals he’d plucked away. “There’s no tingling in this one.”

Ayami chuckled. “No, no. Fugu—properly prepared fugu—isn’t supposed to cause obvious tingling. Some chefs add spice to the sauce which can create that effect, but as my old teacher used to say, too much tingle and you better run to the hospital.”

The reporter didn’t seem perturbed by this. Just drank more stew, moved on to the next question. “It must’ve hurt Maekawa Gen greatly,” he said, “to sell the building to a DreamHub developer.”

Ayami frowned, then tried her best approximation of a nonchalant shrug. “You’ll have to ask him about that.”

“He refused to speak to me and said I should direct all questions to you.”

In truth, Gen had wavered for weeks about the DreamHub developer’s offer. It felt like selling to the enemy. But Gen needed the money to care for his ailing father, and the restaurant had spent its last years losing money rather than making it.

Ayami said, “Gen accepted the best offer. That is all.”

The reporter tapped something on his screen. “There were many reports of your restaurant receiving offers to collaborate on a virtual branch. But Maekawa Gen turned them down. Is this something you wish had gone differently?”

Ayami mulled over what to share, then decided the truth would be fine. This was her final interview, the final record of her as Sushi Maekawa’s fugu chef. “It was Gen’s decision. But I… do agree with him.”

The reporter raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Are you distrustful of technology as well?”

“No. Not technology. It’s just… with Dreamscape…” She waved a hand, trying to explain, hoping she did not come across as outlandish to him as Gen sometimes seemed to the rest of them. “It’s not real. I’m not sure how I feel about it replacing the real world—and leaving people who haven’t given up on the real world with nowhere to go.” She thought of Reiko and Minoru, and of herself.

The reporter made another note. She expected him to probe further, but he moved on to a different topic, and for that she was grateful.

The interview continued until the reporter was about halfway through the carefully prepared meal. Then he told her he wouldn’t keep her any longer, and surely she had other customers to cook for.

“Thank you,” he said, rising to his feet and bowing, “for agreeing to this interview. I know this must be a hard day for you.”

Ayami returned his bow. “Thank you for coming. For… for being the only reporter who came.”

She’d turned away, about to walk back to the kitchen, when he said, “Please, don’t think too badly of my fellow reporters. The JAXA conference is running through the week. That’s probably why they couldn’t show up in person today.”

Ayami paused in her steps, contemplated what to say, managed to find nothing suitable. She resumed walking. She had to get back to the kitchen. She trusted Keisuke, but she didn’t want to spend another minute out in the dining area.

Toshi was gone when Ayami returned to the kitchen. Left at 2:00 p.m. sharp after Sumire arrived for her shift. “He said it looked like we didn’t need him,” Gen explained. “Of course, I offered to pay him for the whole day, but he would have none of it.”

Ayami didn’t reply, just continued turning over the grilled eel. Gen lingered for a moment, then stepped through the partition back into the dining area.

“He didn’t even say goodbye to you,” Keisuke said as he stretched a shrimp for tempura, voicing Ayami’s thoughts.

“It’s alright,” Ayami said. “It’s… characteristic of Toshi. Professional until the end.”

“More like ice-cold and heartless.”

Ayami’s mouth quirked into a smile. “Well, at least we won’t have to worry about Toshi surviving this cold and heartless world. The rest of us will have only Dreamscape to fall back on.”

“Dreamscape? Ha. If any of us gets lost in there, Gen will hunt us down and give us a good beating.”

He glanced at the partition as if wondering whether Gen would return to do just that, then said more softly, “That’s for the rest of us, of course. You’ve earned a break, and even Gen can’t dispute that.”

The partition flapped open, but it was Sumire who stepped through, not Gen. Ayami passed the completed eel dish to her, then said to Keisuke, “I’m not sure I’m ready to… to retire. To live only in Dreamscape.” She didn’t want her last memory of her working life to be failure, to be her restaurant shutting down.

As Sumire left, Keisuke said, “Gen has a point, and I completely understand why he feels that way. But sometimes… I wonder if they might have a point too.”

“They?”

He glanced at her. “I was reading some articles this morning. About this place, and how we’re about to close. Most of them were the usual—lamenting the loss, rehashing your story, talking about the sale to a DreamHub developer. But there was one that said… it said we were part of the problem.”

Ayami had an inkling about what he was talking about, but still she said, “Please explain.”

“Part of what caused that.” He waved a hand at the window behind him. “The poison in the air, the poison in the seas. The fishing industry was at least partially responsible.” He sighed and dipped the shrimp into batter. “It got me thinking, maybe Dreamscape is the way out. If we did all that to the real world, then we should get out of it.”

He’d forgotten to pre-heat the oil. Ayami had half a mind to point that out but stopped herself. “But will hiding in Dreamscape really help? If we want to fix this, don’t we need to be, well, here?”

Keisuke shook his head. “Probably. I don’t know. My point is, it might be worth looking at from another angle. The Dreamscape isn’t your enemy. You’ve been working hard all your life. Sometimes it’s okay to just stop.”

Just stop. Step into an early retirement, like the one forced upon Reiko. Except unlike Reiko, Ayami had no one. No family to rely on, no close friends unless she counted Gen. She had poured her life into her work, only to find herself standing at the pinnacle of a dying profession.

During the three o’clock lull, Sumire walked over to Ayami as she was inspecting the knives. “I sent something to you,” Sumire said. “Check your multi-tab.”

Ayami tapped the mailbox on the hologram and found a pamphlet from JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. It listed training programs for mechanics, navigators, onboard nutritionists . . .

“And?” Ayami said. Then regretted it, when Sumire’s face fell.

“I thought . . . I thought you’d be interested.” Ayami frowned. “Interested? As in . . . ?”

“To apply. You understand cooking and nutrition, and you’re good with your hands. I figured, even JAXA could use someone like you.”

Ayami wanted to laugh—but at the same time, felt something close to tears pricking the back of her eyes. She didn’t know whether to read this as a joke or to be touched Sumire genuinely thought so highly of her. “I’m old. Even if JAXA needed someone, they’d want someone young. Someone like you.”

Sumire bit her lip. “I heard you earlier, when you said you weren’t ready to retire. I heard your interview with the reporter too. You said you wished there was still room for people who haven’t given up on the real world. Isn’t that what JAXA is trying to do? To carve new roads for us, not in Dreamscape but in space? I’m probably not smart enough to help, but you—”

“Don’t say that,” Ayami cut in. “You’re plenty smart. If you think whatever JAXA is doing could work, then you should apply.”

Sumire’s smile was brighter than the overhead lights, brighter than the sun in Ayami’s memory. “Thank you. Maybe I should be more confident. But in turn, I think you should also be more positive. It’s never too late. Please think about it.”

They’d meant to shut down at 10:00 p.m., but the last customer lingered, drinking sake and eating his fifth tuna temaki. Ayami, Gen, Sumire, and Keisuke let him be. Ayami scooped out the last torafugu in the back and started preparing it. The three in the front swam on, uneaten.

“Making this one for you,” Ayami said to the three remaining employees. “At this rate, we’ll be done before the customer out front is. You want me to grab the fugu from the front tank too?”

A chorus of no’s echoed around the kitchen. “Just one piece is enough for me,” Sumire said.

“I’ve had enough fugu to last a lifetime,” Gen said. “And you still don’t make it good as Father did.” Ayami rolled her eyes, and he chuckled.

“Not sure if I should trust you, Ayami,” Keisuke said. “Maybe you’re going to poison me for the time I burned the calamari.”

They all laughed, and chatted, and promised to keep in touch, though Ayami had no idea how many of those promises would be kept. She liked them all, even Toshi, but memories of Sushi Maekawa would become a wound now, and keeping in touch with her co-workers would feel like scraping at the scabs. However, for tonight they were a family, complimenting her on the fugu meal with vocabulary the reporter would never have, cleaning up together on their last night, Gen himself sweeping and taking out garbage.

Gen would return. There were still inspectors to meet, deals to sign, further clean- up to oversee. But for the rest of them, this was the last time.

The last customer left with a ring of the old metal bell. Ayami leaned against one of the wood tables and stared at the tank on the counter.

Gen walked up to her and slowly removed his sunglasses. He blinked as if trying to clear away dust or tears.

“Maybe . . .” Ayami began.

“Hmm?”

Ayami bit her tongue. Maybe you should see someone about your eyes, she wanted to say. But she’d already voiced those concerns a dozen times, and Gen always brushed her off.

Instead, she gestured at the three remaining torafugu. “Such a shame to throw them out.”

“What do you propose?”

She couldn’t keep them. She still lived in the single-room flat she’d had since her office worker days; she didn’t need anything bigger since she spent most of her life in Sushi Maekawa. She wouldn’t be able to keep torafugu alive for long. And she didn’t want to stare at them all day, didn’t want to be reminded of the life she’d lost.

“I’ll need a container,” she said. “And rope.”

They found a clear plastic container with a lid and a length of yellow rope. Ayami scooped water and fugu from the tank to the container, and Gen poked holes in the lid to allow air to pass through. Ayami bound the rope around the container and tied a handle at the top.

At the door, Ayami bowed to Gen. “Thank you for everything.”

He shook his head. “No, I should thank you. I have barely a quarter of my father’s culinary talent. It’s thanks to you that Fugu Maekawa survived so long.”

Ayami didn’t miss how he’d used the restaurant’s former name. “It’s thanks to you, too. A restaurant is more than its chef.”

The corners of Gen’s mouth curled upward. “We outlasted all of them, didn’t we? Take care, Ayami. You were the best there was.”

She hefted her backpack and the container of fugu. “Take care, Gen.”

The walk to the bus stop seemed to take twice as long as usual. Her multi-tab said the next bus would arrive in twenty minutes— decent, considering how late it was and how much public transport had downsized. The bus arrived, carrying only two other passengers: a woman and a man sitting side by side. They gawked at Ayami and the fugu visible through the container. The woman whispered a string of words to her companion and gesticulated so fervently that Ayami wondered if she recognized her. The woman looked old enough to have read Shimonoseki Life back in the day.

Ayami got off at the Kanmon Wharf. It was a short walk to the harbor, the container in her right hand, the fugu staring out into the night, as uncertain as Ayami herself. Even if the city lights blinked out, the skies were no longer clear enough for anyone to see stars. Her steps tapped a steady rhythm on the wooden walkway. She could see the abandoned aquarium building. Once she could’ve asked them to take the torafugu, but now that wasn’t possible.

Ayami knelt on the empty pier, placed the container beside her, and after a moment’s hesitation, released the fugu into the Kanmon Straits.

They would probably die out there. Most things did these days, out on the tainted waters. But maybe they’d survive. They’d survived this long, from their trip to the restaurant and now back to the sea.

Ayami returned to the bus stop and flicked on her multi-tab. She tapped the mailbox icon and opened the JAXA pamphlet.

The land and sea these days were not made for her any more than they were made for the fugu. But maybe she too could find livable waters. She read and reread the registration dates, locking them away in her mind. She’d made change work before, when her life and career had been tumbling toward dead ends. Sumire was right. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

in a crowded room: dress to blend in. No sudden movements, no bright lipstick, bright hair. No loud laughter. You can move among others without attracting attention. Just nod and smileon a city street. Don’t make eye contact. Wear sunglasses. Never smile, or frown. Walk on the shadowed side. Learn to blend into your environment;…

The line is long for a medicine show. It is headlined by a switch of a man who, according to his placard, is called Hanrahan and whose chief ware is a milky green solution by the name of “Doctor Hanrahan’s Clairvoyance Balsam and Vermifuge.”“Can we go? Can we go?” cry Conrad and Lizzie from the end…

My husband didn’t return to me as an animal or ghost. He didn’t send messages in code or possess other people to reach me. My dreams of him were just dreams, subconscious flotsam and jetsam. I’d stopped searching for signs of him. But a part of me was still waiting for him, and waiting was just searching in reverse.

Sometimes, late at night, I snuck off to my neighbor’s place to consort with the living.

There was another man, a divorce lawyer, I sometimes saw too. The twenty-year-old I was trying to be loved to indulge her warped sense of time: What day is it? What year? My disorientation was real, but I embraced it. But the part of me that knew exactly what she was doing also knew, exactly to the day, when six months since my husband’s death had passed. And on that day, that part of me said it was time to grow the fuck up.

That night, my eyelids popped open like some horror-movie doll’s and the time blazed blue across the room: 3:01. The clock practically spoke, its phantom voice insinuating, insistent: neither my own nor my husband’s. But maybe death had changed him. What was he trying to say?

These were precisely the kinds of thoughts I could no longer abide. I flipped on the light, grabbed the nearest book, and pretended to read until I pretended to sleep.

The next night it happened again: the sudden opening of eyes greeted by a bright 3:01. I sat up and almost reached out to clutch the handle of the three. Then I remembered: Just numbers.

But why those numbers? My husband had died in the afternoon: one-something, no threes. And why not an even hour? Why that pointer finger of an extra minute? To what did it point?

Perhaps at me, at my compulsive need to look for answers where there were none. Or maybe it was just scolding me for not looking hard enough. Maybe the very grief that had driven me to seek my husband had clouded my seeing, as it had clouded everything else, and he inhabited myriad mysterious forms I couldn’t discern.

So be it. I was determined to now grieve like a good Anglo-American, or better yet, a made-for-TV upper-class Brit. Like the very best citizen, I would work and work to refill our emptying coffers and cram my mind with useful thoughts. Most importantly, I would focus my efforts on parenting: I would not flee to my room to protect my daughters from my madness and misery or, worse yet, to protect myself from theirs.

Still, every night I awoke at 3:01. With every new wake-up, the numbers grew—larger, closer, breaking free from the clock. Soon, they broke free from the dark. One afternoon, the electricity fritzed out. When I checked my phone to reset the clock, it was 3:01. I ran to the store to get groceries: the timestamp on my receipt said 3:01. A self-help book I was proofreading used, as a negative example, someone who stayed up each night until 3:01. “Typo?” I wrote in the margins. Maybe it was a typo, but it wasn’t, I knew, a mistake.

When my oldest called home from school with a migraine, I barely glanced at the time. I already knew what it would say: I was right. In the car on our way home, I couldn’t help quizzing her about the circumstances of her headache: Had it come on gradually or suddenly? How much time had passed between its onset and her phone call? Did she feel a sense of urgency when she called me or was she listless?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why are you asking me all these weird questions?”

I couldn’t tell her that I hoped her father was somehow communicating with me through her.

I wanted to believe, but didn’t believe it enough to risk her believing it, too. When we got home, I fed her ibuprofen and fled to my room.

My husband and I used to read to the girls before bed, but by each day’s end, I could barely function. My oldest now played phone games long into the night and my youngest raced around the house in circles. I understood that the distress I forced myself to feel about this came from a rarified set of values based on culture and class, one in which my children were supposedly in training to become both masters of the universe and responsible citizens who were to “better” the world while collecting on their advantages. On the other hand, I knew the importance of self-discipline and sleep for basic well-being from my own chronic lack of both. I also knew I was allowing their behavior not out of a revolutionary spirit but because it was easier to ignore it.

One night, after my youngest had supposedly gone to sleep, her feet once more quaked the house. I loved her thumps, the micro and macro rhythms, the jackhammer and the pause. Still, I wrenched myself out of my bed.

“Hey there,” I chirped. My youngest glanced at me and kept moving, her beige hair flapping wildly. I tried again. “It’s late. You should be in bed.”

“I can’t,” she said, still running. “Liv kicked me out.”

“Kicked you out?” I barged into their shared bedroom. “Did you kick out your sister? From her own room?”

“If I had my own room,” she said, “I wouldn’t have to.”

“We’ve been over this,” I said, my jaw clamping to staunch my fury. “I’m still trying to figure out how we can keep this house, so you can forget getting a bigger one. You know there are whole giant families that share one room apartments, right? Count your blessings.” When she blinked her disdain at my platitudes, I yelled: “This is what you care about now, of all things? This?”

She turtled her head. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but it came out snappish. I tried again. “I’m sorry.” In the rest of our little house, my youngest continued to thump around. “I’m going to get Ava now.”

“But Ava won’t stop talking,” she said, clutching her hands as if around a little neck.

“Ava’s just sad. We all are. It’s okay.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. How can everyone being sad be okay? That’s, like, the opposite of okay.”

“I don’t know,” I said, my answer to everything.

Before she could respond, I slipped out of the room and tried to stop my youngest. But she made a game of it. She hopped on the couch, pouncing on the arm that had already caved in from her previous pouncing, then climbed the top of the couch that had already split open from her climbing. The more she hopped around, the younger she seemed, as if she were traveling back to the lost time, when she was five or three instead of nine, before her father got sick and died. She found her own antics hilarious and started narrating her moves, using her chosen regression persona, “the doggo.”

“The doggo is running away from the mommo!” she cried. “The doggo is jumping on the doggo couch.”

“It’s late, sweetie,” I said. “That’s enough.”

“The doggo needs exercise.”

“The doggo needs sleep.”

“The doggo needs to chase a squirrel.”

I tried to intercept her and missed. She shrieked with delight. Then I grabbed at her again and she tripped and went crashing, headfirst, into the wall, the frenzied glee knocked so completely out of her that I longed for its instant return.

She palmed the top of her head. I was already seeing stretchers, hospital beds, the hidden hematoma that fatally burst. At the same time, I refused to believe anything could be wrong.

“I’m okay,” she said, before I could ask. “I just need a little ice.” She went to the freezer and pulled out the cold pack my husband had long ago purchased for such occasions. Even now, I expected him to rush ahead and grab it for her himself.

Now my oldest was up, asking questions and holding the ice pack to my youngest’s head. I so loved them both and I wanted to sleep forever. How could such impulses coexist? When I finally got my girls to bed, I set my alarm, to check on my youngest, for 2:58 a.m.: enough time to fully wake up before 3:01 and not enough to fall asleep again then arise at the fateful time. I would break the pattern, whatever it augured. When the inevitable display of numbers appeared, I would stare them down and bid them farewell.

But I awoke as I usually did, disturbed by nothing but my own brain, at 3:01.

I smiled. I suppose I was thrilled. Not so long ago, I would have spoken to my dead husband about 3:01 and imagined his response. But in that moment, I found that I couldn’t do it anymore. His silence had grown too loud for me to talk over.

In the soft black of my daughters’ room, I sat on the edge of my youngest’s bed and inhaled her warm sugary scent. I wanted to tuck myself behind her, glue myself to her folds, the way I used to, sometimes, with my husband when I couldn’t sleep. Above, my oldest nested beneath her comforter, her thumb, I knew, poised nostalgically against her mouth.

I began the careful climb over my youngest. Her eyes flew open, the whites piercing the night. “Mom?” she said, gazing up at me. It seemed like a big question, all the hope and need and trust packed inside that small, dull word.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s just me.”

Gemini Burns pressed a fingertip into the soil around her bonsai tree to check its moisture levels. She got as close to the plant as she could, pretending to stand beneath it, imagining the staggering heights a tree used to be able to reach. The daily ritual of inspecting its tiny leaves for signs of…

I had a dream about you after everything happened. We were five again, playing in the schoolyard. I was aware of your body even then, how sinuous it was compared to mine. In my dream, recess came to an end and you were behind me in line. You weren’t talking because you were starting to…

Dear lovely reader,

You thought this editor’s note was gonna be about comics. But you’d be wrong. It’s about tampons.

Specifically, about the instructions on the back of the tampon box.

You see, dear reader, I struggled to read growing up. The letters were more interested in wiggling around than being deciphered. Phone numbers were impossible to remember. I couldn’t spell anything to save my life. Little b’s and d’s conspired to look identical. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead at the mere mention of reading aloud in class.

Stubbornness became my strongest ally. Dani Hedlund, I told myself, wasn’t going to admit she couldn’t do something, that she had a problem. She was going to be just like everyone else, and even if she wasn’t, if she was “behind,” she was just gonna fake it ‘til she made it.

But having not cracked reading by the age of twelve—and having gotten past the humiliation of being the one kid in my class who went to special ed—I started to think I could just live without the skill all together. My little town was too small and too poor to have a proper special ed teacher, to even know what the word “dyslexic” really meant, so I’d instead been branded with the title “slow.” Well, by the teachers anyway. My peers had other words for it.

So, the game became not about learning to read, but about pretending. I’d mastered asking my dad to read my homework to me at night, memorizing anything I might need to “read aloud” in class. Not to worry my parents, I would sit between them as they read in front of the roaring fire and stare down at my Goosebumps books, carefully turning pages when they did, eyes running back and forth over meaningless words.

And really, the pretending wasn’t that hard. Sure, my grades weren’t great. Despite studying all the time, I lived in a world of Cs. And yeah, I dreaded school, dreaded failing, dreaded the sympathetic looks of my teachers even more than the mockery of my peers, but hell, it was just school. How much did school even matter? Like my parents, I wasn’t planning on going to college. Just the thought made me feel nauseous. No way I’d willingly subject myself to four more years of torture.

But then, everything changed.

In the locker room, I heard about a girl in my class getting her period. And although I hadn’t yet, I panicked. Later that night, sitting on the floor of my parents’ bathroom, I realized my hack of having Dad read things to me wasn’t going to work this time. I remember staring at my mom’s pink tampon box, trying over and over again to make the letters form words, to make those words form sentences. To understand what the hell those sentences meant.

I was so sure they would explain away the horrifying black and white diagrams on the box (so much scarier than the illustrations in my Goosebumps books), that the words held secrets to being an adult, to being independent, that I just couldn’t unlock.

And I started to wonder: How many other things would there be like this? Things I wanted to know privately? Or what about the times I needed to read something, and my dad wouldn’t be there? In a small farm town, we didn’t really have street signs—or, well, streets—but the city, what if I wanted to move there some day? Surely, I would need to read the signs? Figure out which bus goes where?

Soon the tampon box was even harder to read, my tears making the wiggling letters even wigglier. And like those letters, I felt the promise of independence grow blurrier and blurrier… until I couldn’t see it at all.

A few days later, I knocked on my Dad’s office door, where his bear of a body was hunched over the table, glasses slid down, nose nearly touching the fly he was tying. Dad tied the best prince nymphs in town, always eager for a break to take us fishing. But when he couldn’t get away—which was most of the time—he’d sit up in his office and stockpile flies, like a man who longs to travel but can only pack bags he’ll never take to the airport.

“What’s up, pumpkin?” he asked, not looking up.

I don’t know why I didn’t go to my mom about this. It was a girl thing, after all, but my mom was always so put together, never a wrinkle on her pink blouse, never an eyelash uncurled, and I feared that perfection. Someone like me would never be able to live up to that standard.

But Dad? Dad was messy, funny, weird. His hair was always wild, like he’d been driving with the windows down. His Hawaiian shirts were often buttoned incorrectly, flip flops held together with electrical tape. And it wasn’t just his appearance. Dad didn’t think or talk like the other parents. Dad thought Dune was way better than the bible, that lightning storms were better than the movies, that school would never be as important as the Rolling Stones and a great mayfly hatch. Surely, he wouldn’t judge me.

“Dad, I… well, the thing is… ”

“Take your time, kid,” he said, finally looking up to see me blushing. “And hand me some thread.”

“Which color?”

“Surprise me.”

I walked over to the wall of thread spools, all neatly organized, a rainbow of possibilities. Dad knew that always calmed me. The colors. Being creative. Not having just one right way to do something.

He also knew that talking was easier for me when I had something to do with my hands, when I didn’t have to make eye contact.

“I think… I’m… bad at reading,” I finally confessed.

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, the words… I… they don’t stay still. I can’t… I don’t understand them. They hurt my head.”

“All the time?”

“Yeah.”

I heard him lay his tools on the table, click, click, then the creak of his chair as he sat up straighter.

“But your Goosebumps books?”

I swallowed, fingers shaking over a bright yellow spool of thread. “I’m just… looking at the pages.”

“But… you seem to genuinely enjoy them? I’m always looking up and you’re smiling.”

“Oh, yeah… I’m, ah… I’m making up the stories in my head, from the illustrations.”

“But you aren’t reading the words?”

I could feel myself tearing up, shame burning through me. I remember being so sure my dad could see my whole body blushing, the skin on the back of my neck like a red stop light. Turn back. Go no further, the sign said. This girl is stupid. Worthless. Unlovable. Stop before you get tangled in the wreckage.

“How long?” he finally asked.

“For… ever. Always.”

“Hmm.”

I remember how long the silence felt. Endless. Finally, I heard him stand up, walk over. I was too afraid to turn around, to see how disappointed, disgusted, his face would be. Something lifted in front of my line of sight: the nymph he was tying. I remember its fluffy gray body woven around the hook with a little green feather coming out the back, like a bird’s tail.

“What do you think?”

I knew the question wasn’t about the quality of the fly (Dad was the best) but about the color to add next. Fish aren’t entirely color blind, but the conditions of the water affect how their sight has evolved. Freshwater fish, like trout and salmon, can see reds, oranges, blues, and greens, and you want to make a fly that catches their attention.

I looked from the fly to the wall of threads, carefully selecting a burnt orange and then a shimmery, metallic purple. “Orange first, on the body,” I said. “But maybe a stripey layer of purple on the very top? So they get to see the glitter, and we get to see the cool colors.”

“Magic.” He took the thread, and unlike me, his hands were big enough to hold both spools in one hand. “Listen, Pumpkin, I don’t know about the reading thing. Let me think on it. But…” He waited until I looked up at him to finish. “I do know something already.”

“What?”

“You’re not dumb. I promise. It’s like what Mick Jagger said, ‘Different isn’t dumb.’”

A smile cracked on my face. “Did Jagger really say that?”

Dad shrugged. “Probably… at some point. He’s a talkative fellow.”

A week later, I was summoned up to Dad’s office and handed a present. It was summer, but Dad still wrapped it in Christmas paper. Taped to the front was the orange and purple fly with the green tail. When I tore the paper away, revealing the cover of a book beneath, I was instantly disappointed. How in the world did Dad think I’d be able to read this? Was he telling me I was just lazy? That I just needed to practice more?

But then I flipped it open, and there weren’t walls of daunting text. There were illustrations everywhere.

And not the sporadic black and white sketches in my other books, but big, colorful drawings on shiny paper. Some of the illustrations had words in text bubbles or in boxes, but it wasn’t overwhelming.

“It’s called X-Men,” Dad said. Then he leaned behind him to pull out another identical comic book. “I got one for me too, and I thought we could read them and then talk about them. Like a book club.”

“But… what if…”

“It’s okay. The images will do most of the work, showing you what’s happening. But try to work on the words, okay? I think it’ll get easier.”

And it did.

Dad didn’t know any of the amazing research about how comics are an incredible tool for low-literacy and reluctant readers. He didn’t know that the lack of justified formatting of the text makes it infinitely easier for people with dyslexia to read. He didn’t know why I struggled, but he knew that I loved stories, and if I could just find a way to engage with them, to get pulled into the plot and characters, then I would have enough passion to try, to really try, to get past the fear of doing it wrong. To create a system that worked for my brain.

Decades later, when you ask my mom what my struggles with reading were like, she always tells the story of me running through the house, loudly and frantically reading everything—cereal boxes, postcards, the back of her tampon box. That’s always the one she remembers, me standing in front of her in my My Little Pony pjs, reading the entire back of the tampon box like it was Shakespeare.

“It was like a lightbulb turning on,” Mom always says, “and then you couldn’t stop.”

But Mom was wrong. It wasn’t a lightbulb. Wasn’t an “ah-ha” moment. It was a long road. A road paved with brightly colored panels of superheroes. And like my favorite X-Men, Rogue, mastering her mutant powers, it took eons to learn my limits, to practice, to be strong enough to not despair. I learned to look for patterns instead of individual letters, to use the easy-to-identify words (nice short ones) as anchors to more effectively guess at the bigger ones—just as I had used the illustrations to anchor the text in my comics. With a strong coding framework, I could read most words as long as they were in context, even when all the d’s looked like b’s and all the n’s masqueraded as r’s.

But Mom was right about it being impossible for me to stop. Once the passion turned on, I was hooked. For me, reading became a portal to other words, to other experiences. And although it was hard, although it took me so much longer to read anything than my peers, I loved it. Not just to the act of reading. But what it gave me, how it changed who I was. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the scared one, the quiet one, hoping to go unnoticed.

I was the girl with her hand raised in class, the girl who knew the right answer.

And that became addictive, being good enough, smart enough, knowing things. Not just how tampons worked (which, it turned out, was just as horrifying as the diagrams), but also how the world worked. Physics. Mathematics. Politics. The economics of why “spice” was so valuable in Dune. How Winston Churchill conducted meetings in the bathtub. How hard it was for Banner to control the Hulk. How, in all those stories, a single person, with enough stubbornness, could actually change the world and make it better.

It’s not surprising that I wanted to grow up to be like them.

Nearly a decade later, I sat across from a white man in a black suit at the University of Oxford and finally got diagnosed with dyslexia. I remember his shock, eyes moving from my transcripts to my newly printed cognitive reasoning score. I finally received official confirmation that I wasn’t slow, I wasn’t lazy. My brain was just a bit different.

I remember watching his eyebrows furrow, an unspoken question written in their confused curves. “How in god’s name did you get into Oxford?” those eyebrows asked. But he didn’t ask me. Instead, he took
a deep breath, saying instead, “Of course, reading and numbers are obviously a challenge. Anything with sequencing. But you can avoid that.” He picked up a paper before him, presumably my transcripts covered in firsts. “I assume you’re studying… arts? Painting? Maybe dance?”

I smiled, proud, stubborn. “English, philosophy, and maths.”

He laughed because he thought I was joking. I laughed because I wasn’t.

I was in the last year of my degree, and I’d decided to turn down every smart-move job offer to instead keep running a little dream of a nonprofit. A dream of books and storytelling and people like my dad, who looked past the obvious to find the potential hidden within.

I think of my laughter every time I step into a classroom, comics like the ones you’re about to read tucked under my arm. From low-income high schools to max-security prisons, we use comics to teach low-literacy and reluctant students, from dyslexic kids like me to those who have fallen through societal cracks in far more drastic and heartbreaking ways.

These comics don’t just help improve literacy, critical thinking, and communication; they can give us the biggest and most important gift of all: the ability and desire to change the story we tell about ourselves. To be heroes in our own narratives. To discover our own superpowers, to nurture them, to develop the resilience and stubbornness to fight for our future, even when the world tells us we don’t have what it takes.

In these pages, you’ll find nine amazing stories that do just that: make us think differently about the world. All of these works were first published in Brink’s publishing imprint, F(r)iction, a collection of amazing stories, poems, essays, and comics that we teach in all our nonprofit education programs. Spanning nearly a decade of publishing, these original short comics are our favorite and most effective teaching tools, helping students think differently about themselves and the societal norms that try to shape us.

Some stories are fantastical, saturated in family curses, apocalyptic worlds, long journeys to the stars. But, like the X-Men comics I first fell in love with, real themes and hard lessons live beneath the fantasy. Characters explore the difficulties of accepting their bodies, of finding hope in the darkest times, of letting go of the past to carve a new future. We see how caring more about success than the people around us can transform even the strongest hero into a villain, that fear can erode the good in our lives, that accepting our flaws is the only way to embrace our strengths. Others are steeped in reality, like the comic memoir that closes the issue. “Brilliance” came out of our Frames Comic Program, a story from a formerly incarcerated student who spent nearly a year reading and discussing comics with us as he sculpted his own powerful memoir.

For the comic lover, you’ll see some big names from your favorite comics and novels, but the majority of these stories are from emerging and debut talent. New, brave creatives whom we’ve mentored to make sure that the next generation of readers can be inspired by diverse, incredible voices.

I hope, as you read these stories, that you think of your own story. Of the decisions you’ve made that have created the person you’ve become, both the good and the bad. I hope you embrace the parts of you that you love and have the courage to acknowledge and accept the parts you don’t. And remember, above all, that you have the power to decide who and what you want to be. We might not have mutant powers, but we are all powerful. We all have unique talents and perspectives, and we can do truly incredible things with them.

And when in doubt, remember what Mick Jagger probably never said: “Different isn’t dumb.” Different can be a magic all on its own.

Dani Hedlund
Editor-in-Chief

Why do we dream? Science has yet to fully answer this question, though many theories exist. Some suggest that dreams help us consolidate and analyze memories and serve as practice for real life situations. Physiologically, experts believe the forebrain generates dreams while the brainstem generates rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the cycle of sleep during…

You’re in a torchlit cave in France studying a hunting chronicle left behind by an Aurignacian who scratched the burnt end of a stick onto rock. You’re in the Met trying to decipher the hieroglyphs etched onto a slab of stone by Egyptians. You’re in a pew in Wisconsin ignoring the sermon and taking in the vivid, sun-soaked colors of the nativity of Christ pictured in the stained glass. You’re in a bathroom stall in Spokane trying not to laugh at the most profane mural of graffiti even as you uncap a pen to add your own cipher. You’re in a bar in Austin and a man with whiskey breath pulls up his sleeve and shows you a rippling slab of muscle coated in ink and tells you a story of grief that explains why he spent twenty hours getting needled. You’re in a nursing home in Boca Raton and your grandmother is flipping through scrapbooks and photo albums, telling you wandering stories about the ghosts of her past.

Businesses like to categorize (and subcategorize and sub-sub categorize) things, even our stories. A bookstore or a record store will send you in one direction for horror or metal, another direction for romance or country. Streaming apps will direct your scroll into peculiar strands like “Feel Good Food and Travel” or “Buddy Late Night Comedies.” Producers and editors worry over metrics and formulas and graphs. But our brains aren’t driven by algorithms. And most storytelling ignores taxonomy.

Comics embody this truth; they are a medium of defiance and rebellion. I’m not just talking about their niche or underground status. Or how, throughout their history, they have been a topic of moral panic and censorship, maligned by parents and politicians and the media. I’m also talking about the way they rebel against any strict form, flout boundaries, lean into experimentation, appeal to synesthesia.

They blend visual and textual literacy so that the navigation of the page can be driven by color or border or letter or line. If the sentences of a novel or memoir are laid out as cleanly and uniformly as rows of corn in a field, the pages of a comic surprise and even assault you with every page turn, as you take in the epic visuals of a splash page or tick, tick, tick your way through the boxes of a nine-panel grid or descend and ascend through five vertical columns. You’re constantly relearning how to process information—which makes you lean forward, which makes you arguably more engaged and complicit in the act of storytelling.

Sometimes, when I read a graphic novel or grab a monthly issue off the rack, I slowly digest each page, savoring and delighting in every detail. But sometimes I flip through to pleasure in the art alone. And (I say this as a writer) here is the humbling truth of comics. You can ignore every dialogue balloon and narration caption and still finish the story and comprehend it and think, now THAT was a hell of a comic book. The artist is the true director and wizard of the medium, in other words. This is one of the reasons comics are considered such an excellent teaching tool. The reader is decoding language, yes, but the setting, the time, the arc of the plot, the behavior and feelings of the characters can all be comprehended on some level through the art alone, making comics a vivid gateway drug to literacy. And from there, self-expression, conceptualizing new futures, rewriting the negative narratives that the world has told us about ourselves. Let’s drop more anthologies like this one into classrooms and libraries and prisons (and and and and) please.

Even if superheroes have been gobbled up by the Hollywood machine, comics are far from mainstream. Seeking out the single issues and trades and omnibus editions remains a cult activity, the brick-and-mortar comic book shops often secreted away in strip malls between the vape stores and tanning salons. The true believers might bag and board their issues or they might read them over and over and over until they fall to pieces in their hands, but these are holy texts. The cape-and-spandex canon of DC and Marvel is the gateway drug that leads you to the punk rock published by Image or Storm King or Vault. And those stories might lead you to local zines or internet showcases like Webtoons…

…or journals like F(r)iction. The name alone—a name that embodies defiance, a welcome discomfort— makes it clear that this is an ideal home for comics. And over the past few years they’ve been publishing some mind-melting work by boss-level creators. See for yourself. In these pages you’ll be assaulted by the hack-and-slash aesthetic of Carmen Maria Machado and Shan Bennion, you’ll be seduced into the sepia-toned nightmare of Ben Mehlos, you’ll be lost in the desert darkness and spectral wonder of Rebecca Roanhorse and Isabel Burke, and more, so much more, a catalog of some of the most exciting and challenging work that will widen your eyes and light up all your nerve endings and constantly surprise you.