Editor’s Note: In October of 2017, Naira died of lung cancer at the age of 29. When her family approached us earlier this year about the possibility of publishing some of her work posthumously, we were moved by the uncomplicated authority of her voice. The following essay confronts the topics of identity, culture, and ownership…

August 9 – 8:52 a.m.We are here.Some retching as always from the shift, some panic and disorientation even in the seasoned men. One never truly grows accustomed to this place, its hugeness and loudness. Even its silence hisses, even its darkness throbs. The very air is an avalanche upon us, and though it is my…

Dear lovely reader,

It’s been a weird couple of years. From politics to Hollywood scandals, it seems like unrest is everywhere. People are angry, they’re disenchanted, and they’re taking matters into their own hands. In a world on the offensive, we can’t help but put on our armor and prepare ourselves for the next battle.

I’d love to say that we’re immune from that unrest here in the F(r)iction office. But we’re not. For years, we’ve been rebelling against the established way of putting out a literary journal. We’re fighting an industry that believes good literature cannot have an ounce of magic in it, not a hint of genre. We’re fighting, at a very basic level, just to make something that lasts.

Our authors and artists are rebelling, too—against a big, hard world that tells them no one cares about stories and art. They resist parents who say they’ve got cotton between the ears, peers who wonder when they’re going to get real jobs, and agents who would rather they focus on creating for an industry instead of the industry of creating.

But, unfortunately, we don’t always rebel in helpful ways. We procrastinate, we conflagrate, we argue. We seek refuge in empty vices and our own indignation. These offer temporary comfort, but little in the way of solutions as to what triggered our revolt in the first place.

So, dear reader, what you hold in your hands is a different sort of rebellion. One that aims not to fight for the sake of fighting, but to try—and to try damn hard—to transcend our circumstances. This rebellion is not focused on the enemy, but rather looks upward, toward the goal.

This issue is about uprising.

Here you’ll find characters rewriting reality, unwinding convention, and preventing a giant from eating a monkey. Alasdair Gray traces the spiral of human history to the absurdity lying at its core. Isaac Marion leads us on an ascent that, as an end in itself, alters its own course. In our “Breaking Ground” feature, Aimee Molloy shows us a woman in revolt against her own motherhood. Poetry by Erika Luckert reminds us that merely making it through the day can be its own form of resistance. And, in an exclusive sneak peek for our “Pioneering Author” feature, humorist Christopher Moore shares a chapter from Midsummer, his novel-in-progress that sees the return of one of his most beloved characters, Pocket of Dog Snogging. Chuckle manically as Pocket, yet again, challenges everything—including his own survival instinct.

Combining fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, and comics with a poignant feature from the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, F(r)iction #10 continues our rebellion against traditional publishing.

Like each of us, the characters in this collection have their own struggles to overcome—to escape from the shadows of parents, rivals, and in one lovely story, the shadow of an enormous celestial object. Also like us, each aspires toward something greater. As we read of their attempts to rise above, we witness uprising at its purest—all the good and the bad, the tragic successes and spectacular failures both. Let these stories and poems be a manual for your own uprising. Take them to heart, let them lift you up.

Cheers,

Dani Hedlund
Editor-in-Chief

There’s a maiden who must escape
and so transforms herself
into a pond. She is doing this
again and again, drinking
her own water while you prop
pillows round your head
and a turnip princess sprouts
from dampened soil. The children
dream of growing roots and
dicing themselves into soup,
its broth already boiling.
Just think of all the opened
mouths, the bellies growing full
with lore when frog legs
leap into a young boy’s arms—
he will bathe them first
then kiss them all, while
woodland ladies chop down
trees and lay the kindling
for a fire. Now the whole world
has tucked itself into bed.
There’s a girl who tells lies
till her child-sized teeth blacken
and fall from her jaw. She remembers
a fairytale told and then told
until it grows old as her.

The night you try to kill yourself I am eating cake
with strawberry frosting and you are in a mountain-town
motel room downing tylenol and vodka.

At least there is a view
when you stumble back into consciousness
on the balcony and look out—

you told me it felt like dying
but I never asked if you meant
the passing out or the waking up.

In France, I aspirate the h (hear
asphyxiated breath), order a hamburger
hold it foil-wrapped and hot.

Why am I always eating
when you decide to die? I don’t swallow
for days. At the wake,

your body’s swollen
and your throat is wide. We all
smell of formaldehyde and ethanol,

embalmed. I feel the stiffness
set in. I move as little
as I can but you move less.

I was too tight
with fear and you
were too tender
with your almost-death
and so we had to use our hands
to pull some part
of what we felt
back to the surface
of our skin and if this
was love or lust then both
are a bodily sadness, the
terror of losing
you again. There
in the basement of your family
home we shook
with the need to conceive
of some place
where you could bury yourself
and be alive. Beneath
the covers we clung
to the sheets and each
other but mostly
we clung to ourselves
when you came
crouched above me
on your hands and knees
in an arc across
that terrified bed
and we knew that this
was the most alive
you had been and would
ever be again.