La Lima, Cortés, Honduras // 1954 Based on the flooding of ’54 and protests against the United Fruit Co. that took place in northern Honduras. They agree, unspokenly, to not worry until the water has reached the second wooden step. Tuesday at noon, it isn’t quite there yet, but when the wind picks up and…

Mom always told me the floor was held up by a broom handle. If I stomped or my feet landed hard, she’d say don’t jump there, stop that, no! And if I moved too fast along the wooden floor in the hallway, she’d say things like young ladies don’t run inside the house.

One day, she kept yelling at me about how she’s the one who’s always got to clean up, and look at all the dirty clothes I make but don’t bother to wash, and how is she supposed to live in a house where I’m always tracking mud in from outside? I tried to sneak away, and she told me do you want our house to collapse? If you make our house collapse, I’ll punish you for the rest of your life.

I wasn’t even stomping. Just by existing in my mother’s house, I could make it fall apart.

I was sick of it, sick of the talk about the broom, sick of Mom telling me do this when I was trying to do that. So I shoved past her and her stupid piles of clothes all folded neat on her pink duvet. I went into my room and pulled the box out from under my bed where I’d hidden my adventure things—a jar full of rocks, a canteen, and my camping lantern. I left the rocks and canteen. I took the lantern. I had a plan.

Outside, I found the opening in the foundation and I crawled through onto mud-covered cement. My lantern made the whole place look bleached, all drips and weird shadows, pale beams, rusted pipes. My hair snagged on a crooked nail. My knees scraped in the grit. The floor sloped down. It spread away from the bottom of the house, leaving enough room that I could crouch instead of crawling. The space opened up into a low chamber.

In the chamber stood a small woman, her knuckles bent white around a broom handle. She had the same thin mouth as Mom, the same hard eyes, but she was filthy, her dress ripped at the hem, and her hair knotted up like a nest on top of her head.

My broom is stuck, she said to me, as if it were my fault. She tugged at the broom, an old wooden thing with dark stains on the handle where it had been touched. It wouldn’t budge. Wedged tight. On the ground, bristles splayed away in every direction, caked in a layer of brown mud.

“Your broom is holding up my house,” I said.

I didn’t ask for visitors. This place is such a mess, what will everyone think of me? She went on tugging at the broom, and as she tugged, she started to cry.

I’m sorry. She said. Oh god, I’m sorry. She looked up and wiped the tears away from under her eyes with the tip of a muddy finger. She blinked a bunch, her mouth open. Get it together, she told herself. Come on, it’s not that hard.

Not far away from the woman sat an old yellow stove like the one we had in the house, but this one was streaked with mud. Beyond that, I saw a bed, also muddy, with a dirty pink duvet seeping over the mattress edge. Apart from the woman’s sniffling, the chamber was quiet. Cool and damp. Secret. Like a hideaway. The air held the smell of an autumn forest floor.

“You have a lovely home,” I said.

Bullshit, she replied. Then, she started to cry again, crying harder, and she tugged harder at the handle, but the broom still wouldn’t budge. It hadn’t moved an inch.

I didn’t know how to help her. If I pulled the broom with her, maybe the whole house would come down. Maybe we could both make it out, but we would have to run. Plus, I didn’t want to upset her more. I stooped and crawled out, my hair catching on the nail again. I emerged into the sun of the backyard and went inside.

What kind of mess do you call this? Mom said. She stepped toward me and caught her fingers in a knot of hair on top of my head. Where have you been? Never mind. I don’t care. You’re filthy.

I looked down at myself, my dress ripped and muddy. Under my nails, black crescent moons. I must’ve looked just like the woman under the house. My shoes had tracked tiny grains of dirt onto the white tile, and feathered dust drifting down from the hem of my skirt. I wondered who was going to sweep it up. I wondered if it should be me.

I thought about the section of wooden floor, how with just one well-placed stomp a broom could break apart. At its most worn point, the wood thin and black with fingerprints, the handle would probably splinter in two.

Oh god, Mom said. Oh god, what will the neighbors think of us?

I stomped past her. I stood on that spot in the hall, and I made sure that Mom was watching. She needed to see me, see us, see us three stuck in this house together. And I needed her to know that I knew what I was breaking.

I bent my knees and jumped.

Even after all the time she had spent cleaning, she still found herself listening for some sort of noise—water in the pipes, perhaps, or the hum of fluorescent lights. Outer offices often had large windows and sometimes, when she was working on the top floors of buildings, the wind would gather strength and batter against…

In the battle for historical recognition, there is a huge divide between legacy and renown. Alexander the Great, a thirteen-year-world-conquering wonder, for example, left little lasting impact; most of the land he conquered was lost mere decades after his death. Yet still, he’s remembered as one of the most illustrious household names, while other innovators,…

Dear lovely reader,

Two years ago, I was lucky enough to interview Hart Hanson—the brilliant mind behind the show Bones—who took a break from the silver screen to write a crime novel called The Driver. It’s a fun romp full of mystery and sex and guns, but buried beneath all the adventure, a central question brews: Can someone be both a great and a good person?

That conversation has never left me. I bring it up frequently—at work, at home, when I’ve had too many glasses of wine and I can’t stop waxing philosophical. Because, if we look at history, the mutual exclusivity of being good and great is pretty stark.

Look at our greatest world leaders, our brightest minds, the names that grace the spines of our most beloved classics. Their biographies are often littered with broken families and mental health issues. Cleopatra, Nero, Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Robin Williams all committed suicide, riddled with heartache, illness, or insurmountable melancholy. And for every suicide, there’s ten times the number of historical powerhouses who were deeply depressed.

From Tesla’s agoraphobia and Van Gogh’s vendetta against his own ear to Alexander the Great’s penchant for death-by-bestie, the conclusion is clear: often those who make the greatest impact on our world are the most unhappy, the most troubled, the most, ah . . . stabbed.

So why, dear reader, are we all killing ourselves to leave a legacy, to make our mark in this world, when the sacrifices that it requires often result in us living a life with little joy? With the least love and trust. With the least “good.”

It’s this massive quandary that our Legacy issue hopes to explore.

In true F(r)iction fashion, you’ll find bone-cuttingly intimate pieces exploring the positive and the downright repulsive tendencies we inherit from those we love. You’ll adventure through wild tales about legacies carried in our blood: curses, prophecies, magic. . . frightening apocalyptic futures. There’s even a stellar historical intro essay exploring the huge rift between creating a lasting legacy and being remembered for it.

As always, I am constantly surprised by how each issue comes together. Our submission pile was full of works that focused not on what we do to create our own legacies—as Hart and I agonized over—but on how the legacies we inherit reshape us. Will we escape the molds our parents poured us into? Will we be strong enough to change the world we inherit? Or, in the end, is our legacy completely out of our control?

Because, if I’ve learned anything from putting this book together, dear reader, it’s that legacy is a tie that binds both ways: the constant pull of those who came before us and the threads we make ourselves, shooting out into the future to make a mark, to weave our name into history, to latch onto those whom we leave behind.

These stories, like our lives, live in the balance between those two forces. And as you navigate them, I hope they inspire you to wonder why we want so desperately to do something worth remembering, and if that desire is the final nail in the coffin of our happiness. Or how, if we are somehow clever and kind enough, we might be able to have both . . .

Cheers,

Dani Hedlund
Editor-in-Chief