The Fairytale My Favorite Editor Rejected

I wanted to write a fairy tale about fracking. The tale would include special creatures, frack-fairies, with seven-syllable chemical superpowers and tiny parcels of invisible frack-dust said to cover the meadows at midnight. There would be magical events, Frackfests, that occur when stars shoot up from cracks in the earth’s crust and the ground dances…

Flaming fiddles, it looks like there’s a roadblock here! If you’d like to finish reading this piece, please buy a subscription—you’ll get access to the entire online archive of F(r)iction.
Alina Stefanescu

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Prize and was published in May 2018. A finalist for the 2019 Kurt Brown AWP Prize, the 2019 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the 2019 Frank McCourt Prize, and the 2019 Streetlight Magazine Poetry Contest, Alina won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize. Find her online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

Hailey Brown

Hailey Brown is a freelance illustrator born and raised in mid-Michigan. With a Bachelor’s of Science in Zoology, she spent years formerly working as a field biologist. Moving across country to the east coast, she also moved from science to art and graduated the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. Hailey works as a freelance colorist and illustrator for a wide assortment of clientele including comic anthologies, fantasy authors, and Dynamite Entertainment.


First Featured In: No. 15, spring 2020

The Identity Issue

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