by Fran Lyons

I learned about Dad’s fall on a Monday afternoon in August, two days after his eighty-seventh birthday. The doorbell security camera shows Dad shuffle across the wet grass with Gracie, his smaller dog while his neighbor walked the other dog. No cane in his hand, no walker, and no one escorting him. The video cuts out as he nears the neighbor’s driveway. I’m both frustrated and relieved that it stopped because then we’d know exactly what happened.

On Monday, August 10, 2020, a derecho passed through northern Illinois. A derecho is a widespread, long-lasting wind storm with multiple fast-moving squall lines. There were fifteen tornadoes in northern Illinois that day, and the town of Harvard, where Dad lived, experienced sustained winds over seventy-five miles per hour. The skies were dark, and tornado sirens kept sounding to ensure residents remained in their homes.

Dad was alone, but had Stella and Gracie to keep him company, although they were likely spooked from the storms as most dogs are. The house had a full basement, but he was too unsteady to use the stairs to take shelter.

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by Michael J. H. MacNeill

Two years ago I got a wild hair up my ass and decided to make a fiction magazine. There weren’t many magazines out there that produced what I wanted.

What I wanted was the equivalent of a low budget, terrible-but-great horror movie. Despite having no budget, and despite having no directorial skills and no trained actors and no sober crewmembers, a bunch of enthusiastic fans with a camera and a heart of gold can still make something incredible. And by incredible, I mean incredibly bad. But something magical happens with these kinds of bad movies. The audience can quickly adopt the movie’s shortcomings, and, somewhere along the line, the chemistry of the water changes. It’s the puppet show effect. Don’t bother hiding the strings. Everybody can tell that it’s a puppet. There are no illusions. The strings don’t matter. You can still enjoy the show.

I wanted that DIY, screw the rules, “lean in” quality in a literary magazine. And, equally as important, I wanted to show off the good work that my writing group was producing. Most importantly, I wanted to reestablish subterranean mutants and slimy, semi-erotic monsters into the great Literary Conversation. So I got to work, learned what I needed to learn, and put out the word.

That’s when I realized I had been fucking up.

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Conventional Art is very, well, conventional:

That’s a painting of a bowl of fruit.

It looks like a bowl of fruit.

The artist intended it to look like a bowl of fruit.

Everybody who sees it can tell that it’s (say it with me now) a bowl of fruit.

Contemporary Art is different:

That could be a bowl of fruit – or it could be various snakes of different colors who’ve just devoured a pack of rats, then curled up together in this bowl, their skins distended into vaguely fruit-like shapes by the currently-being-digested lumps.

Or maybe it’s a horse.

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