At some point in your life earlier than that, however, you will be brave enough to look in the mirror and say to yourself: this is what I am, this is who I am. You will cry, you will laugh, you will feel like leaving the party early. You will try at least once. Don’t. Your story doesn’t end here.

Once upon a time, in a used bookstore in Houston, I came across a book called  The Seven Serpents  by Steve Jackson.

Kristian is fidgeting and asks the dreaded and inevitable question for the umpteenth time. "Mummy, Ma, are we there yet?" "Almost there, sweetpea," says Maarit, sharing a grimace with me. I’m concentrating on remembering precisely which wooded path it is that leads to my family’s summer cabin. Sometimes it feels like the forest changes . . . .

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents Sara Norja's "Water, Birch, and Blood."

I want to challenge how women's bodies are thought of and represented—in comics especially.

Listen—one day you're gonna find yourself out in the ocean, / in the world, and you're gonna stop and feel the electric / heartbeat of the entire world in the water around you—

That our flower girl would sprinkle / tobacco leaves instead of rose petals / before you plucked me apart / with your blood-smudged claws.