Size / / /

Content warning:


1. Take a walnut glazed
with the honey of their name.
Crush it with a mortar and pestle.

2. Gather the dried lavender of their voice,
and scent your hands with it.

3. Hold the gifted knife firmly,
and stab yourself where
memory resides in you.
Beware!
It is a tricky, slithery, too fast thing.
Be quick and sure.

4. Watch for the echoes of their scent
in the caverns within you, bioluminescent wonders.
Drown them in silence.

5. The swans will clamor
wings flapping, beaks snapping, asking
to deliver messages.
Resist.

6. Let the pythons wrap themselves
around you, constricting your lungs
till you learn again to breathe
underwater.

7. Soak in the shower
of an unseasonal rain,
or the silver ache of a snowstorm.

8. Drink. Rinse. Repeat.



Vijayalakshmi Harish is the author of Strangely Familiar Tales, a self-published collection of speculative fiction. Her poetry and short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies, including Kaleidotrope, Borderless Journal, and others. A voracious reader and enthusiastic gardener, she is always curious about all things mythological and magical.
Current Issue
27 Mar 2023

close calls when / I’m with Thee / dressed to the nines
they took to their heels but the bird was faster.
In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Reviews Editors Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland talk to novelist, reviewer, and Strange Horizons’ Co-ordinating Editor, Gautam Bhatia, about how reviewing and criticism of all kinds align—and do not—with fiction-writing and the genre more widely.
If the future is here, but unevenly distributed, then so is the past.
He claims that Redlow used to be a swamp and he has now brought them into the future before the future. Yes he said that.
My previous Short Fiction Treasures column was all about science fiction, so it’s only fair that the theme this time around is fantasy.
I’ve come to think of trans-inclusive worldbuilding as an activist project in itself, or at least analogous to the work of activists. When we imagine other worlds, we have to observe what rules we are creating to govern the characters, institutions, and internal logic in our stories. This means looking at gender from the top down, as a regulatory system, and from the bottom up, at the people on the margins whose bodies and lives stand in some kind of inherent opposition to the system itself.
Wednesday: And Lately, The Sun edited by Calyx Create Group 
Friday: August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White 
Issue 20 Mar 2023
Issue 13 Mar 2023
Issue 6 Mar 2023
Issue 20 Feb 2023
Issue 13 Feb 2023
Issue 6 Feb 2023
Issue 30 Jan 2023
By: Catherine Rockwood
By: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Ciro Faienza
Podcast read by: Catherine Rockwood
Podcast read by: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Maureen Kincaid Speller
Issue 23 Jan 2023
Issue 16 Jan 2023
Issue 9 Jan 2023
Load More
%d bloggers like this: