Size / / /

Content warning:


I don't have a quiet heart. These
hollow chambers clang and echo

when so much as a penny
is dropped in.

The neighbors peer inside me and tut.

"Try filling it with earth," one says.

"So it can grow things instead of making that—"

wince "—noise."

"Nah," another says. "Go with grain.
You can sustain anyone
with a heart of grain."

"No," my mother says. Ear pressed to my chest,
she counts in time to the chambers’ moans.

"Fill it with salt water, so that only
those who thrive there may stay."

And who would that be—a tropical fish?
I wonder. But obedience comes naturally.

With a heavy jug, I fill my heart three-quarters full.

(Salt stings too much to fill it to the brim.)

The neighbors groan.

"It's still too loud—and now
she can't even drink from it."

Shhh, I say, listening
for the tide as it sloshes
inside me. Ocean water cools

this hot blood.

Waves give these echoes
and clangs of mine

a rhythm.



Maddie Phelps is an English and Strategic Communication student at the University of Minnesota.  After Maddie graduates this spring, they hope to use their experience in non-profit development and communications at an organization focused on health, disability, gender and sexuality, or sexual violence.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
Issue 18 Mar 2024
Strange Horizons
Issue 11 Mar 2024
Issue 4 Mar 2024
Issue 26 Feb 2024
Issue 19 Feb 2024
Issue 12 Feb 2024
Issue 5 Feb 2024
Issue 29 Jan 2024
Issue 15 Jan 2024
Issue 8 Jan 2024
Load More
%d bloggers like this: