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Curiosity's caught me
in its claws. It gnaws
on my thoughts till even my dreams
echo with your words:
"You must never set eyes on me
before the sun smoulders
and twilight raises its banners."
Each day your locked door
mocks me with its secret.

Why mustn't I?

Daylight steals you from me,
jealous wretch that he is!
As the northern days lengthen
our time together is thread-thin,
cursed sun barely setting before rising again.
It's nothing like our courtship
in the cold season.
I want winter, I want the thrill of frost
and your touch nightlong!—those endless nights.

*

You've forbidden me, yes,
but shouldn't a spouse
know everything about her love?
Just a little peek
through the keyhole. Just a little

look. Shock stabs me
sharp-slick in the heart—
by daylight you've lost your beauty,
your forest-brown skin,
your hair's wild swirls.
In the stark summer-light
I can see your day-form,
your true-form: a red fox
lies curled up sleeping
where my love should lie.

*

Unlocked, for you trust me, the door springs open
at my mistaken touch. The fox shies awake.
Dread leadens my heart. Betrayal. That's what this is.
Fox-fur standing straight
you stare sorrowful at me. Your eyes
are the same. "Only three more days
till the spell's breaking," you say,
"but it's too late, for magic
should never be spoken of."
My heart spills over for never did I think
that there was a spell. But of course there was.

Off the eiderdowned bed, down carpeted hall
you flee into the forest, haunted, cursed
and all for my impatience.
I know I'll never see you
again, unless in dreams.
I tear my hair, jaw clenched, I long
for our short summer hours,
our endless winter nights.




Sara Norja dreams in two languages. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, inkscraw, and Interfictions. Her short fiction has appeared in various publications and is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online and An Alphabet of Embers (ed. Rose Lemberg). She is @suchwanderings on Twitter.
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
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By: Catherine Rockwood
By: Romie Stott
Podcast read by: Ciro Faienza
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Issue 23 Jan 2023
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