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You Are Here

You need to take the Blue Line to Memorial Park – move up around the
axis to the second exit. (You can use your home vehicle.) You walk along
the fence and turn right to find the entrance ahead. The fountain is
inside, centered in the hall; to locate it, you need to walk past the core
steles along the main avenue.

At the time of liberation and crisis, this was the largest cavern inside
the planetoid, dug for the purpose of mining ore; but the mine became
repurposed as a war memorial when independence was declared. The lights
overhead fade out in response to your awareness and darken to a constant
gray, reminding the visitor of generations past in the face of what is yet
to be. With each moment, the baseline of your memories shifts, creating an
unsettling dream atmosphere. The quiet, oblique space opens wide and
resounds with your own breathing. You can touch the fragments and pebbles
embedded in the stone mantle, but beware of your instinctive missteps –
the ground is uneven. You can assert yourself and call from the inside,
expecting deliverance, but any wrongs are products of your own mind and
your preconceptions. You are the mirror.

[ PROCEED ]

Was: Blue Line to Memorial Park

The cavern inside you resounds with the purpose of generations past;
you walk ahead, expecting the lights overhead to darken any second
and the dream to fade out to the constant gray of baseline awareness.
Turn to move, mine your memories for ore and liberation. You are here
and with each moment you assert your independence, centered inside
the planetoid you can call your own. You need to find the fence around
the fountain, to walk along the main avenue and touch the steles; exit
as the entrance opens wide – this is your need to locate your home when
you are but a visitor, creating a memorial from repurposed fragments,
the unsettling space inside became embedded in your core,
reminding you of past missteps. Take up the mantle but beware the war,
the instinctive response to right declared wrongs at the time of crisis –
the quiet in the hall is the vehicle of your own uneven breathing
and the ground shifts along an oblique axis. It is the deliverance
of the mind – preconceptions dug in stone and atmosphere;
the largest products mining can use are but pebbles in the face of
what was – and can yet be. Mirror yourself.



Bogi Takács (they/them or e/em) started working on the poetry / flash fiction series “Jobs for Magical People (That Do Not Involve the Military)” in response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. E would like to ask you to consider how authoritarian power manifests the world over (including in the stories we tell), then do something to counteract it. Bogi is a writer, poet, critic and scholar of speculative literature; and also a Hungarian Jewish immigrant to the US, a winner of the Hugo and Lambda awards, and a finalist for other awards like the Ignyte and the Locus. Eir second short story collection Power to Yield and Other Stories was published earlier in 2024 by Broken Eye Books, and eir poetry collection Algorithmic Shapeshifting is available from Aqueduct.
Current Issue
10 Feb 2025

The editors for the AfroSurrealism Special invite you to submit fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.
he curls his bicep into ever more and more and more bicep
Hush. He sees through / the static. Softly. It sees him back.
“Please also be reminded of the following prohibited items,” the clerk explains kindly. “No chemicals or toxic substances. No fluids over 1,000 milliliters. No lithium batteries, laptop chargers and power banks, no love, no light, no family, no safety.”
By: Alexandra Munck
Podcast read by: Claire McNerney
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Sandrine by Alexandra Munck, read by Claire McNerney. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
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By: E.M. Linden
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By: Susannah Rand
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