Size / / /

Content warning:


I was born without eyes and limbs, for my
father was the first person to venture out to
the fringes of the universe only to return
seemingly unharmed. I may be eyeless but I
can see through the eyes of everyone and everything.
My parents put cameras all over the house so I could see
around the house when I’m all alone, but I
best prefer seeing through the eyes of my mother.
And I may be limbless but navigation comes
naturally, for I am able to levitate wherever I please,
if only I please

My parents love me just the way I am, but
they wanted another. So they were filled with
jubilation when my sister looked normal in the ultrasound.
But one morning my mother woke up screaming
and my father rushed her to the hospital.
I stayed alone in the house, watching

There was no reasonable explanation they
could give my parents. My sister simply
wasn’t in my mother anymore

My parents were sad for a long time after that,
and I noticed they were looking at me differently.
When my mother found out she was pregnant again
my parents gave me away to the government where
I wasn’t allowed to levitate wherever I please

The government gave me a large white dome for
a room, which was very spacious, and equally empty,
except when they came to ask me what I see.
On my fifteenth birthday the government gave me
a birthday present. They shaved my head and installed a small
camera on top of my scalp so that I could see from a normal
person's viewpoint. But they still wanted to know
what I see with the eyes of everyone else

Years later I heard her voice in my head.
She told me she was my sister and that she was
sorry for everything that has happened to me.
She told me she had had to leave and that she was
planning on returning to my mother’s belly
but that she was too afraid to hurt her.
I’ve never heard from her again, not until my
hundredth birthday. Her voice came to my head
sounding exactly like the first time she spoke
to me all those years ago.
She sang me happy birthday and then asked me
to join her, and the moment I thought about
saying yes I found myself surrounded by the
starkest of darknesses, and there she was, my
little sister; a rosy fetus floating about in a transparent
bubble, with two tiny black eyes and diaphanous skin.
When I turned around I saw the universe in its
entirety, and then my sister asked me if I wanted
to play with her and when I said yes she taught me
how to play with marbles



Born an emaciated preemie, Aber grew up to be the largest man of his lineage. He attributes his size to a lifelong consumption of hummus and his mother’s early life at a small town next to a nuclear power plant. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Southampton Review, Space and Time, Andromeda SpacewaysMithila ReviewLeading Edge, and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and he has won the Bernice Schaffer Bessin Poetry Award.
Current Issue
31 Mar 2025

We are delighted to present to you our second special issue of the year. This one is devoted to ageing and SFF, a theme that is ever-present (including in its absence) in the genre.
Gladys was approaching her first heat when she shed her fur and lost her tail. The transformation was unintentional, and unwanted. When she awoke in her new form, smelling of skin and sweat, she wailed for her pack in a voice that scraped her throat raw.
does the comb understand the vocabulary of hair. Or the not-so-close-pixels of desires even unjoined shape up to become a boat
The birds have flown long ago. But the body, the body is like this: it has swallowed the smaller moon and now it wants to keep it.
now, be-barked / I am finally enough
how you gazed on our red land beside me / then how you traveled it, your eyes gone silver
Here, I examine the roles of the crones of the Expanse space in Persepolis Rising, Tiamat’s Wrath, and Leviathan Falls as leaders and combatants in a fight for freedom that is always to some extent mediated by their reduced physical and mental capacity as older people. I consider how the Expanse foregrounds the value of their long lives and experience as they configure the resistance for their own and future generations’ freedom, as well as their mentorship of younger generations whose inexperience often puts the whole mission in danger.
In the second audio episode of Writing While Disabled, hosts Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston welcome Farah Mendlesohn, acclaimed SFF scholar and conrunner, to talk all things hearing, dyslexia, and more ADHD adjustments, as well as what fandom could and should be doing better for accessibility at conventions, for both volunteers and attendees.
Friday: The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon 
Issue 24 Mar 2025
Issue 17 Mar 2025
Issue 10 Mar 2025
By: Holli Mintzer
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 3 Mar 2025
Issue 24 Feb 2025
Issue 17 Feb 2025
Issue 10 Feb 2025
By: Alexandra Munck
Podcast read by: Claire McNerney
Issue 27 Jan 2025
By: River
Issue 20 Jan 2025
Strange Horizons
By: Michelle Kulwicki
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
Issue 13 Jan 2025
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