Strings By Jason Heller Art by Jason White Published Issue 101, May 2022 The wound steel buzzes beneath my finger. It’s the G string, the thinnest and highest. I play it way up past the twelfth fret, letting the A and D strings drone open while muting the E string with my thumb, wrapped around […]
The Old Gods By Maggie D. Fedorov Art by Dylan Fowler Published Issue 100, April 2022 “LOOK MAMA, THERE IT IS; SHE’S WAKING UP!” she cries, infused with as much wonder as I’ve ever seen in a child of four. A smile unfurls as I laugh lightheartedly at the little flutter in my chest from
The Old Gods by Maggie D. Fedorov | Art by Dylan Fowler Read More »
Published Issue 100, April 2022 Best of Birdy Originally Published Issue 015 The knock at the door comes at 2:30 a.m. I am alone and awake to greet it. I pad down the hall in soft socks and weak shadows, my shoulder blades twisting beneath my skin like insects trapped in a napkin. Charlie says
The Voice of Silence By Maggie D. Fedorov Art by Michael McKenney Published Issue 097, January 2022 I awake with a start to the slamming of a door. A quick glance around the room reminds me that I had left the window open as I slept. The cat looks at me with an expression that
Published Issue 094, October 2021 The first part of Many Carvings was published in Issue 084, October 2021. Click this pumpkin icon to finish where you left off reading in print. “Light the lamps, Alaster,” the boy’s mother said, lifting her needlework to squint at a stitch. Alaster lay on the floor, too obsessed with
Book Club By Hana Zittel Published Issue 089, May 2021 The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones (2020) When four members of the Blackfeet Nation make the ill-advised decision to hunt elk on land reserved for elders, their fates are sealed as a violent haunting starts to unfold around them. Stephen Graham Jones’ newest
Why We Are Whispering By Jason Heller Art by Ali Hoff Published Issue 085, January 2021 Best of Birdy | Originally Published in Issue 068, August 2019 Amy never meant to build an automaton. She didn’t know how to make anything. Nevertheless in her basement one day she heaped laundry baskets and car batteries and
Published Issue 083, November 2020 Of course you can’t be an organ donor. You’ll need them when Jesus comes back. I was raised under a pretty extreme Evangelical theology, but somehow, I missed this crucial bit of doctrine until I applied for my driver’s license. It turns out learning the rules of the road came
TEA FOR THE ETERNAL EMPEROR By Joel Tagert Art by Dylan Fowler Published Issue 081, September 2020 Despite the thin air and the cold, Pleven and Emma spent nearly the entire eight-hour flight across the Cauldron on the observation deck, talking together and looking eagerly at the roiling clouds below them, lit intermittently by flashes
BAD REPUTATIONBy Kaylie RivasArt: Cosmic Death Queen by Jaime ValderramaArt: Dog by Luke DiBonaPublished Issue 080, August 2020 I didn’t always used to be this way. You know … hated by everyone. In a way, all of this “evil” stuff has just given me a complex, really. It’s like you do one thing wrong and