Current Issue
528 words
Dear Reader,
I’ve been thinking a lot about damnatio memoriae. In the ancient world, if the wrong person was mad at you, they’d scratch your name from the history books. This mostly involved chiseling chunks from stone inscriptions and blotting out faces from statues and murals, and the whole process kind of reminds me of that Chris Rock joke about how bullets should be really expensive—erasing people from history sounds like a lot of work and hardly worth the effort. Damnatio memoriae remains everpresent in the modern era, but we no longer strike from tombs or tondos the names of those consigned to be forgotten. Too little now is writ in stone, and too few of us have chisels. Instead, we purge them from virtual machines in the depths of data centers, erasing bits through lines of code. We choose not to speak their names.
Table of Contents
Fiction
Pieces of Anna by R.L. Meza
In This Dimension, Do You Still Believe in God? by Lora Gray
If You Don’t Return, I Want You To Know by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
Convergence by Dan Peacock
Poetry
flowers, coffee, cinnamon and the long way home by Arden Baker
Here Come The Men In Black, or, Out Wrecks The Shroud, or, Kelly’s Black Boyfriend Is Actually The Eschaton??? by Christopher Leigh Silverberg
The First Spider on the Moon by H.V. Patterson
Wintering Grounds by Anna Madden