the storing

Somewhere outside the cave, inciting the sky, there are the knives of stars. I try to stop the sensation of them piercing me. They apparently also have stories they want to tell.

The stories in this issue speak to each other through time, offering the suggestion of sequels and prequels and ‘meanwhile…’. They exchange strange, curling language about death and new growth, about apocalypse and what comes after. In Saraid Taylor’s the storing, the narrator claims a place in memory and space among creatures that ‘click their teeth happily’, and in Claire Aman’s Ishbel, the narrator carries her memories with her, pacing and pacing up and down her brother’s street in the company of a whippet. In Pip Jones’ False Autumn, climate apocalypse looms as rain moths die confusedly and a couple search for mushrooms among pine needles that smell like a ‘detritivore hymn’. Gilgamesh’s Oracle by Zana Fraillon presents as a possible far-distant sequel, a saga looking back over the millennia to flood warnings plastered over the public toilets. And Meghalee Bose’s Doing good stands watching, outside time, and gives its narrator an opportunity to undo some wrong, and the moral responsibility to undo it correctly – and the most perfect pair of final words.

— Kate Kruimink, Fiction Editor

Somewhere outside the cave, inciting the sky,

there are the knives of stars. I try to stop the sensation of them piercing me. They apparently also have stories they want to tell. I promise them the morning. I ask for the night. They do not care for this request. They susurrate/hiss/purr to me anyway. I lift my hands to my ears so quickly, I scrape my left elbow against the wall of the cave. The cave grates me. It takes a square of my skin and holds it like a painting.