I do appreciate a story that conveys the scale of time. We started 2026 with a fine example, charting decades such that their impact only truly came concrete at the end; here, C. J. Peterson allows centuries, even millenia, to pass as easily as months or years. And as any child or civilisation could confirm, you can pack a whole lot into those great spans.
It appears the editor (who also moonlights as story art designer) associates themes of memory with polaroid photographs, since both this issue and the previous boasted such a piece thus decorated. Very much different tales, though. Marina Favila gives us a concise, convincing portrait of persons and place, familiar little cruelties and regrets, and less familiar ones too.
K. Meera's story is all voice - a deceptive claim? Of course, because there's also thrumming family tension, a vividly sketched community pressured to breaking point, and a liminal unexplainability at the heart of it all. But we get only what the narrator chooses, or can bring himself, to express, so maybe 'all that can be voiced' is closer to his truth.
As we move into the back half of this issue, I sense some overlap with the previous, in the themes and my arrangement of stories. Get in line, subconscious, and back on topic. Torture doesn't work, it's often claimed (unless, as in i46's Strip-Mine, we are torturing ourselves). It seems J. M. J. Brewer's faintly affectless perpetrators here perform torture almost for torture's sake. So wrong: torture does work. Just not on who we expect it to.
On the surface, there is little conjunction between Daniel Burnbridge's (potentially triggering; warning over) depiction of an evening in the life of a gay rent boy and last issue's penultimate story, of a grief-stricken astronaut orbiting the world alongside the partner they'd lost. But while their absurdities and resolutions are very different, sex - and profound emotion - are there in both.
Yes indeed, as I get to the end some strange closing alignment with the last issue, though perceptible perhaps only to myself. But I'll say no more of that before Sylvie Soul's short story has its moment - an example of a type I see often, though which rarely clicks for me the way this did. And after you've read it, why not hop back an issue to see if you can tell what I've been talking about… if anything…
When I read Mattia Ravasi's review of The Immeasurable Heaven I felt uncontrollably moved to buy a copy the same day - editorial privilege I guess, and possibly a spoiler for what Mattia thought about it. I finished it a few days before the review itself, but it's clearly time to let the man speak for himself.
For some reason I miscalculated my plans to parcel out my short reviews in four month chunks and picked from five last time, so for this issue I was tightly focused on just three! Yet in the end I could have focused tightlier still, since my favourite three stories from around and about all landed in September.
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