from The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club Ben stood in the basement and called upstairs, “Mom, have you seen my dice bag up there?” “What dice bag, sweetheart?” His mother replied from the kitchen. “My only dice bag.” He’d been using that same dice bag since high school. “It’s made of…
Category: Issue Nine
“Set The Scene” by Devon Halliday
The alien family lives in a yellow house, center stage, picket-fenced. Down the road, a war general raises his three sons in a domestic bootcamp. The middle son is in love with Ophelia, who lives with her thrice-widowed aunt next to a mysterious graveyard, but Ophelia is dating Johnny, the green-skinned teenage alien in the…
“Girl Who Games” by McKenzie Zalopany
McKenzie Zalopany is a comic and fiction writer based out of the Tampa Bay Area. She is a recent MFA graduate from the University of South Florida. Her work has appeared in The Boiler, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.
“Shipping: A How-To Guide for Naming Your Favorite Fandom Lesbian Couple” by Sarah Harder
I. There are only so many ways to drown a girl so slice away her name instead, syllable by syllable, like you’re shaving off her limbs, wounds uncauterized in case you need to piece her back out of order. Think: Anatomy Jane, all her insides out. II. & so for a girl to love another…
“Searching for a Friend at the End of LiveJournal” by Hannah Cohen
My cursor hovers above the Twitter DM button. The name on the account is her real name, but she’s still using the same online handle I knew from over fifteen years ago. To access my LiveJournal and Fanfiction accounts, I had to leapfrog through a series of email logins. I spent several months trying to remember old screen names and the stories she wrote. But now that I’ve found our old conversations, I know it’s her. It’s 100% my old online friend, D.
An Interview with Doug Henderson
Catherine Valdez: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Doug. Your novel was such a fun and engaging read. So many lines lingered with me. In the very first chapter, for example, I was drawn to this line: “sometimes, ‘objects of power don’t reveal themselves to the mortal plane unless called forth with a summoning…
“The Sufjan Question” by Michael Colbert
I came to Sufjan late, in 2018, in an embarrassingly obvious way: through Call Me by Your Name. The book was what I needed to begin understanding my sexuality–Aciman’s novel, like much of his writing, is more vividly bisexual than the film implies. Aciman tracks Elio’s sexual becoming with a man, a woman, and, of course, a peach.