Vol. 1 No. 7 (July 2023)

In this issue, a white dog plays fetch on a disused highway, and a drunkard seeks a hands-on lesson in animal anatomy.

Featuring the stories: Personal Ghosts, Τύχων, This One Shall Breathe Somewhere Else, and Empathy Farm, as well as a few poems.

Personal Ghosts: There’s about a mile of now-unused highway where the course of the highway is now directed somewhere else, and where Forager now likes to lead me when we go out on walks so that we have a wide, clear, long open space to play fetch. He’s a white lab, though only his height and the shape of his head give this away: his body and legs show off long white hair which always ripples backwards as though perpetually moving forward through water.

Τύχων: My dreams have been getting so goddamn vivid lately and I hate it.

This One Shall Breathe Somewhere Else: Eleanor and I sit on a bench in the park. Our engagement rings touch as we hold hands. A city guard stands a little ways off. In the distance, over the city walls, we can hear the blasting of grand horns from the lunar monastery, celebrating the coming of a full moon. Eleanor and I look up at the moon, green and blue and pink, cloud-streaked, shimmering, a world unto itself.

Empathy Farm: I can tell that this voyage has reached a critical mass of fuckedness (fuck•ID•niss, archaic, n.) because I have a meeting with Boreas Ground Control in two minutes to discuss our spike in incident reports, and instead of getting prepared for this meeting, I am on comms with Gomez, and he is telling me that a maintenance issue is now my urgent problem. For six years, I have been blessed with his ability to get handed a problem in any department and make it go away. No longer so.

Poems: Bathroom; Factual Dog Status Awareness; Ambiguously Grammatical; Not All The Time Of Course But Sometimes; Couplet; Yet Another New And Happy Morning; Claws.