Letter from the Editors

by Meera Velu and Emily Pellegrini 
Issue 16: Consumed

“I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.”

Frankenstein’s creature issues this plea in the form of a threat, starved for the companionship Frankenstein has denied him, else he will kill everyone his creator loves, feeding death to sate his own hunger.

Issue 16 begins with these words because its theme–consumed–reaches beyond devouring, into what it means to be taken, overtaken, or given over to desire, to faith, to another, to inheritance.

Alifah Omar’s “Healer”, the issue’s first fiction, follows two twins and an older sister recently orphaned and grappling with the responsibility of caring for one another. When the twin sister falls ill, the search for help unearths an unsettling family legacy that threatens to consume the twins.

Exploring a more literal ingestion, the vampire protagonist in M. Shaw’s “American Vampire in Amsterdam” visits Europe expecting to find a society of liberated vampires, only to learn that what looks like progress is built on a history of appetite and exploitation.

Andrew Dugan closes the issue’s fiction with “Devotees”. In this story, an abbot, having lost his faith along with all his brothers to a monastery ravenous for flesh, must confront a newcomer whose beliefs have never wavered. In him, the abbot finds something to hold onto in an impermanent world where everything eventually gets consumed.

With poetry, Agatha Danielle’s “Flesh-Eating Cherries” chronicles the intimate, hungry act of writing.

This issue ends in conversation with Indrapramit Das, a Delhi-based writer of novels like Devourers and a number of short stories that celebrate cities—from their cherished foods to the exploitative mechanisms that eat away at culture itself.

And with that, we close, hoping the issue leaves you with a craving to keep speculating.