"Winter Solstice, Kandiyohi County"

By Kristin Idaszak

& I walked out, summoned by the siren song into darkness pricked by shivering stars & I stepped onto the frozen lake, boots crunching in the snow, my footprints ampersands leading away from the drowsy warmth of the fire crackling inside the cabin & the wisps of clouds overhead mingled with my shaggy breath & at first it was disorienting, I couldn’t locate the source of the sound which seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere, an aural aurora borealis & it was low & moaning & inhuman; the only way I can describe it is like the whalesongs I sometimes play when I have insomnia, but this bellow was nothing like the tinny recordings emanating through my headphones & then there was rending and splitting as though the tectonic plates were talking to each other, deciding where to go after their shift, let’s try that new noodle place in town & what can I tell you about the moment I realized the music was coming from the lake itself, the ice settling in its wintry bed, pulling the covers over the fish & kelp (I've always wondered how they sleep through the long night) & suddenly I was wide awake & would you believe me if I told you that the music entered me & I became a being made of pure sound & frozen beauty &

Kristin Idaszak is an internationally produced playwright, essayist, and accidental cultural critic whose work excavates the intersection of chronic illness and climate change.

Photo by Shane Kelly.

Sockeye

By JR Fenn

We moved the cabin from Anchor Point to Homer, thirty miles on winding roads, up Diamond Ridge and down the bluff; but it wasn’t, technically, us who moved it—it was Mike, with his flatbed truck and winch (a flatbed big enough to fit a 12x20 cabin, lifted off its cinderblocks with its tidy white windows and red walls flying through the air, the windows where we had once lit candles in the dark, no longer a fishing shack by the Anchor River, now carted along the road to be hoisted into the air once more and set down by the slough, where the grasses waved in salt water and the gulls and murres circled overhead), though it wasn’t the moving of the cabin I remembered later, not the groaning of the timbers as the structure strained against gravity, not its undercarriage exposed, floating high above the ground, its roof outlined against the greenery of the ridge, not how it settled beside the 80-foot spruce, its porch looking out to sea like a face aghast at the volcanic peaks across the bay, their tops covered in snow against the still blue of the sky—no, what I remembered was taking the check to Mike a month later (half down, half after delivery and a few phone messages reminding us of the balance due; it’d been a cash-poor summer) when he was cleaning fish caught that day, dipnetting on the Kasilof—what stuck in my mind, emblazoned in fire once I’d taken it in, was the way he stood in his Carhartts by the tailgate of his flatbed and turned a fish belly-up to slit it from chin to gonads, holding the lips of the cut wide so I could see the deep red of the flesh, the blue and purple of the organs nestled inside tight and compact as gems—“A woman’s purse,” he said, echoing the metaphor beginning to shape itself on my tongue—before he sliced off a translucent piece of flesh, so thin it could be a veil for a glittering sun seen from far underwater, or the cold petal of a tidal flower, and held it out to me, the fish open in his hand, all it had grown and miraculously brought back home quivering on the tip of the blade.

JR Fenn's work has appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Diagram, Flash, and Versal, among other places; she teaches Environmental Writing at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and lives in Western New York with her family.

Art by Melissa Warp.

Curio: a Relief

By Jace Brittain

That word: Fortune being relative, I was made to understand Mr. Sonnabend had spent more than he could afford on the thing: “Well, it is, uh,” he said, “I, look, I mean, you, listen,” and I was just passenger to: he holds up a, he says, human horn, and he says, “I can’t make heads or tails of—" and I stopped him right there because I won’t let someone make a mockery of human anatomy, its delicate or dim damp illusory curves and casts, where light loses ground at the inner ear, and said: “That thing is a projection, external, unusual,” while, after all, my grandfather, who kept alive so long a tusked rabbit, regretted it, we thought, later, when he died, so Mr. Sonnabend, flustered, dropped it under the table, when I hunkered down there to find him: hands and knees, elbows propped and arms encircling, a collection of such oddities: the electric lamp between his teeth beamed at the tilt flitting from object to object as if he thought a curiosity might save him, however, however, however, however,

Jace Brittain, the author of Sorcererer (Schism Neuronics), has published writing in Annulet, Grotto Journal, ANMLY, dadakuku, and elsewhere.

Art by Jace Brittain.