From the Editors

Dear Readers, In 2013, Interfictions launched this online journal, bringing new genre-bending fiction, non-fiction, poetry and everything in-between to a global audience, with three issues published in the first twelve months. This past year, the Interstitial Arts Foundation asked for help to…

The Rise and Fall of the Simian Empire
Lavie Tidhar

Being a Rather Brief Introduction Things come to us in broken pieces, old records, torn fragile parchments, the task of the historian is beset with difficulties, half-lies and myth, unreliable narrators, invented memories. One of our most persistent stories begins,…

Vulturism
Genevieve Valentine

Someone had turned in six albums to the store, thick as dictionaries, each full to bursting with slivered photos askew in their pockets. There were eight or nine of every setup; Chester the photographer took no chances. Each was…

Witches of Childhood
Gwynne Garfinkle

The comfort of the sitcom witches with their laugh tracks, sixties dresses and twinkly music. When I have the flu, my mom wheels the TV into my bedroom so I can watch. Samantha Stephens twitches her nose, and the vacuum…

“Aihportue”
An original digital work by Baltzerglass (daniel Baltzer and Mikel Glass)
Sculpture by Baltzerglass
Photography by Don R. Wilson
Video editing by Terence Taylor

In 2012, two art collectors in Virginia named Grace and David Lawson contacted New York artists daniel Baltzer and Mikel Glass, working collectively as Baltzerglass, to create a room-sized installation in the Lawsons’ living room. In addition to being art…

Mothers
Carmen Maria Machado

Here she is, on the porch, all straw-hair and slumpy joints and a crack that passes through her lip like she is dirt that has never known rain. In her arms is a baby: genderless, red, not making any sort…

Otherwise, Ferguson
Ashon Crawley

Otherwise. Otherwise than this. To begin here in the otherwise, as the otherwise, is to pose a question about tears born in dreams. Ever wake with tears in your eyes? Or down your cheek? Those tears serve memorial. Those tears…

Isaiahs at the Diner
Matthew Lattanzi

The police arrived at the diner, bearing news of my husband’s death. I brewed coffee behind the counter while my husband checked his vitals. It turned out he was very much alive. He tried to explain this to the officers,…

Game Space and the Game Body
Wren Hart

1. In most video games you never quite reach the edge of the world. Walls, sure, or places where the trees become impenetrable, where bitmaps strain towards pixellation. But here I am falling. Down down through soft empty space.…

Dark Light
John Reinhart

There is no key, just an infinite number of doors turned inside out, each one creating a black hole full of white noise and closing into empty dreams where doves die forgotten on rotten limbs and their songs are unsung…

Pocket Atlas of Planets
Alex Dally MacFarlane

Alpha Centauri Bc / gases falling In the atmospheric remnants of gases falling, the iiiiy braid space into garments. First seen by the ESPRESSO instrument in 2017 and described by Dr. Suvi Isometsä of Finland and Dr. Scribonia Pulchra of…

Open Spine, Turn Page
Carrie Sessarego

This is the story I tell myself: Once upon a time there was a little girl who went wandering in a wood in the sweetness of springtime. She came to a well and leaned far down to see her reflection,…

Concerning The Curious Burial Customs of the Witches of Megaira
Elizabeth R. McClellan

For A.F.S.B., friend of poets & fairy godparents, wise mother of witch-worlds. On Megaira the witches gave up solstices and equinoxes fifty years after the Displacement. The groves (more shrubs than trees) flower hydroponically, light-years from the moon and…

Lust for Love (5)
Susan Rukeyser
Photography, Words: Susan Rukeyser
Music:”Atlantean Twilight” by Kevin Macleod (incompetech.com)
licensed under creative commons: by attribution 3.0, creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

Artist Susan Rukeyser’s piece “Lust for Love (5)” is a collection of five hybrid photography/spoken word tone poems exploring the tension created by images that imperfectly match the words spoken over them. The piece populates the negative space between the…

On the Government of the Living: A Parable
Matthew Cheney

They had not lived in this place for long, but it felt longer than they had lived there. They had lived in other places like this place, and they had moved on. They often moved on, but they never seemed…

Shadows Into Light
Kythryne Aisling

I made a necklace about you. Counted out beads like words, linked them, glass and stone – the wire will hold. There are stories in it that we haven’t even begun to write. I warned you that loving an artist…

Touch
Debbie Urbanski

This was to be the celebration of a lifetime. That’s what we were told anyway. Even the hynies had come out to watch. They huddled on the corner in their ugly robes, hoods up, though they weren’t supposed to gather…