Under the exquisite cover Frost and Snow by Melissa Mary Duncan …

Our featured author, the esteemed Evelyn Lau, offers three poems riddled with grief and stolen moments. Spencer Stevens takes a break from the front lines in the final Seven Swans instalment, ‘The Mystery of the Forgotten Soldier’, by Mel Anastasiou. Echo wanes as Narcissus waxes in Joelle Kidd’s modern retelling, ‘Echo/Narcissus’; while a Pythia of Apollo unweaves 25 years’ worth of lies in ‘The Golden Feather’ by Jenny Blackford. Space isn’t exactly lawless, but everyone bends the rules in Margot Spronk’s ‘Rules of Salvage’; and on the other end of the SF spectrum, Graham Darling’s ‘A Pleasant Walk, A Pleasant Talk’ neatly turns a Lewis Carroll poem on its head. A seemingly useless power feeds a young woman’s resentment in Emily Lonie’s ‘A Seed in Every Womb’, and Michael Bracken’s ‘The Fishmonger’s Wife’ explores the dangers of dry land for mermen. Search for the perfect stone in ‘Stonecold’ from Leslie Wibberly, the 2018 Creative Ink Festival’s flash fiction contest winner. Explore new mythologies in Nicholas Christian’s ‘The Angler’, winner of the 2018 Hummingbird Prize for Flash Fiction; and the runner-up by Robert Runté, ‘Day Three’, examines the little things we miss the most. Allaigna falls in with a new crowd in the latest installment of Aria by JM Landels, and a carnival fortune-teller shares valuable tricks of the trade in ‘Madame Sylvie’s Three Rules for How to Speak for the Dead’ by Susan Pieters. And finally, find out what very old aristocrats do when they let get unlaced in Kris Sayer’s sequential short ‘Under Pale Flesh’

Evelyn Lau

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