If I had to hold one memory, it would be this: me and my friend, on the roof of the school, on our backs, staring out. The sky, so dark and infinite and full of wispy smoke, like tendrils of oil on water, like you’re drowning in the best way. And if you turn it around in your head – that you’re not on your back and looking at the sky, but rather, jutting out into the infinite darkness of space – it’s beautiful, really. It feels like you’re about to fall right off. Perfect vertigo.

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I used to be terrified of the dark. But now I find it alluring, comforting, somehow, or perhaps comforting because. Comforting in the same way scary stories on the computer were comforting, real but not real; Schrondinger’s terror. The darkness is a place of secrets, of midnight laughs, where I feel the most alive, where words tumble from my fingers like water from a fountain, like the ocean into a leaking submarine.

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In this issue, you’ll find murmurings about love, about monsters, about the afterglow. Or perhaps that’s the murmuring of the river. Or perhaps that’s the silent scream, about the formless-incomprehensible horrors under our feet and above our heads. Here you’ll find creatures – under rocks, inside forests, right behind you. Here you’ll find queer joy and the myth of meritocracy. And butterflies, and death, and eyes. Here you’ll find a pounding. Against the door? Or perhaps that’s just the music. And in the cracks, behind it all, you’ll find--

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the darkness. Soft and velvet and weighted. We invite you to step into it. Bathe in it. Wrap it around you like the ocean swallowing you whole. Breathe in. Breathe out. Listen. We hope you like what you find.