Description

Peek beneath the fascinating and ominous cover by Zoran Pekovic to discover a wealth of stories inside Issue 13:

• Matthew Hughes brings masterful storytelling to two great tales as a twentieth-century statesman weighs the value of fate in ‘The Devil You Don’t’ and a hapless investigator sees more than he imagines — and less than he should — in ‘Fishface and the Leg’.
• A hitchhiker and a band of aliens cut loose on a road trip from hell in FJ Bergmann’s ‘How to Lose a Week’, while an organ courier faces down a heart with designs of its own in Rebecca Wurtz’s prizewinning tale, ‘Xuefei and His Heart’.
• ‘Piano Music’ by Susan Pieters uncovers a busy family’s true heart; another family balances disappointment with beauty on a shoestring in Jenna Park’s coming-of-age tale ‘Painted Nails’; and it’s hard for kids to keep merry when there’s a Santa-shaped monster behind the walls in Anna Belkine’s ‘Better Watch Out’.
• Discover death, darkness, light, and love in poetry by Susie Taylor, Daniel Aristi, Jude Neale, and Elizabeth Armerding.
• Anat Rabkin’s beautifully drawn ‘It Rained Then Too’ tells the story of a relationship broken by agony and transformed by revelation.
• A young woman faces dark magic and a cursed choice in Carolyn Oliver’s ‘The Green Thread and the Blue’, while a mermaid smuggler struggles with his career choices in Eric Del Carlo’s ‘Mermail’.
• In The Case of the Cavalier’s Rapier, Book 3 of Mel Anastasiou’s Seven Swans Mysteries in Time, Spencer Stevens gets a second chance at happiness during the English Civil War
• And finally, swordswoman Allaigna returns to our pages with gripping adventures rich in enchantment, political intrigue, and the secrets of a royal family in part one of the new serialized novel by JM Landels, Allaigna’s Song:  Aria.