Not One of Us issue 84
Sep. 18th, 2025 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asakiyumeI have a flash story in the current issue of Not One of Us, and what a great issue to be in! I'm sharing the table of contents with Patricia Russo, Sonya Taaffe, and Jeannelle Ferreira--all writers I've loved for a long time--along with Devan Barlow, whose work I've only gotten to know recently, but I enjoy, and others whose work is totally new to me but whose literary acquaintance I'm pleased to make, like Zary Fekete.
Let me share a little (and then a lot!) about my own story first, and then some about the other contributions. Mine is called "The Moon in His Eyes," about a young woman who marries a water buffalo, only to fall in love with the moon on her wedding night. Curious about what happens? Well, you can buy a copy of Not One of Us here.
... or, if you don't mind being read to... I read it aloud here. It's literally just me sitting in my study reading into my desktop computer's camera and microphone all in a single take because I know nothing of video editing and am much too lazy, at present, to learn.
And now let me say a few words about the rest of the zine.
The first piece is "Come Each Bird That Seeks Its Nest," by Jeannelle Ferreira, who specializes in gorgeous historical fiction with crossdressing, queer characters and magic threaded through. This story features old friends, a liminal infant, and some fine spellcraft. I love the descriptions of the baby:
Next is Sonya Taaffe's poem "The Burnt Layer," a defiant piece. It's too short for me to quote from, but I can advise: carry the sky and the sea with you and know where you'll be when the storm finds you.
Then comes Zary Fekete's "Bridge," a marvelous slice-of-life story from the perspective of a worker on a fabulous bridge, built 30,000 feet in the air, to connect landlocked Hungary to a newly formed guano island in the Adriatic ("staffed by two zoologists and a rotating poet-in-residence") that Hungary has claimed. From way up at working level, the island is barely visible ("Just a faint smudge on the horizon, like someone had tried to erase a stain and given up halfway.")
The story's about working on this high and lonely site, about keeping in touch with loved ones, and about a nest in an inopportune place ("Inside the nest, three eggs. Pale and unbothered.")
Then there's the poem "The Intrepid Botanist Insults the Wrong Plant," by Gretchen Tessmer, about a plant witheringly deemed "ordinary." ("How common, how prosaic, how very basic.") Uhhhhh, WRONG!
Then my story ;-)
Then the poem "Star-Clad and Howling," by Beth Cato and Rhonda Parrish, about withdrawing and letting your fur and horns show and your howl sound ... and then finding companionship, with ... well, technically a unicorn, but ....
I felt kind of betrayed by the ending of the next story, "Benny Was a Binman," by Aaron Long, but I have a sense that the author might say that was part of the point. There's lots of acrobatic language, an energy about it, and the main characters (Benny, who sleeps in doorways, and Lydia, who generally gives him two quid once a week) are engaging.
The poem "Vestments," by Susan Shea, is written from the perspective of a cleric trying to bite his tongue to avoid being blunt with his congregants, and contains this great line: "I resist sincerity / knowing my purse of honesty / will be begging me to empty it."
Then comes the last story in the issue, Patricia Russo's "Blue and Black." I always love Patricia Russo's stuff. In a desolate landscape, two travelers ease the passing of a third from life to death. They have virtually no way to help him and yet they manage it, with care and labor. I'm keeping them as role models.
The last poem, Devan Barlow's "The Endlessness of Oracles," echoes some of the actions of Russo's story (liquid slipping down a throat), and the ending is beautiful:
So yeah! Get your hands on a copy of the zine here, and listen to me read "The Moon in His Eyes" here. ;-)
Let me share a little (and then a lot!) about my own story first, and then some about the other contributions. Mine is called "The Moon in His Eyes," about a young woman who marries a water buffalo, only to fall in love with the moon on her wedding night. Curious about what happens? Well, you can buy a copy of Not One of Us here.
... or, if you don't mind being read to... I read it aloud here. It's literally just me sitting in my study reading into my desktop computer's camera and microphone all in a single take because I know nothing of video editing and am much too lazy, at present, to learn.
And now let me say a few words about the rest of the zine.
The first piece is "Come Each Bird That Seeks Its Nest," by Jeannelle Ferreira, who specializes in gorgeous historical fiction with crossdressing, queer characters and magic threaded through. This story features old friends, a liminal infant, and some fine spellcraft. I love the descriptions of the baby:
The baby was on the floor, in his soaker and a layer of crushed blueberries, playing with a stem of grass. There was cornbread in his knee-creases and his hair ... when Pen set him in the middle of the kitchen table.
Next is Sonya Taaffe's poem "The Burnt Layer," a defiant piece. It's too short for me to quote from, but I can advise: carry the sky and the sea with you and know where you'll be when the storm finds you.
Then comes Zary Fekete's "Bridge," a marvelous slice-of-life story from the perspective of a worker on a fabulous bridge, built 30,000 feet in the air, to connect landlocked Hungary to a newly formed guano island in the Adriatic ("staffed by two zoologists and a rotating poet-in-residence") that Hungary has claimed. From way up at working level, the island is barely visible ("Just a faint smudge on the horizon, like someone had tried to erase a stain and given up halfway.")
The story's about working on this high and lonely site, about keeping in touch with loved ones, and about a nest in an inopportune place ("Inside the nest, three eggs. Pale and unbothered.")
Then there's the poem "The Intrepid Botanist Insults the Wrong Plant," by Gretchen Tessmer, about a plant witheringly deemed "ordinary." ("How common, how prosaic, how very basic.") Uhhhhh, WRONG!
Then my story ;-)
Then the poem "Star-Clad and Howling," by Beth Cato and Rhonda Parrish, about withdrawing and letting your fur and horns show and your howl sound ... and then finding companionship, with ... well, technically a unicorn, but ....
I felt kind of betrayed by the ending of the next story, "Benny Was a Binman," by Aaron Long, but I have a sense that the author might say that was part of the point. There's lots of acrobatic language, an energy about it, and the main characters (Benny, who sleeps in doorways, and Lydia, who generally gives him two quid once a week) are engaging.
The poem "Vestments," by Susan Shea, is written from the perspective of a cleric trying to bite his tongue to avoid being blunt with his congregants, and contains this great line: "I resist sincerity / knowing my purse of honesty / will be begging me to empty it."
Then comes the last story in the issue, Patricia Russo's "Blue and Black." I always love Patricia Russo's stuff. In a desolate landscape, two travelers ease the passing of a third from life to death. They have virtually no way to help him and yet they manage it, with care and labor. I'm keeping them as role models.
The last poem, Devan Barlow's "The Endlessness of Oracles," echoes some of the actions of Russo's story (liquid slipping down a throat), and the ending is beautiful:
until
one day I've swallowed
enough truth
supposedly the water
will take me back
So yeah! Get your hands on a copy of the zine here, and listen to me read "The Moon in His Eyes" here. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2025-09-19 02:29 am (UTC)I watched and listened to your flash fiction, and it read like an adult version of a Little Bear story, the ones by Else Holmelund Minarik, told by the narrator of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles when she's telling the introduction stories for each dungeon, which can be found here. I think you might like the little tales she tells, they are like my favorite thing about the game.
As for the contents of the story, I'm not sure what it means, but I'm unconvinced that the heroine loved the moon in his eyes all along, as, if I remember correctly, she first notices the moon in the sky, not in the water buffalo's eyes, and she also seems to come to the realization after a series of regret-tinged revelations. I think perhaps she loved the water buffalo the whole time, but also the moon, perhaps the moon a little bit more, and but then settled on her lesser love, the water buffalo, after realizing that the moon was unobtainable. There's something about the grass being greener here, too, I think, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I do know, however, that limerence is, and always will be, incredible and unexplainable and foolish in perhaps the best way possible.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-19 02:45 am (UTC)As for what the story means, I don't know that I had in mind any particular set of things, but I like what you made of it! I definitely feel like there's lots of ways to feel love, and the times when I've most powerfully felt "in love" have been when the object of my affections was out of reach in one way or another. Amazingly intense feeling. But I also really value the kind of love that comes from shared affection and delight in the other person arising from spending time with them. And those are just two ways of loving people; there are so many others.
Thanks so much for listening! And thanks for linking me to the Crystal Chronicles stories--I'm going to go listen to more of them now.
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Date: 2025-09-19 06:38 am (UTC)I really like you reading your own work.
I am so looking forward to this issue when I am somewhere I can get hold of it.
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Date: 2025-09-19 11:25 am (UTC)(Philippe Petit icon for the story "Bridge")
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