TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 63, January 2021 FROM THE EDITORS Editorial, January 2021 Arley Sorg and Christie Yant FICTION Things to Bring, Things to Burn, Things Best Left Behind C.E. McGill Incense Megan Chee 10 Steps to a Whole New You Tonya Liburd The Billionaire Shapeshifters’ Ex-Wives Club Marissa Lingen POETRY Butterfly-Hummingbird Magaly Garcia like the gator loves the snake Maria Zoccola NONFICTION Interview: N.K. Jemisin Arley Sorg AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS C.E. McGill Tonya Liburd MISCELLANY Coming Attractions, February 2021 Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard Subscriptions and Ebooks Stay Connected About the Fantasy Team © 2020 Fantasy Magazine Cover by warmtail/Adobe Stock Image https://www.fantasy-magazine.com Published by Adamant Press. Editorial, January 2021 Arley Sorg and Christie Yant | 600 words Fantasy Magazine #62 has been very well-received—many thanks to all of our readers, old and new. Now we bring you issue #63 co-edited by Christie Yant & Arley Sorg. Hope you like it! • • • • CY: We did it! We survived 2020, and managed to get our first two issues out. We dove into this project together back in July and have been sort of feeling our way since. We’re still revising our workflow, trying new approaches to making our purchasing decisions—with such a wealth of great stories, those decisions are hard!—and of course working on getting caught up on slush reading. AS: You’ve been doing this kind of work for much longer; I’ve been . adjacent for a while, but this is a new role for me. With each issue we put together, I learn more, see more. I’m discovering who I am as an editor, and we are discovering who we are as an editorial team. I am loving it! As we break into 2021 I’m excited by the prospect of a new year, for what it means personally, as well as what it means for our adventure here. With the first issue (#61), we had the sheer newness, and everything was basically a wonderful experiment. The second issue (#62) we faced so many challenges behind the scenes: growing pains; but still featured absolutely lovely content. This issue, I feel like we are starting to hit our stride. I’m so proud of what we’ve done, and I am eager to see what hitting our stride means for us. CY: We’re both still learning! But I’m confident that we’re hitting our stride as we enter the new year. One of the behind-the-scenes challenges we’ve had is poetry. We were both committed to including poetry from the start. It never occurred to us that it would be so challenging to format! Of course we’re having to work with multiple platforms, including our highly customized WordPress, ebooks, and ultimately Kindle. It’s been a steep learning curve and I’m not sure we’ve landed on the ultimate solution yet. In issue #61 the problem was new and the best solution we could come up with at that moment was to post the poems as images. Since then we’ve had more back-end work done and—fingers crossed—we hope we won’t have to do that again. One thing I know we agree on: We don’t want to pass on a piece that we both love just because of tricky formatting. AS: For 2021, I am looking forward to reading more submissions from an amazing range of voices and perspectives. We’ve poured so much energy, time, and love into this magazine. Each issue is different from the last, and yet each carries our creative vision as editors. We send each issue out into the world, carried by our passion for genre and our hopes. However people transition into 2021, whether boisterous or quietly or anywhere between, my hope is that folks who read this issue find it the perfect way to start the New Year! • • • • In this issue we have original fiction from Tonya Liburd (“10 Steps to a Whole New You”) and C.E. McGill (“Things to Bring, Things to Burn, Things Best Left Behind”), along with flash fiction from Marissa Lingen (“The Billionaire Shapeshifter Ex-Wives Club”) and Megan Chee (“Incense”). We also have poetry by Magaly Garcia (“Butterfly-Hummingbird”) and Maria Zoccola (“like the gator loves the snake”). And finally, Arley interviews author N.K. Jemisin. Thanks for reading! ABOUT THE AUTHORS Arley Sorg is a senior editor at Locus Magazine, where he’s been on staff since 2014. He joined the Lightspeed family in 2014 to work on the Queers Destroy Science Fiction! special issue, starting as a slush reader. He eventually worked his way up to associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He also reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate. Christie Yant writes and edits science fiction and fantasy on the central coast of California, where she lives with a dancer, an editor, a dog, and four cats. She worked as an assistant editor for Lightspeed Magazine from its launch in 2010 through 2015, and, in 2014 she edited the Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue of Lightspeed, which won the British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. In 2019 she co-edited (with Hugh Howey and Gary Whitta) Resist: Tales From a Future Worth Fighting Against, an anthology benefitting the ACLU, and co-edited The Dystopia Triptych series of anthologies (with Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams). She is also a consulting editor for Tor.com’s line of novellas, and her own fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton), Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, and Wired.com, and has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow). Things to Bring, Things to Burn, Things Best Left Behind C.E. McGill | 3097 words Oz is holding a knife to his wrist when they knock on the door. For a moment he hesitates, weighing his options. His eyes dart between the door and the knife—eeny, meeny, meiny, mo—and land on the door. “Might as well,” he mutters, and gets to his feet. The dull sound of the knife as he sets it aside on the kitchen table seems to fill the room. It’s a terrible thing, he muses, how loud a house is when there’s no one else in it. “I’m sorry,” the augur says the moment the door swings open. No preamble, nothing. She really does look sorry, at least. So do the three councilmen standing behind her. “But… your name came up in the hearth.” Oz wonders dimly which name it was. “That’s fine,” Oz says, and it is. It doesn’t matter, really. It might even be better this way. “Just give me a few minutes to get my things together.” Their brows furrow. Clearly, judging by the number of people they brought to drag him out of his house, they weren’t expecting him to come as easily as this. Oz knows exactly what they’re thinking—what’s wrong with him? Is he up to something? He’s become fluent in dirty glances and sidelong looks over the years. “What things?” asks one of the councilmen. “My things,” Oz says, and shuts the door again. To his surprise, they don’t force it open. Even they wouldn’t deny a dead man his last request, it seems. • • • • They escort him out to the edge of town, where the fields turn to marshland and scrub. One of the councilmen points out the mountain, as if it’s not at least twice as tall as any of the other peaks in the range. As if Oz hasn’t spent his whole life staring at the damn thing. As if it’s not a mountain. “Just there, halfway up the slope,” the man says. “Go all the way in.” They will not watch the mountain take him—for who likes to be watched while they eat? —but they do not need to. The string will make well enough sure he goes in. One end is tied to a post, the other is around his finger in a neat little bow. The knot will not come loose until the deed is done; it’s charmed that way, a holy relic, drawn from the same fire that spits out the names. Tomorrow morning, they will fish it from the cave and roll it back up, ready for the next unfortunate soul. After the augur and the councilmen leave, Oz looks at the string and looks at the mountain —and he laughs. He laughs. Because of course it would be him, of course it would be today, the day he’d already decided would be his last. It’s poetic, really. He starts to walk. • • • • Not many go in for blood sacrifices nowadays. Off to the South, they’re considered old- fashioned and superstitious. Really? the young women will say as they lean over their neighbors’ market stalls, one eyebrow raised. Still? We stopped sending ours ages ago. In the North, meanwhile, they’re redundant. The people do a good enough job killing each other on their own.