Augur Magazine Issue 1.1-1.Pdf
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Copyright © 2018 by Kerrie Seljak-Byrne, Alexander De Pompa, Mado Christie, Terese Mason Pierre, and Amy Wang Copyrights to story, poetry, and graphic fiction content remains the property of its respective creator(s). This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the copyright holder except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Published in Canada. Ordering Information: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases on single issues or subscriptions by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at: [email protected] All other orders may be placed at www.augurmag.com/subscribe Augur Magazine www.augurmag.com augur t.o.c. where the city ends 9 Senaa Ahmad juniper’s ashes 19 Helen Tran stay 20 Davian Aw pledge the depth 25 Joseph Dandurand lasciare suonare 27 Andrew Wilmot unwashed, reused 39 Daniel Maluka concussion 40 Dominik Parisien gwen stacy 41 Amy LeBlanc 42 at night i watch wonderful shows Courtney Loberg you can go anywhere 43 Jen Neale lume 52 Grace Teoh the god of small chances 53 L Chan of stories and futures Kerrie Seljak-Byrne Stories for the futures we need. When we launched our kickstarter, this was the tagline we chose. After all, we believe that literatures—stories, storytelling, reading, translations, experiencing, rereading, sharing—affect everything about the futures we can look forward to. We know that every new story is tied up in the political; in futures already being shaped today. Stories are important. And we need to acknowledge the power that they hold over us. We deserve better futures. And we deserve the stories that will give us those futures. That’s why we chose the name “Augur”: with each new story, we perform some small reading of things that could be. Augur is indebted to others, of course, for the life’s blood of this tagline. To theories of futurity in queer theory and disability studies. To decolonial literatures like magical realism, afrofuturism and indigenous futurisms. To the work of the many who have come before us, and who continue to do work today. Who create movements with their intellect, compassion, rightful anger, and/or drive that push us to know better; think better; listen better. Be better. This is why we have our three dominant goals: first, to publish creators from the space currently known as Canada and around the world, highlighting Canadian and Indigenous writers; second, to explicitly bring 5 together speculative fiction and just-barely-realism (what we call “dreamy realism”); and third, to focus on intersectional feminism, promoting marginalized and/or underrepresented voices whenever we can. These are the goals that speak to what we want to see in our stories, our worlds: these are the goals that we will aspire to meet with each issue. We look forward to learning how we can better achieve this with every publication. Augur opened to submissions for the first time about a year ago. We were overwhelmed, at the time, by the response. With little but a new Twitter account and a dream, we received more than 500 reprint options for our Preview Issue. We thought that Augur was a publication that needed to happen. Those numbers proved to us that we were right. So we are also indebted to those who’ve believed in us and supported us, whether you’ve been with us from the start or only heard of us a week ago. Whether as a kickstarter supporter, a social media follower, or a supportive name in our inbox. We had the idea: you are the ones who helped us make it happen. A publication is a community, and we wouldn’t be here without ours. Since April 2017, we’ve received a grand total of 2100 submissions from writers around the world, and have had the opportunity to read more fantastic stories from great creators than we know what to do with. We are honoured to have received this trust. We have enough content that our third issue is already taking shape, and we have been able to pay our creators rates that are competitive with the Canadian literary magazine market. For us, that’s phenomenal. Thank you. We can’t say it enough: thank you. Thank you for joining us in showcasing these stories; digging into these future-telling mechanisms. This issue, our first official issue collecting previously unpublished work, is larger than we expected—just like this magazine project, it blossomed before we knew it. So we’re thrilled to invite you to explore not eight—nor nine!—but twelve pieces, by twelve creators from the space currently known as Canada and around the world. We love them all, and hope you will too. And, once you’re done, let us know what you think. What stories you know our futures—your futures—need. We’re listening. 6 Illustration by Ann Sheng where the city ends Senaa Ahmad Who knows why our grandparents built a city beneath the sea. Maybe they woke up one day with saltwater coming out of their ears and eyes. Or maybe when they stood on the shore they felt the city’s glow like a phantom limb, a bubble of honey at the bottom of the sea, and they shed their human skins in search of something as old as instinct. I imagine them, wind-whipped and water-logged, clutching the rims of their boats. I imagine them diving into the sea in those old-timey diving suits: orbed, otherworldly, the cords of their throats throbbing silently as they try to remember how their primeval cousins used to breathe underwater and swim across hemispheres. Along the slope of a continental shelf, they built the city themselves, an upside-down fishbowl. The entire weight of an ocean seethes above us. Somewhere beneath the pressure the glass ceiling is starting to splinter along faint hairlines, infinite cracks radiating along the top of the sky, and somewhere above the city my dad slips along the slick slope, gumming the 9 seams with a sealant gun. One day we’ll look up and the last thing we’ll see is the sky splitting open and the ocean plunging in to claim us. Hameed says I’m a ghoul. He says, You’re kind of obsessed with experiencing death, don’t you think? And I say, If you’re not obsessed, then what’s even the point of being alive? Usually this is when Ada will go, Jesus, please can we not do this and Hameed turns it into a dumb joke, like, Gertie can’t help it, her parents basically doomed her with a name that sounds like a dead nun’s. And at this point, it’s all I can do not to point out that, if he calls my thing with death an obsession, then what’s his thing with Ada? A one-person cult? Outside in the electric city, the streetlights have dimmed to a hum. It’s one of those dreamy nights. The kind that swallows you forever, so that in every lovely night in the years to come, you’ll find the smudged imprints of this one. My mother is spread on the bed like a starfished angel, gurgling softly to herself in her sleep. My dad’s out late working again. He comes home at one or two in the morning, his boots filmed with granular ocean silt, as if he’s been walking upon the surface of the moon. Underneath the single flickering bulb in the kitchen, he fixes himself a modest dinner of buttered bread and eggs. I wake up almost every night to it, egg whites bubbling in the pan, fragrant toast crisping in the burner. I have another theory about us. It’s that our ancestors never reached the place they were going. That somewhere in the middle of the choppy waters, their boats halved beneath them and the ocean clutched them hard and wouldn’t let go. Dragged down into the deep, their lungs filled with water until they flickered out, one by one, still tangled in each other’s hands. My theory is that they drowned, down to the last person, and that we’re not really here in this place that they built, but dreams of the dead, the ghosts of what could have been. ••• We meet by the fizzed-out marquee of our high school, the words See you next year! slipping from summertime neglect. I squint at the sky, looking for the ocean. In the lamplight, it’s impossible to see, but you can still hear it, thudding in your ears. When I think of the summer I think of every summer, in an endless loop: the four of us stuttering through time, from moon-faced adolescents to Frankenstein’s teenagers, all gangle and no manners, selling cheap candy door-to-door back when parents were still charmed by our lispy entrepreneurial spirit, tinkering with bicycles and clocks because one of us thought she was a mechanic, watching any black-and-white movie we could find, whipping tufts of popcorn at each other as if it could hide our own stupid guilelessness. Only this year snags; only this year skips. This year, we did none of those things, and I don’t know how it happened—if it was some petty fight Ada and I had, or something Noam did, or if we had 10 just finally filled up on each other, the way everyone does. It was like we all took a vow of silence and forgot to tell each other.