Issue 5.4 | Summer 2018

In this issue you can read the winning entries of our 2018 contest as well as our finalists. Our first place winner, as selected by our judge Anne Valente, is “Kingfisher Bridge” by Niamh MacCabe. Valente describes the winning story as follows: “Narrated in gorgeously lush, precise prose of the natural world, ‘Kingfisher Bridge’ centers on a boy gone missing, the chaos of which is organized throughout the story by the Gaelic Alphabet Through Trees—one of the boy’s favorite charts. This piece pulls the reader in immediately, and is expertly and beautifully drawn.”

Review: Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

In Leni Zumas’ novel “Red Clocks,” Congress has just passed the Personhood Amendment, outlawing In Vitro Fertilization and abortion in an America eerily like our own. The novel weaves together the lives of… Continue reading →

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Spring Reprints: Week 3 pt. 2

The security camera at Morrison’s Party Rentals is lonely. Its job is to document its own solitude. Or its job is to enforce its own solitude, and the record of this job becomes… Continue reading →

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Spring Reprints: Week 3

The cacti are letting go. Nobody is quite sure why, or if there’s anything we can do about it. The news websites say it’s the whole cactus family. Their root systems are disintegrating.… Continue reading →

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Spring Reprints: Week 2 Pt. 2

June in Ventura is a gloomy month. The fog creeps in from the ocean and stretches its fingers inland, settling in the creases of the hills, the spaces between office buildings, the narrow… Continue reading →

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Spring Reprint: Week 2 Pt. 1

Where the river meets rock and dirt, bone and blood and fire, you will find the abyss. You might sense a creeping monstrosity that inches in the spectrum of light outside of human… Continue reading →

Spring Reprint: Week 1 Pt. 2

It is just past sunset when we breach, Husband and I. But breaching only delivers us from the dirt; it takes more light than the yellowed haze of dusk to pull ourselves fully… Continue reading →

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Spring Reprints: Week 1 Pt. 1

The first story of our 2018 digital reprints is “The Potato” by Rachel Luria.

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2018 Contest Results

Below you’ll find our 2018 Psychopomp Magazine Short Fiction Award winners and runners up, along with brief notes from our judge, Anne Valente, about the first, second, and third place stories. We look… Continue reading →

Review: Ventriloquisms by Jaclyn Watterson

Understanding the Abstracted: A Look into Jaclyn Watterson’s “Ventriloquisms” “By the time he’s dead, delicacy, like high-heeled shoes, is a vector, and–no surprise–ventriloquism is no longer a form of self-expression. Stick a feather,… Continue reading →