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Under an authoritarian regime, artists are blinded and women’s faces are surgically altered into bone-flowers. Aliens arrive on earth and become obsessed with poignant, tragic humans—the only species in the universe that dies. A Hindu watches his own cremation. A man seeks answers from his estranged family after he finds himself dying and resurrecting, over and over. A bereaved parent gives tips for opening a childcare center for the unliving. A scientist falls in love with the ebola virus he’s studying … and more!
From realistic to fantastic, from dark to whimsical, these twelve, genre-defying short stories explore what might lie beyond the death of a culture, a parent, a child, or the self—and what might happen if death itself were thwarted.
Original stories by Vajra Chandrasekera, Dennis Danvers, Maria Haskins, Pedro Iniguez, Benjamin C. Jenkins, Marc Lecard, Tonya Liburd, B.T. Lowry, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Dimitra Nikolaidou, Steven C. Schlozman, and Robert E. Stutts, with a foreword by the editor.
See the Elephant Magazine is a semi-pro e-zine, launched in 2015. It publishes stories that emerge from the spaces between genre and literary fiction, between the personal and political, between consensus reality and the metaphysical, mythic, and visionary. We actively seek work by women, people of color, indigenous, LGBTQ, and international writers.