fiction
Therapeutic Phlebotomy by Olivia Madeline Abigail
Haruspex by Pearl-Hill Freedland
Dear Reader,
A dehiscence is the separation of a wound or stitches at the edges. A coming undone of what was supposedly already healed.
The word appears twice in this issue, in two separate stories by two different authors. Olivia Madeline Abigail reminds us, in both her story “Therapeutic Phlebotomy” about a trans woman’s surreal recovery from bottom surgery, and in her interview, “Scar tissue doesn’t bleed,” that to bleed is to to heal. Meanwhile, in “Haruspex,” Pearl-Hill Freedland’s narrator goes searching for answers in the inert bodies of mail-ordered lab specimens.
Don’t mistake me: I don’t wish for blood to become a metaphor. Not when so much of it is being spilled thoughtlessly across the globe. Not when we are continually forced to watch genocides of Palestinians, Sudanese, Congolese, in our names, in our silences. Not when the blood is so quickly forgotten, like in genocides past, or never even acknowledged. Smoke and mold will not look away, will not obscure.
In his poem “when walking alone in the nature preserve you have to say hello,” hanta t. samsa’s speaker asks “Aren’t you so tired? […] Tired of beautiful days?” And I am, I am. Would that the beautiful day could reveal a dehiscence, could come apart at east and west and spill forth some of what the horizon hides. Would we still save night for healing, then, for quiet? When will beautiful days reveal their wounds?
We’re here now on our new digital home. We’re still filling out our archive. We won’t publish an issue this coming fall, but we will begin publishing an ongoing series of interviews, the first of which is with Olivia Madeline Abigail, who urges us to remember that we are bodies in space. Is that overly simplistic? It doesn’t feel like it these days.
Thank you for following us to this new space. Thank you for continuing on.
– Cal Angus, publisher of smoke and mold