Editorial: Becoming “We”

Cover art for Reckoning X by Mónica Robles Corzo, featuring a fish, a human, a snake, some mushrooms, and the tail of a fox in a semicircle surrounded by curlicues representing communication, with a big black X in the middle, against a white background.Reckoning X

[An Exquisite Corpse]

 

Humans use words. Mushrooms use mycelia. Who’s to say which is better? This is why we have infused each copy with spores.

If you’re reading this, the psychedelics have already entered your bloodstream. Get ready.

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[An Exquisite Corpse1]

 

Humans use words. Mushrooms use mycelia. Who’s to say which is better? This is why we have infused each copy with spores.

If you’re reading this, the psychedelics have already entered your bloodstream. Get ready.

The language of our nervous system, the solar system, any system. We don’t hear it? Can you hear the earth burning? The shrieks of languages travailing across species like migrants from another destroyed solar system. The voices of the non-human neighbours pleading to billion deaf ears. Betrayed by alphabets, the language killed by a deficit in the bank of vocabulary. Do you speak/understand the language of the planet?

And if you’re not fluent in Disregulated Polysystem, if sometimes these days it seems impossible to believe reason, attention, goodwill, a ‘decent ear’ should be enough to turn so much noise to signal, well then: what’s the strangest living thing you can love and listen to? Stranded between ice and melt, with January sheeted over sidewalks and March shaking the treetops, maybe you think of lichens, moss; if moss, then tardigrades; if tardigrades, then irritated bears who also suffer from unsettled weather. If bears? then skunk cabbage, which heats itself inside a fruitful mire. Red-hulled stinking food. Saying in its own way, come here—come soon.

Listening gathers silence and casts light into the countless corners of an ever-connecting web. We coalesce at the intersections like dew drops, each our own glimmer until we all become a single shine. Until we are all water and sunlight and rainbow refractions, myriad reflections we only sometimes believe.

Below us, we know, is a darkness we cannot fathom, a hollow our refractions cannot touch. But it’s always been there.

The rain ends and the worms squirm forth, singing. Like orpiment wine, the sun spills across the field; the tender brush unfurl to tap into the light, decussate leaves bobbing up eastward. This is the force of change. No one gets what they want—except us, and we want a happy ending.

So go, sip at the new sun. Listen for what you’ve always missed. Thousands of years ago, human hands traced ochred animals along Chauvet’s stone, painting the slope of a snout, the hunch of shoulders. Let your fingertips sink into warm clay, and know that it is not too late to begin again.

1. Exquisite Corpse is a storytelling game, invented by French Surrealists in the 1920s, wherein each participant adds a single line after having seen only the previous line. The title refers to a line from one of the game’s first incarnations: “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.” (“The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.”)

Photo of C.G. Aubrey, a smiling, white, female-presenting person in brown glasses and a scarf patterned with bright orange maple leaves.

Author: C. G. Aubrey

Managing Editor, Fiction Co-Editor, CNF Co-Editor

C.G. Aubrey is a queer, AuDHD writer and outdoor enthusiast obsessed with yellow leaves, swamp rainbows, and em dashes. She holds dual-masters degrees in US History and Religious Studies and often finds inspiration at the intersection of cultural memory, religion, and the environment. Her story “A Predatory Transience” appeared in Reckoning in 2023; she’s been editing here ever since. Find her occasionally on Bluesky @cgaubrey.bsky.social, Instagram @c.g.aubrey, and www.cgaubrey.com.

A closeup of some Spring Beauties blooming: small, star-shaped pink and white flowers with brown stems.

Author: Priya Chand

Art Director, CNF Co-Editor

Priya Chand is a California transplant living in the Midwest, where she volunteers as a forest steward. Her work is inspired by a background in biology, and has appeared in magazines including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Clarkesworld.

A brown oak leaf floating in a black glacial inkpot carved out of granite.

Author: Michael J. DeLuca

Publisher

Michael J. DeLuca’s short fiction has been appearing since 2005 in markets such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Mythic Delirium and Apex. His novella Night Roll was a finalist for the Crawford Award in 2020, and his debut novel The Jaguar Mask came out from Stelliform Press in August, 2024. He lives in the rapidly suburbifying post-industrial woodlands north of Detroit with wife, kid, cats, plants and microbes. For more, try his website: The Mossy Skull.

Closeup photo of a female-presenting person in brown glasses with only their face and a few strands of dark hair visible.

Author: Ruth Joffre

Novellas Editor

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Pleiades, khōréō, The Florida Review Online, Wigleaf, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest.

Author: Hope Joseph

Hope Joseph is an essayist and poet. He writes from Nigeria, West Africa. His works are forthcoming or already published in Poetry Ireland, Notre Dame, CSM, Augur, Stormbird, A long house, Mukoli, SolarPunk, Riddlebird, Reckoning, The Sunlight Press, and more. A multiple times Best of the Net & Pushcart Prize nominee. A joint winner for SEVHAGE/Agema Founder’s Prize for Creative Non-Fiction (2023).

Author: Andrew Kozma

Andrew Kozma’s fiction appears in Apex, ergot., and Analog, while his poems appear in Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, and Contemporary Verse 2. His first book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press. You can find him on Bluesky at @thedrellum.bsky.social and visit his website at www.andrewkozma.net.

 

Portrait by Wolf William Say.

Photo of a red trillium flower growing in front of a moss-covered log.

Author: Ellis Nye

Submissions Coordinator, Fiction Co-Editor

Ellis Nye (any pronouns) is a scientist, fiber artist, and writer. Ze lives in New England, and wrote this short story on a laptop that the tech support people wanted to throw away because it was “too hard to fix”.

Photo of Offor Chidera, a young Black man with neat moustache and beard.

Author: Offor Chidera

Offor Chidera (t[he]y) is a Nigerian Poet residing in Coal City. They have been published in The Spectacle, So To Speak (print), Reckoning, Ouch! Collective and elsewhere. Find them on Bluesky: chideraoffor.bsky.social.

A white, female-presenting person with straight, copper-red hair in a dark blue sleeveless top stands against a hedge.

Author: Catherine Rockwood

Catherine Rockwood (she/they) lives in Massachusetts with her family. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in HAD, Stone Circle Review, Moist Poetry Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. Catherine’s poetry chapbooks, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion, and And We Are Far From Shore: Poems For Our Flag Means Death, are available from the Ethel Zine Press.   

Author: Bernie Jean Schiebeling

Bernie Jean Schiebeling (she/they) is calling on you to join the struggle for liberation and peace alongside Palestinian, Jewish, Native American, and oppressed peoples everywhere. Set aside the catharsis of short-term activism and binary thinking: embrace community, embrace longevity, embrace the possibility of change. Work together, form coalitions based in trust and respect. Rest together, and help the garden grow more than salt.

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