issue 1 - spring / summer 2016

After the overwhelming response to our first call for submissions, Kelly and I could have filled six issues of Liminal.  But while we made our final cuts and decisions, we found ourselves in immediate agreement on nearly every choice.  These six stories balance each other, and they speak to what we wanted to showcase in our first issue.  There's humor and grace and sadness and unease.  There's also honesty—a sense that the world is just like this, if you find the right angle from which to look.

Our first story, A.C. Wise's The Men from Narrow Houses, questions identity and independence in a lush backdrop of foxes, magicians and attempts at ordinary life.  It's also available in audio from PodCastle. In David Tallerman's Team Invasion, an agent begins to question the purpose of the endless conflict with invaders who never stop coming; in Trevor Shikaze's A Windowless Kitchen, a girl traveling alone, pursued by her sister, finds a strange companion when she stops to rest.  Joseph Allen Hill's You Can't See It 'til It's Finished takes a sharply funny look at art, pretension and the way relationships change as people grow up.  In Nazifa Islam's The Clock Misread, a woman does not quite predict the time of her own death.  And finally, Octavia Cade's The Signal Birds looks at a group of women who have found a very particular way to serve their country during wartime.

We hope you enjoy reading the first issue of Liminal Stories, and we look forward to bringing you many more.

Shannon Peavey and Kelly Sandoval, Editors