Issue #42 of Shimmer contains the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Promise. The Triumphant Ward of the Railroad and the Sea by Sara Saab Almost everyone I entertain over a frosted fifth of vodka—bottle balanced precariously on a foldout tray, half my attention on keeping it upright—wants to know how I became a competitive eater. Also, how I found myself living on the Dbovotav Coastal Express. They Have a Name For That by Sara Beitia Mother insists everyone always said what an attractive quartet the family was, and there’s a stair wall lined with years of family portraits to bear this out. And now Cal and her groom will have children of their own, probably immediately, and they’ll be beautiful, of course, because Calliope won’t have it otherwise, and somehow that’ll settle it, because her life is a fairytale, so she can’t conceive otherwise. It’s not her fault. The Imitation Sea by Lora Gray You find the dead Angel at five a.m. in the slurry of broken bottles and rotting fish on the Lake Erie shore. It almost looks human in the morning light, a ten-year-old, maybe eleven, boyish, face bloated, limp and blue and doughy. If a bear… by Kathrin Köhler You know in the same way that anyone who lives in an isolated village in a deep-shadowed wood knows anything: it’s been repeated so often you’ve choked on it since you were a child. One day a bear will show up at your doorstep.
Authors
Lora Gray is a writer and artist from Northeast Ohio. Their fiction and poetry can be found in Shimmer, Strange Horizons, and The Dark, among other places. Lora is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a graduate of Clarion West, a recipient of the Ohio Arts Council's Individual Excellence Award for Fiction Writing, and a Rhysling Award nominated poet. As an illustrator, Lora has provided cover and interior art for various novels, anthologies, and comic books and has been a featured instructor for the Cleveland Museum of Art's MIX series. Lora also works as dance instructor and occasionally moonlights as a musician. In their free time, Lora can be found wrangling a very smart cat named Cecil.
