II.

​

"That's what he said once!" The woman laughs, her voice pealing like a set of bells in the empty house. The boy feels her deflate when the laughter wanes.

​

"We  were  just..."  She  trails  off  and  shakes  her  head.  "I can't remember what we were doing. But I can still feel his voice, and the gentle way it jolted my brain, and a sense that we both knew there was nowhere else we should be."

The   boy   sits   up   and   wipes   bits   of   ceiling   off   his shoulders. "What paintings did he take?"

"Only the ones that were his." She shrugs. "He didn't say anything when he walked out that door, just stopped a few times to re-wrap his hands around the canvasses when they slid down his arms. I stood around for hours after he left, looking at the ruins: an antique fire extinguisher we found in   my   parents'   old   house;   rusted climbing equipment; a giant stereo that I can't remember buying."

The boy and the woman watch the living room collapse.

"And he just walked out," she says, "and left me with all these strange things, the debris of that life. All I wanted to ask was, 'Should I pack it - or throw it away?'"

SHARON

MERTINS

was born during the disco years underneath the deep Guatemalan sky. She’s a fiction writer based in Berlin. Her work has been published in Leopardskin and Limes, Literally Stories, The Wild Word, Jersey Devil Press, Cafe Irreal, and Visual Verse. Her writing has likewise received an Honorable Mention for Glimmer Train's  Short Story Award for New Writers. She is currently engaged as a co-host and producer of the monthly literary fiction podcast Story Strumpets.

TOP OF THE CROWN (LETTER TO M)

​

​

Dear M,

​

(I think we traveled through time and space on Friday. I think you reversed my age, I was younger than you are now. It was hot outside, and I felt tender like a tent with nothing inside. You turned my insides that weren’t there. You pushed so hard that, out of the nothingness, you suddenly created something. And I’ll be alright.
I longed to grab your hands, to pull them off your body, to keep them forever. When you went backwards with me, the sound tuned out, as if all the birds and people in the gardens outside turned mute. I didn’t look, but I know you checked my breathing. I skipped some of my own breaths to hear yours. But you were almost as mute as everyone else.
Picture me now, lying on the big couch, no longer naked, but aged. I’m writing to ask if I can come back, if you’ll tend to my wounds and tell me nothing.
Tell me nothing. Touch it, push it.
Down and back —
Make it hurt less.)

​

What do you spend your money on?

ALINE

SCHWIBBE

studied Psychology at the University of Cologne; Painting with Ute Pleuger at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle (Saale); and Fine Art at both the Prague  Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design and the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Since 2019 she is Meisterschülerin of Prof. Pia Linz at Weißensee Academy of Art, Berlin. Her work has been exhibited with the Kunstverein Hamm, White Pearl Gallery, and CCA Hubbell Street Galleries.

is a performance artist, writer, and translator born in Lisbon and based in Berlin. They studied Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. In their works, they seek to create open-ended brainstorms that platform the cognitive-motoric & chemical-physical expansion of socially constructed meaning. They have performed at Horse&Pony, ACUD MACHT NEU, diffrakt., transmediale 2019, LOW TEXT, and Internet Xplorer, among others.

INFODEMIC HEDONISM

​

So far, the High-frequency Active Auroral

Research Program (HAARP) has created Hurricane Katrina (2005) & an earthquake in Haiti (2010)

Project Cumulus caused floods in Lynmouth (1952)

& Pakistan (2010)

 UFO Roswell incident
The Philadelphia Experiment turned a navy

warship into translucent textile

Water fluoridation is a process to dispose of

industrial waste

Or

Water fluoridation is a communist plot to

​weaken the US-American population

Phantom helicopters will come to surveil

Secret, large-scale atmospheric programs (SLAPs)

poison aircraft trails – aluminium, strontium, barium –

adequate for attention and obedience

​The headquarters of the New World Order

​occupy the soil under the Denver International Airport

Korean Air Lines Flight 007
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370
Which eventually became Malaysia Airlines

​Flight MH17

Destroyed concealing the truth about HIV
Nero’s death and return
Paul is dead
Avril Lavigne was replaced

CRU

ENCARNAÇÃO

(or Masha) comes from a country that no longer exists, and probably from a time that does not exist yet. Her work deals with joints of language, power structures, and translations. She is tracing the diverse engravings that abuse, displacement, and inequality leave in the landscapes of human minds. Masha thinks in pictures of distance and cross-media glitches, and she often works with words as they come, misspelled and  embeautied by their imperfection.

GRID ON GREEN — GRID ON PINK

​
 

small drop. another. creation of ocean.

Gravity

gravity that holds us together. could we create our own gravity?

Create

what is it: to create?

I don‘t like it. this word fashed [me] back to the nature of owning things: to go closer to god, to something saint, heilig.
create and be productive. 8 hours a day, 8 hours to sleep,
8 hours to eat...8 like infinity of ocean...8 like infinity of creation.

erase all the takts and tempo. lay down on earth, on grass, on green, yellow, brown, white, and sandy. lay down and don‘t move, don‘t think, accept this being,

           by

​even this place made for human — translude it,

           on

don’t rewrite, don’t hide, simply accept to rethink. slowly, everything around becomes ephemera and transpaternt — everything made, everything that does not belong here, everything — everything except nature. machines are gone. noises, mechanical noises, technical noises fade out...and a remembrance vibrates in this place.
 

MARIA

KARPUSHINA