Issue 18: Beneath Human Skin | Fake Funeral | Sour Spell
"We weren’t burying Abuelo’s body because it was already in its proper hole in El Salvador. This was for the better, my mother kept saying, because she wasn’t trying to see no corpse..."
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues.
Issue 18 is full of cemeteries and spells, blood and bones. It’s surprising and thrilling when an issue’s art and words alchemize in the way this one did! To enter Khôra’s collaborative waters:
Writers, read about Khôra’s 500 Words here.
Artists, send your artwork to Khôra's Images here.
Issue 18’s Featured Writer Stephanie Feldman is the author of Saturnalia, a novel that Carmen Maria Machado calls “a heady mix of the most terrifying elements of our troubled past and inevitable future; an eerie, propulsive novel.” Stephanie is also the author of The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Electric Literature, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Maine Review, The Rumpus, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
From Beneath Human Skin, for Khôra:
The cemetery gates were in sight when she heard another voice.
“Got bored?”
It was a man, sitting on the lip of one of the tombs. He had curly hair and a curly beard, both the color of lead — a shade that could have been gray or black. He was short, wiry, with shoulders that bulged in his t-shirt and veins that bulged on his forearms. She couldn’t guess his age; as he smiled, deep grooves descended from his eyes, but he was also ferociously tanned.
“Something like that,” Alicia said.
He stepped forward, held his palm open. She took a step forward, too.
It was a stick of gum.
“I don’t take candy from strangers.”
Read Beneath Human Skin.
Issue 18’s Featured Artist Elaine Close is based in Portland, Oregon. She studied art at Connecticut College and after graduating she moved to Portland, where she has been showing her work since 1992. Elaine says of her work:
I work in mixed media, predominantly oil paint on wood and paper. In addition to larger paintings, for about 20 years, I have been working on a series of small and tiny mixed media paintings, some as small as 1.5 x 1.5 inches, using combinations of graphite, colored pencil, pastel, acrylic, oil, watercolor, blood, and collage. My abstract paintings are inspired by organic shapes especially bird bones, and the by emotional power of colors.
View Small Gray Square Painting:
In Issue 18, we’re back with new work from our team of curated writers Amra Brooks, Shin Yu Pai, Lindsay Quintanilla, and Debbie Weingarten; and artists Sui Park, Justin Rueff (for Issue 18), Erica Svec, and Mandy Cano Villalobos.
Check out the highlights below!
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and Khôra will be back next month.
With galactic gratitude,
Leigh
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad
P.S. Your donations help to pay Khôra’s writers and artists, something that's incredibly important to us as a small magazine. A donation of just $5 a month means so much, and we're grateful.
Issue 18 Highlights
A Natural Calamity by Amra Brooks | Artwork by Sui Park
My husband used to sleep on the old gray couch almost every night. He’d stay up late watching a horror film and pass out. Gore before bed. For years, I asked him to go to bed at the same time as me, just once or twice a week. I liked us both in bed reading until we clicked off our nightlights, our rhythms in sync. Once in a while he would acquiesce and inevitably he’d snore too loud, and I’d whack him on the shoulder, and he’d stop and roll onto his belly, and then he’d still snore and I’d whack him, and then our son would come in the room and worm between us. My son would then whack him when he'd snore again…
Read A Natural Calamity.
The Cruelest Year by Debbie Weingarten | Artwork by Mandy Cano Villalobos
It was the cruelest year. And cruel beget cruel. By mid-summer, it’s true — I wanted everyone else to suffer the way we had.
I first made the creek rise. From my bed, I drowned the mossy banks and the honeysuckle, the new little frogs perched on their wet rocks. The creek became a small river, and then a bigger one. I screamed into my pillow, and the current pushed against the old rope swing tree until it uprooted and fell, the sound loud as a firework.
But I was not finished. I had never been so full of fury. I wanted to take their daughters, but I could not, so for a time I took their water…
Read The Cruelest Year.
Sour Spell by Shin Yu Pai | Artwork by Justin Reuff
Ylva Mara, a two-spirit Romani witch, gave me verbal instructions on how to cast a spell to solve what was vexing me. I’d found them on the internet. They ran an apothecary down the street from my house, where they practiced both acupuncture and spell casting.
I needed to expel a man from my life. Someone besides my husband to whom I’d grown attached. Burning the red thread that symbolically bound us together, though cord cutting hadn’t kept him from coming at me. I needed something more forceful, like a sour jar. A spell to freeze him out…
Read Sour Spell.
Fake Funeral by Lindsay Quintanilla | Artwork by Erica Svec
We weren’t burying Abuelo’s body because it was already in its proper hole in El Salvador. This was for the better, my mother kept saying, because she wasn’t trying to see no corpse. My father bought a gravestone because he said we needed to honor Abuelo; to be in two places at once intrigued me. My father parked La Toyota. He didn’t wait for us. He slammed the door and walked towards the service, with a bottle of Guaro. My black dress was itchy in the sun; my hair was pinned up in a blob. It was Cecilia’s go-to hairdo, which I copied carefully — a messy bun with never-ending bobby pins…
Read Fake Funeral.
Khôra will be back next month!
As a reminder, when you subscribe to Khôra for free, you’ll receive issue highlights straight to your inbox. No one will be turned away due to lack of funds. If you are able to pay for a subscription, we love you, and you help to build access for others. If you’re not able to pay for a subscription, we love you, and welcome to the revolution.
Your donations help to pay Khôra’s writers and artists, something that's incredibly important to us as a small magazine. A donation of just $5 a month means so much, and we're grateful.