Editorial

Welcome to the seventh issue of Baffling Magazine, and the third issue of Year Two.

First, a hundred thank yous to the folks on Patreon who make this magazine possible. If you can support us for a month or a quarter or a year, we’d be deeply grateful.

Today’s my birthday, so I am sharing this issue’s bevy of fine stories with an extra helping of magnanimity. Yes, welcome, come in. Have a piece of cake while you’re at it. These pieces in particular do as much storytelling out of the corners of their mouths as they do the more straightforward kind. Perhaps because we open and close with fortune-telling, something a fool is wise to pay heed to.

First, Ruth Joffre’s “A Girl Predicts the Future” brings both warmth and humor to precognition alongside the sort of details that make a story feel really lived in. “Together” by Iori Kusano compresses a lot of dread and discomfort into a very small space. Bogi Takács’s “Four Glass Cubes (Item Description)” sprawls across time and space, giving the reader plenty to mull over as they consider what is not included in these notes.

“Ocean Christening” by Karyn De Freitas is a joyous awakening, and perhaps an unexpected twist on the trope of seeking mystical boons. The air of menace in “Cubicle Refugia” by Jackson Jesse Nash is great, yes, but I think you’ll agree that the voice’s insouciant charm lends a texture to the story that is quite unexpected. “Lakeboys” by Sean Chua is summery poetry, sideways and golden.

Ann LeBlanc’s “Frequently Asked Questions About the Dead Woman Beneath Sang-D’Heloise Subway Station” is a bolt of lightning in the arm, a stirring manifesto, and charming as hell all at once. And our cover, by the always impressive Savanna Mayer, brings our final story, the epic-in-flash “Three True Auguries and A Lie” by Lauren Bajek, to life in delightful, lurid, anti-colonialist detail. I’ll confess that I’m desperate to see this story on the big screen; it scratches so many perfect itches.

I hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

Enjoy!

dave ring
Co-Editor, Baffling Magazine