In a time of tumult and transition, we are pleased to offer a community of voices, stories told from various perspectives with humor, resilience, rebellion, and compassion. This issue has an international emphasis. Phil Cummins’ “Thicker Than Water” is told from the point view of a good-natured scoundrel in Ireland who gets his rather violent comeuppance before his wedding day. Vicki Derderian writes with lyrical prose of a young Armenian girl in Marash, Turkey, during the First World War. In “Pigeon,” Tunde Oyebode recounts the story of a Nigerian immigrant in London who finally has enough of how he is treated. And Douglas Cole’s “Spirit of the Water” is a coming-of-age narrative about a boy who finds strength in himself during a life-threatening camping trip with his father, who reveals their possible Native American heritage.
Phil Cummins’ darkly amusing, often hilarious, over-the-top story is of a semi-hoodlum who is caught by a violent gang and brought to a butcher shop. Certainly, this offbeat character could be a compelling protagonist in a novel. “Lyric FM and the eclectic instrumentals of Night Train filled the car, the DJ’s familiar husky drawl somehow filtering through to reach my tender ears. Picturing the two yokes sitting up front, I might’ve actually smiled at the absurdity of this scene were it not for the duct tape sealing my mouth and the distinct possibility I’d be involuntarily donating body parts in the coming hours.”
In Vicki Derderian’s compelling story “Marash, 1914,” an Armenian family considers fleeing their hometown. The daughter wonders why the mother wants to stay, even though restrictions are posted, and names are put on a list. Too soon, “neighbors’ homes are occupied. Even Ma is shaken. When caravans are attacked, Pa is frantic and clutches his hair in his fists. It’s time to flee. It is still possible. Others have. The Mouradians. The Kevorkians. The Seropians. Whole families. Families still whole.”
In Tunde Oyebode’s ironic story, an immigrant struggles in an unpaid internship. The narrator reaches a breaking point when he realizes that in London, park pigeons are treated better than beggars: “There were pigeons in Lagos, mostly in the villages just outside the city and people caught them. In Lagos, they weren’t this comfortable, he thought. They weren’t this brave, strutting around. In London they are fed more than beggars on the street, he thought. They are fed so much that they leave leftovers to waste on the ground. Thinking this, a sudden embarrassment of having no money for food and fun—for living—overwhelmed him.”
In Douglas Cole’s lyrical, mesmerizing tale, which reads almost like a myth, a troubled boy must follow his father to an island to see the ocean and immerse himself in wild, threatening waves and in his ancestral past. As in fairy tales, the child hero must often bottom out in order to see the light. “The ferry horn sounded three times and the boat pulled out into the sound and rocked softly. Out there was the blackness of the water, the far faint lights of homes on the islands. What was it like to live on an island? It seemed like a desirable dream and at the same time unreal. He didn’t want his life the way it was, now that he was a bad kid. On an island he would be alone.”
We hope you will probe into these talented stories that span continents and share a common search for personal justice against the odds. Such stories of the marginalized are at the core of the fiction which Solstice Literary Magazine has championed over almost two decades.
Lee Hope, Founder and Fiction Editor and Karen Halil, Associate Fiction Editor
Lee Hope, is the author of the novel Horsefever, a finalist in the Midwest Book Awards. She is a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship for Fiction. She has published stories in numerous literary journals such as Witness and The North American Review. She founded and directed a low-residency MFA program and has taught at various universities. She also teaches for Changing Lives Through Literature, which serves people on probation and parole.
