Heartlines Spec Issue 2 (Spring/Summer 2023)

By HeartlinesSpec

This second issue of Heartlines Spec has poignancy running throughout. It's in the powerful stories that fill the space in your heart. The poems that grip your hand and whisper to you. The essays that lean forward, elbows on the table, to tell you something vital. It's a feeling of something that's not forlorn, not sad, not fluffy, but poignant—pain in the chest, funny flipflop heartbeat, and wistful smile with a shimmer of comfort.
Editorial by Heather Clitheroe

Short Fiction
The Long Way Home from Gaia BH1 by Manuela Amiouny
Sibble-Sweet by Carol B. Duncan
The Saint of Lost and Stolen Things by E.M. Linden
Autumn Without Rain by Lucy Zhang
Pomegranate Anatomy by Diana Dima
Night Blooms by Narrelle M. Harris
The Bodytakers by Eva Papasoulioti
Lost Time in the Turnaround by Sarah Ramdawar

Poetry
The Magician’s Foundling by Angel Leal
Five Things said by the Deity's Lover by Goran Lowie
Harrowing Nightwatch by Gretchen Tessmer
As a, I want to, so I can by Kelley Tai
Parable With Time Travel by Ashish Kumar Singh

Non-Fiction
It Takes (More Than?) Two: Relationships and their impact on the broader environment by Lynne Sargent
Meet me at the bar by Mary Sanche

Heartlines Spec is an online speculative magazine focused on long-term friendships and relationships. It's the comfort of the known, the fierce hug of someone that knows you best. Issues are released three times a year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HeartlinesSpec
• Release date: Jul 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215451816

HeartlinesSpec

Heartlines Spec is a speculative magazine focused on long-term friendships and relationships. It's the comfort of the known, the fierce hug of someone that knows you best. We are a primarily a Canadian magazine, looking to feature writers identifying as being from Canada/Turtle Island. Issues are produced three times a year: February, July, and November.

Book preview

Cover_with_Names_1500x2400.png

Heartlines Spec

Issue 2 (Spring/Summer 2023)

Cover Art by Alice M.

Edited by

Rebecca Bennett, Managing Editor

Heather Clitheroe, Fiction Editor

Jess Cho, Poetry Editor

Emily Yu, Associate Editor and Interior Illustrator

Copyright © 2023 by Heartlines Spec

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a review.

Fonts used: Spartcus, Droid Serif

https://www.heartlines-spec.com

Table of Contents

Editorial

by Heather Clitheroe

Lost Time in the Turnaround

by Sarah Ramdawar

The Magician’s Foundling

by Angel Leal

Night Blooms

by Narrelle M. Harris

Pomegranate Anatomy

by Diana Dima

Harrowing Nightwatch

by Gretchen Tessmer

Autumn Without Rain

by Lucy Zhang

Sibble-Sweet

by Carol B. Duncan

Five Things Said by the Deity’s Lover

by Goran Lowie

The Bodytakers

by Eva Papasoulioti

The Long Way Home from Gaia BH1

by Manuela Amiouny

As a, I want to, so I can

by Kelley Tai

The Saint of Lost and Stolen Things

by E.M. Linden

Parable With Time Travel

by Ashish Kumar Singh

It Takes (More Than?) Two:

by Lynne Sargent

Meet Me at the Bar

by Mary Sanche

Editorial

by Heather Clitheroe

Welcome to the second issue of Heartlines Spec—our scrappy little magazine with big feels. I’d like to imagine you’re reading this as part of a pleasant sunny morning, or a lazy afternoon...or even during a sweaty commute home; if only because it means you’re done for the day and heading home.

And maybe you’re with people who are important to you—maybe these scenes have people in the background, or next to you, or pinging you. Or maybe not. For many of us, this summer is the first real ‘after’—a season where nothing is at reduced capacity or two metres apart. Festivals are back, the theatres are full as everybody troops off to see Barbie and Oppenheimer, and you can’t guarantee you’ll get a table at the place down the street. The spectre of the pandemic hasn’t left us—not really—but we’ve entered a curious time of compressed memories. What was I doing two years ago? When was that first anxious lineup for a vaccination? It’s an oddly hushed memory of loneliness and aloneness— a sense that it happened to us, but not to us. Not really.

I teach creative writing to adults and teenagers, in different settings. They’ve begun asking when I think pandemic stories will be ‘okay.’ When can we write them? When will people read them? The answer to the first question is easy: write whatever you want, whenever you want.

To the second, I can only say that I don’t know. I’m not sure.

This second issue of Heartlines Spec is not a pandemic issue. But I think there is a note of poignancy that runs through these powerful stories that fill the space in your heart with their feelings, these poems that grip your hand and whisper to you, these essays that lean forward, elbows on the table, to tell you something vital. It’s a feeling of something that’s not forlorn, not sad, not fluffy, but poignant—pain in the chest, funny flipflop heartbeat, and wistful smile with a shimmer of comfort.

Relationships come with poignancy built right in. The last three and a half years irrevocably changed so many things, but relationships were evident even in the most difficult of times. It’s the friend who came with lukewarm Starbucks to sit in a parking lot because she knew I was alone, silly group chats, and the coldly odd video conference dinners, the neighbours waving from the balcony across the road. When can we write about those moments? I still don’t know...I could barely write this.

What I do know—as I look through the proofing pages of this issue—is the touching, particular, and wordless language of relationships is what we’ll use when we do. This language, that wraps around you and touches your soul, is felt in the way that our writers and poets composed their pieces for us to enjoy. They have created such a swell of feeling—it will rise to meet you, and it will carry you through these summer days.

And how lucky are we, the Heartlines Spec staff, to bring them to you?

The very luckiest.

Heather (Senior Editor, she/her) is from Calgary, Alberta. Her science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, and more. Heather teaches creative writing at the University of Calgary, and leads youth writing workshops with the Calgary Public Library.

Lost Time in the Turnaround

by Sarah Ramdawar

Amar’s wife is passing through YYZ tonight. She may have forgotten him this time, but he will see her anyway; he always sees her here (—this is where my family lives after all). Space and time didn’t manifest itself in his schedule to see his family during his last shift, so he’s hoping it will this shift.

Amar is lucky that he happens to work in the Toronto Pearson International Airport, the largest airport in Canada. It is a through place for some; a rest stop for others looking to move and expand ever onwards, outwards, and upwards; or a final home for many—the end of a long journey towards this country and settling on the first safe spot for weary feet. Amar first came to Canada through this very airport, and he met his wife here, and he’s continuing to meet her here still. This place of goings and comings, constant movement and bustle, is built to forget. Amar does not forget.

•••••••••••••

Amar is one of the people responsible for cleaning, stripping, and waxing the floors of the terminals. This shift, he’s been assigned to ride his floor scrubber in Terminal 1, the newest of the three terminals. To keep these floors clean, to wash away the dirt and grime of hundreds of countries from thousands of feet is an ever-present constant in staving away annihilation. That’s what upper management said at the end of orientation, anyway. Through time, Amar found this to be true, although he often wondered whose annihilation?

Large LED dotted letters mark his path along airline desks: (A B C D E F G), all consecutively forward along the alphabet. It’s good he can still see those letters, because he can’t make out the smaller LED’s on the eye-height Arrivals and Departures board, even when his face is close enough to see the individual coloured red, green, and blue specks that make up the glaring bright white light. The hours and minutes on all the screens never looked like anything except for long, bright, melting blobs to him. So much for being nearsighted instead of farsighted, he thought.

He doesn’t look at the planes flying overhead anymore. The best he does is glance at the wheels of jetliners taking off or touching down whenever he’s near the windows. There’s no point in witnessing other people’s beginnings