Rusa Bhowmik – a poem
Holly Day – 2 poems
Casy Killingsworth – a poem
Richard Klin – a story
Ewa Mazierska – a story
Laura McCullough – 2 poems
Jim Meirose – a story
George Payne – a poem
Roger G. Singer – 2 poems
Jane Snyder – a story
Allison Whittenberg – 2 poems
editor’s desk
Dear Friends,
Here we are, embarking upon a new year after the last one really pretty much exhausted everyone. There were resets and resets of resets, people in the streets, fact-checking our realities, our perceptions, our preconceptions, our rights and our wrongs.
And it is still not settled, this human experiment, and it is still not fair, right or just. Not nearly right. Not near close enough.
But we wake each day. We strive. We ferret out the truths and we carry on.
Mortality seems to be on a lot of people’s minds. Rightly so. Everyone knows someone who has succumbed to the virus, or nearly so. We’ve all seen the numbers and likely wondered when it will be us.
This issue, several of our authors are presenting the faces of our mortal coils, maybe coincidentally or by design of our collective consciousness.
A hope in this: That we may take a long hard look in the mirror that is the singular “me” and the royal “we.” That we may empathize and sympathize. That we may investigate our lives partly or fully lived and seize the opportunities afforded us to reach out and foster something better, more equitable.
Physicists have told us that the distance from where we stand (on planet Earth) to the edge of the observable universe is a relative constant. 46.1 billion light years. That no matter where we plant ourselves in this universe, be it here on Earth or way over there on some distant planet circling any one of so many other suns, the edge of the universe will be an equal number of light years from the top of our heads to the unknown.
In my interpretation, that means that there are billions of overlapping universes, each with a center and an edge, each of them equally vast in breadth, height, width and depth; all of them common, alike, co-dependent.
In our brevity, the hair’s-width of our experience in the timeline, what is our constant? Perhaps not our sentience, but our common space. All equal. The grand leveler.
Ahh, but then what is our raison d’être?
How big and small are we? Significance in every cell.
Kind Regards,
Raymond Prucher, Editor
whimperbang
Issue 23, January 2021