🖤 🎃 🧜🏿‍♂️ Tricks and Treats 🧜🏽‍♀️ 🎃🖤

October’s issue embraces hard goodbyes, the sinister, and the bittersweet.

In this issue, we have murderous mermaids, storm-tossed seas, obsessive humans, mer graveyards and ghosts, and a few different examinations of disability in mer-terms.

We have a tiny flash piece by Umiyuri Katsuyama translated from the Japanese by Toshiya Kamei and an original comic by Miranda Leyson and Elyse N. Russell, both of which warn about what you may awaken if you dare to disturb the waters.

Cathin Yang and Coral Alejandra Moore give us a hefty each to each pairing about what happens when humans go searching for merghosts. Marie Brennan’s reprint piece gives us a siren seeking desperately to save her own soul, while Marlane Quade Cook gives us a tale of tempests and grand destruction, and of the choice of the destroyer to salvage even one life. Meanwhile, Marisca Pichette and Ori Jay give us meditations on undersea graveyards.

Csilla Kleinheincz plays us a song of human obsession mistaken for love, translated from the Hungarian by Bogi Takács, while Stefan Slater gives us a poignant look at the idea of love meaning being willing to let the object of your affections go, and Ashley Bao shows us what it means to become a siren’s bride (spoiler: it means death…)

Melanie Jayne Ashford gives us an essay about disability and how merfolk are like disabled people in certain ways, and we’ve also got a story by Kathryn Kania, and poems by Felicia Martinez, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto, and Elizabeth Kestrel Rogers that explore the limits of embodiment and mer-resonance for the disabled, chronically ill, and wounded.

Below you’ll find 17 pieces of mermaid magic that are both, tricks and treats: