Under the exquisite cover Frost and Snow by Melissa Mary Duncan …

• Our featured author, the esteemed Evelyn Lau, offers three poems riddled with grief and stolen moments.


• Spencer Stevens takes a break from the front lines in the final Seven Swans instalment, ‘The Mystery of the Forgotten Soldier’, by Mel Anastasiou.


• Echo wanes as Narcissus waxes in Joelle Kidd’s modern retelling, ‘Echo/Narcissus’; while a Pythia of Apollo unweaves 25 years’ worth of lies in ‘The Golden Feather’ by Jenny Blackford.


• Space isn’t exactly lawless, but everyone bends the rules in Margot Spronk’s ‘Rules of Salvage’; and on the other end of the SF spectrum, Graham Darling’s ‘A Pleasant Walk, A Pleasant Talk’ neatly turns a Lewis Carroll poem on its head.


• A seemingly useless power feeds a young woman’s resentment in Emily Lonie’s ‘A Seed in Every Womb’, and Michael Bracken’s ‘The Fishmonger’s Wife’ explores the dangers of dry land for mermen.


• Search for the perfect stone in ‘Stonecold’ from Leslie Wibberly, the 2018 Creative Ink Festival’s flash fiction contest winner.


• Explore new mythologies in Nicholas Christian’s ‘The Angler’, winner of the 2018 Hummingbird Prize for Flash Fiction; and the runner-up by Robert Runté, ‘Day Three’, examines the little things we miss the most.


• Allaigna falls in with a new crowd in the latest installment of Aria by JM Landels, and a carnival fortune-teller shares valuable tricks of the trade in ‘Madame Sylvie’s Three Rules for How to Speak for the Dead’ by Susan Pieters.


• And finally, find out what very old aristocrats do when they let get unlaced in Kris Sayer’s sequential short ‘Under Pale Flesh’