silica
Materialized by Emily O Liu on Monday, September 22nd 2025.
I think often of how I have never truly seen my face, and can’t remember my memories well. Is it really a coward’s perspective to believe nothing is real, when we are body after body, turtle after turtle? The real mystery is why, but I can only speculate what*. I have an impression, deep green: silicon chips bearing microcosm cities, projecting glitter onto a plastic heavens. When I hear that tired line about the relation between humans and stardust, this is what I see — learned hands collecting the damp sheen of sand, sourced from the same unknown warehouse as hot suns and kernels; only dressed in a different name**. Some day as I do this, my glossy form like a shell too will be swept up — some of it sprinkled over castles, some receding into the vast and vanishing turquoise.
*material of infinitely full-stacked shells
**glitter collecting glitter to engineer into glitter
Emily O Liu is a Chinese American writer from San Diego working in higher education. Previously, she studied learning science at Stanford University and taught English in Taiwan through the Fulbright Program. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Strange Horizons, No Tokens, Lost Balloon, Gone Lawn, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She is interested in windows, languages, multiverses, and any of their combinations.
Other stars in the Whale asterism:
The Old Village Brings Memories
Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arowolo
& i, light as a dry log, would take down cocoa pods, / guavas, bananas, & green mangoes. / & back in the kitchen, she would be there
Katsu
David Capps
When in Spring semester the breeze from cherry and apple blossoms would blow through the classroom he was first to sense it, and by the wordlessness of his example garnered participation points.
In Which No One's Swallowed
Stefanie Kirby
A whale waits, eager as sin.
For Clark
Eden Petri
EALÁT
Shalini Singh
Only in an American pool, did I find myself floating like a leaf baying— what a beautiful thing it is when you drown yourself and come up, a dolphin more, less human.
The Waiting Room At The End of the Universe
Veronica Tucker
Children here sometimes age in reverse. I once saw a toddler fold into an old man between triage and discharge.
babel
Laura Walker
At first we kept close track of each unspent word, watching our hoard grow and grow, building more boxes and stacking them higher and higher, full of the unsaid, but always close at hand in case we needed them.