ISSUE 13: HUSH TALES

This issue centers on silence, secrecy, and everything that hides behind closed doors. The featured works navigate themes that hover between dream and reality; touching on grief, exploitation, nostalgia, suppressed emotions, shame, prejudice, acceptance, lust, and death.

The poetry section opens with Hush Myths by Anna Yin, a surreal meditation on the blurry line between dreams and waking life. In Buried Confession, Ayomide Olaiya confronts the brutal aftermath of familial sexual abuse. Kendra Whitfield’s I Set You Free explores abandonment, addiction, and the fragile will to heal. Colleen Moyne’s Forms of Silence examines how silence is passed down, transformed, and inherited. Meanwhile, Whitfield’s Notes on the Persistence of Memory wrestles with the toxic weight of nostalgia and the scars left by social and economic dysfunction.

The fiction section brings equally haunting narratives from Africa and Asia. In An Inheritance of Forgotten Tongues, Simon Mohsin tells the story of a war-torn Asian family fractured by history, racism, and forgotten grief. Joemario Umana’s The Undoing follows a young seminarian’s descent into guilt and suicide. Halima Juma Adam’s I, Adam HJ captures the conflict between online performance and private shame, alongside the brutal fallout of collective vengeance. Edwin Mamman’s Invisible Threads and Unfinished Business dwells on grief, memory, and family tensions. Valerie Lwile’s The Opportunity Cost of Silence dives into lust and the recklessness of youth, while David Agyei-Yeboah’s The Pain of Size reflects on body shame, self-worth, and the ache for acceptance. Sandra Uche Delumozie’s Skylights Under Shady Tree closes the section with a dark tale of greed, mental illness, and crimes buried by those meant to protect.

The pieces in Hush Tales echo the moments we often silence but never forget. They whisper the truths we carry in the shadows.

Eziafakaego Brenda Nwafor

Nigeria,

July 2025