Welcome to our Fiction First issue. We hope to do one single-genre issue each year. Keep an eye on our submissions page for information about the next single-genre issue!

It is winter time in Texas, which is cold and damp and nothing at all like winter in Vermont. I had a beautiful winter photo on my desk, snowy woods, a path leading through the trees, branches in black silhouette, you get the idea. But it is not on the cover of this journal.

On the cover is this magical photograph of a small girl and a horse walking across water. Is it winter? Who knows? Or who cares?

Oh, I can look at the photograph with logic and tell you that I deduce from the harness on the horse, that it was taken in eastern Europe. The tires on the wagon tell me it is a poor country that makes do with what it has. Or I could just ask the artist and find out all the details.

But the little girl—so bravely walking the horse across the water and into the rising sun—surely not a setting sun.

Isn’t that what writing is all about? Someone with the nerve to do the impossible, walking across water into the rising sun?

I like to think so, and I hope that you will think our authors in this issue do exactly that, following their own magical trails into the rising sun.