Across a Blinking Blackness
Dear reader,
We walked through the shadows for you in this issue, traversing lines of darkness in order to bring you back a handful of glimmering light. These stories, poems, photographs, and works of art shine like stars in the night sky. Although dread creeps in at the corners, the heart of this issue pulses with something brighter.
Ancient humans pulled stories down from the stars as they sat close to the protective glow of their fires. Just out of reach, in the shadows, death waited for them, hungry and terrible. But they felt safe in their stories of Orion the mighty hunter, Cassiopeia the vain queen, Ursa Major the great bear….
In this issue of RiverCraft, we found new constellations: seals in the sea, connected by Cara Roets. A teacher dreading the vulnerability of her students, discovered by Ashleigh Tomcics. And many more glittering tales—“pinpoints of light,” to use the words of Tyla Parks—waiting to be known. If you, like Shannon Grasser’s narrator in “A Cleaving in Addison County,” pray for your “mortality to stop haunting and step into the light,” then you’ve come to the right fireside.
And so, dear reader, come in off the cold doorstep. It’s dark out there—“one of those nights where the town lights were dim enough to make out some of the stars,” as Jason Ferris writes.
Come warm your hands. Stave off the shadows. Peruse these affirming disturbances we’ve collected from the Susquehanna stars, and hopefully you, as Amy Jarvis writes, can find “light as antonym for ache.”