Editor’s Note.
Welcome to issue 3 of The Birdseed!
The Birdseed celebrates short fiction–stories of 150 words or less. We’re drawn to short fiction for a few reasons: it is in many ways a more accessible medium to read, it takes a whole lot of talent to write, it provides a challenge to the imagination, and it invokes mystery. Short fiction, by necessity, leaves much unsaid. And it is in what’s unsaid that this issue takes shape.
These 38 pieces are beautifully crafted, without exception. They delight and they linger and they swerve, stars making way for sea and the dark and things even deeper. They show and they impress and they trust you, reader, to find the gaps and embrace what’s left unsaid.
Within these pieces and within the season of life that you find yourself in, I hope you take the time to search for the mystery. To look for wonder and delight, for what’s below the surface, for things unknown and things that can never be known.
May you find joy, potential, wonder, and mystery.
Happy reading!
– Kourtney Jai
Space
Look up and you’ll see stories in the stars, dust-sized galaxies, and mystery in the spaces between. These pieces invoke the feeling of looking up and wondering at just how little you know.
Sea
In many ways more unknown than our galaxy, the sea hides her secrets in swirling tide-strewn dark, sharing only what she wishes in the odd mystery washed ashore. Dive below the surface to find treasure, myth, and ruin in these pieces.
Myth
The shadow you see out of the corner of your eye, the creature you secretly search for between trees and beneath waves, the stories that keep you company around campfire: these pieces.
Magic
Skin-tingling, static-zinging: the feeling of true magic, of stumbling across a place or a person that makes you believe, against all odds, in magic. Step into these pieces and believe.
Death
A mystery that we must all explore, a transition, a shift. These pieces contemplate what’s next and what it means to be confronted with death, to know the unknowable.
The Birdseed 