sing an ode without
By Nayt Rundquist
You’re always searching for margins. Investigating straight lines and liminal spaces, hoping for some way to slip the cracks, climb a gutter between panels, tumble from a page turn. You always admired fourth-wall breakers—She-Hulk, Calvino, Navidson, Guildenstern, Rosencrantz. And now, with the next extinction-sized asteroid hurtling earthward, you wish to join them. Break the constraints of this story you’re written in, escape enjambment and serifs and punctuation—sing an ode without. Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re killed on impact, it’ll be slow. Days or weeks or months of choking debris and sun-obscuring, climate-obliterating ash. Until humanity’s final page turn.
Nayt Rundquist’s (they/them) odd scribblings have been nominated for Best Small Fictions, shortlisted for the Brave New Weird anthology, and can be found in Whale Road Review, Inverted Syntax, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Scavengers Lit Mag, and others. They live outside space and time with their artist-jeweler wife and fifth-dimensional dog.