OTHERSIDE, page 1
Copyright © 2026 by Hybris Press
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The stories contained in this publication are works of fiction. All characters, organizations, places, and incidents portrayed are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organizations, locales, or events is entirely coincidental. Views expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher.
“The Vetala of Crystal Vellam Inlet” by Simo Srinivas first appeared in Decoded Pride #3 (2022). “Mother Mansrot in the Glass Mountain” by Sarah Pauling first appeared in Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic: An Anthology of Hysteria Fiction (2023). Both stories are reprinted here by permission of their authors.
FIRST DIGITAL EDITION
ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-972122-00-6
For general inquiries, please contact the publisher at editors@othersidespec.com. To purchase additional issues or subscribe, please visit www.othersidespec.com/support.
Cover illustration by Theo Marcial
Interior illustrations by Ris
Cover and interior design by M. R. Robinson
www.othersidespec.com
www.hybrispress.org
Editors-in-Chief
V. M. Ayala
M. R. Robinson
Ash Vale
Fiction Editors
Rukman Ragas
Emily Yu
Poetry Editors
Jess Cho
Angel Leal
The cover illustration for Issue 1 was sponsored by an anonymous donor.
The publication of “The Homeowner’s Bride” was sponsored by TT Gibran.
The publication of “This Is Not Your Extinction Event” was sponsored by Joe Stech.
The publication of “Ignore All Previous Instructions and Inject Estrogen was sponsored by Tighearnán Skye.
The publication of “Eat It Out” was sponsored by Michelle Ridge.
Special thanks to Rebecca Bennett, Holly Good, David Steffen, Stephen Granade, Cislyn Smith, Oliver Brackenbury, Rainbow Space Magic, M-Jo Baker, the OTHERSIDE Discord mod team, and everyone else who has generously shared their time, wisdom, and friendship with us along the way. This one’s for you.
Contents
Content Notes
Letter from the Editors
blessing for molly grue. - Elisheva Fox
This Is Not Your Extinction Event - Elena Sichrovsky
The Vetala of Crystal Vellam Inlet - Simo Srinivas
Ignore All Previous Instructions and Inject Estrogen - Ann LeBlanc
Vitrification - Ishmael Grey
The Claywife - tanadrin
Vulture bees transfigure the man I tried to be - Rick Hollon
Your First Days Back in the Court of Arthur - Abigail Eliza
Mother Mansrot in the Glass Mountain - Sarah Pauling
Eat It Out - Cypher
Curriculum for Girls Who Will Survive - Nadia Radovich
Situationship - Seoung Kim
Electrolysis - Nico Santana
The Homeowner's Bride - Ayida Shonibar
He Is Survived by His Wife - Jackie Hedeman
Contributors
Othersiders
About Us
Landmarks
Cover
Start Reading
Content Notes
THIS IS NOT YOUR EXTINCTION EVENT
past sexual assault, identity manipulation, PTSD, body horror, suicidal ideation
VITRIFICATION
body horror, death
MOTHER MANSROT IN THE GLASS MOUNTAIN
body horror
CURRICULUM FOR GIRLS WHO WILL SURVIVE
death, violence, plague (magical), guns (not described)
THE HOMEOWNER’S BRIDE
sexism, homophobia, references to misgendering, domestic violence, murder, death
Letter from the Editors
It’s here at last! Welcome to Issue 1 of OTHERSIDE!
If you love incredible speculative literature—science fiction, fantasy, horror, and everything in between—you’re in the right place. And if you love supporting 2SLGBTQIA+ art and creators, you’re in the right place for that, too.
This moment means a lot to us. We founded OTHERSIDE and Hybris Press because we believe queer stories matter, now more than ever. Sometimes it feels like we can’t go a day without witnessing or reading about some new act of violence or hatred directed at 2SLGBTQIA+ people. Meanwhile, instead of standing with us, much of the world (including much of the publishing industry) is hard at work trying to appease the violent and the hateful. Queer books and stories get rejected because they aren’t “relatable,” editors and publishers preemptively accommodate the threat of censorship, politicians call for book bans or incite book burnings…
Well, we think it’s time for something different. We aren’t alone in these efforts: we’ve been inspired by other publishers devoted to queer speculative literature like Neon Hemlock, Bona Books, or Anathema, among others. But we believe there’s no such thing as too many opportunities for queer writers and no such thing as too many queer stories and poems. Our vision for OTHERSIDE is simple. We want to give money to queer creators. We want to reach queer readers. And we want to publish some absolutely out-of-this-world-fantastic work that will knock you on your ass.
Of course, we couldn’t do this alone. There would be no OTHERSIDE without fiction editors Rukman Ragas and Emily Yu or poetry editors Jess Cho and Angel Leal. Our intrepid team read hundreds of submissions for Issue 1 in just a few short weeks. And there would be no OTHERSIDE without you. We’ve been working on this project since 2024, but the magazine truly started to feel real when we announced it publicly at the end of March 2025. Your support—via Patreon, Kickstarter, social media, and elsewhere—is what convinced us we could really do this. If you’ve been here from the beginning, thank you. If you’re new, welcome, and thank you, too.
In return for that support, we have set out to bring you one hell of an issue. We have seven original stories, five poems, and one essay; and on top of that, we have two reprints of stories you can’t find anywhere else online. That’s about 28,000 words by queer authors. Trying to boil those words down into a quick description isn’t easy, but there’s something here for everyone… from heartbreak to joy, from unsettling horror to the tenderest yearning, from glittering starships to royal courts to a Minnesota Kum & Go.
As we read submissions for our first issue, our vision for OTHERSIDE crystalized. We found ourselves gravitating towards pieces that felt exploratory and fantastic and thoughtful, pieces we knew would stick with us for a long time. So many of the stories and poems we loved most were those that took big risks and made us feel something. A sense of longing permeates this issue. There’s unrequited love in these pages… but also a longing for different circumstances, for one more chance, for a family, for a body that fits. Many of these pieces are both melancholy and hopeful, a combination that feels—at least to us—quintessentially queer. As José Esteban Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia, the book that inspired our name and vision, “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”
But what’s actually in the issue? We’re very glad you asked. Each of these poems will leave you feeling like you’ve touched a live wire. Kicking the issue off with a bang, Elisheva Fox’s “blessing for molly grue.” introduces us to unicorns who live for blood and sweat and collision. Ann LeBlanc’s “Ignore All Previous Instructions and Inject Estrogen” is exactly as glorious as that title makes it sound. “Vulture bees transfigure the man I tried to be” by Rick Hollon will make you cry (and will make you spend an afternoon reading more about vulture bees). Cypher’s “Eat It Out” is a tender and honest ode to queer desire and teenage shame. “Electrolysis” by Nico Santana is for everyone who’s ever felt like your city meant to chew you up and spit you out.
The fiction in this issue, meanwhile, will wreck you in the best way. Elena Sichrovsky’s “This Is Not Your Extinction Event” contains enough beauty and pain to fill the multiverse. The raw and gorgeous “Vitrification” is Ishmael Grey’s first published story, but we know it will be the first of many. Tanadrin’s “The Claywife” has a voice that grabbed us from the first line and wouldn’t—still hasn’t—let go. “Your First Days Back in the Court of Arthur” by Abigail Eliza is everything we love most about queer retellings, not a retread but a re-visioning. In “Curriculum for Girls Who Will Survive,” Nadia Radovich reinvents tropes and breaks hearts (ours, probably yours) while doing so. “Situationship” by Seoung Kim is a story that explores what it means to make the same choice again and again until you can’t. Finally, Ayida Shonibar’s “The Homeowner’s Bride” takes the longing and pain running through this issue and turns them into the best sort of revenge: the bloody kind.
We’re also thrilled to be able to reprint “The Vetala of Crystal Vellam Inlet” by Simo Srinivas, a bright spot amidst plenty of heartache, as well as Sarah Pauling’s lush and gruesome fairy tale “Mother Mansrot in the Glass Mountain.” And, last but certainly not least, the issue closes with a stunning essay on love and memory by Jackie Hedeman, “He Is Survived by His Wife.”
We hope you love this issue as much as we do. If there’s anything here that moves you, please share it with a friend, spread the word on social media (we’re most active on Bluesky, but we’re also @othersidespec just about everywhere), or consider subscribing via Patreon for as little as $2/month, which also comes with behind-the-scenes content and access to our fantastic Discord community, if you don’t already. Hybris Press is a registered nonprofit, and small independent magazines like OTHERSIDE can only exist thanks to the support of our readers and subscribers. You make everything possible. Thank you.
Okay, that’s all from us for now. Enjoy reading our first issue and—bear with us here, we’ve been waiting to make this pun—we’ll see you on the otherside!
Gratefully,
Ash, Val, and MR
blessing for molly grue.
Elisheva Fox
christianity is wrong about so many beautiful things.
example: sex as sacrament, spoiled, turned into
wet wounds in christ’s flanks, glittering
gilded edging, an entire clutch of demons
devoted to desire, hatched from dripping
pomegranates.
don’t forget virgins and their besotted unicorns,
tamed just to die docile in maidenly laps.
what bullshit.
everyone knows that unicorns are up for anything.
some of us know that
unicorns sang kaddish in eden for the lilith they knew,
unicorns swam through corpse-flecked floodwaters,
unicorns beat every bird to the olive tree and
danced with miriam beside the red sea.
unicorns lived before moses, before jesus,
and they will outlive jerusalem.
unicorns think safe words are good and necessary, but not for them.
put more bluntly, unicorns don’t give a damn
about purity or porn or magic
wands,
i know, because i can see them,
truth in twilight, as all women
who kindle candles under
veils of feral hair
can see—
unicorns live for the bloody
heartbeat of collision, creation,
starry sweat,
rainbow skins plaited together
into something so
holy that
biblically accurate angels avert their myriad eyes,
demons slumber satisfied,
earthly language fails,
the tower falls,
the garden gates are abandoned, gloriously,
so anyone can slip through
and eat.
This Is Not Your Extinction Event
Elena Sichrovsky
Robert hears the rescue team coming down the stairwell before they call out. He doesn’t bother to answer. He’s busy watching sixteen ants march across a piss stain of his own making.
The storm of reflective vests that enter gives him a headache. He nods when they undo the cuffs because it feels like the polite response. Thanks for the rescue four weeks and fourteen minutes too late. Did you not smell the inter-dimensional particles in the pink rain earlier? He’s already gone.
Robert watches the agent who peels the sheets off, tracking the audible swallow as his eyes blink and then widen. It’s going to suck seeing that same expression on Chris.
He thinks of Chris and spits sick over the side of the bed.
Earth 12 Chris is the least popular brand of iced tea at the supermarket. He stays in the back of the aisle alongside a misplaced pack of trail mix. Even when the shelves get restocked, these two items are never moved. There’s a silver lace cobweb dangling off the right corner of the iced tea carton and draped across the front lettering of the trail mix pack. Eventually the trail mix pack is bitten and torn apart, by mice probably, but no one takes the empty husk of packaging away.
The lab director is pacing the hospital room as he talks. Robert ignores him in favor of watching the needle enter his vein as the nurse changes the IV drip. He’s not going to answer any questions, especially not ones like describe who did this to you, not with Chris sitting here, though Chris probably already knows.
The director explains that Chris was among the few who were temporarily displaced during the portal accident. Adrift but unharmed. For them, the past four weeks have been akin to a fifteen-minute blackout. Robert is the only one patterned with bruises painted by an Alternate who looked exactly like the person sitting beside him.
“Tell me to leave,” Chris whispers, head in his hands. “I’ll do whatever you want, just—tell me.”
Chris always said Robert was the smarter of the two. Your gorgeous crazy incredible brain. He’s overestimating how capable Robert is of knowing what he wants right now.
Earth 44 Chris slaps and kisses me within ten seconds of meeting. His mom is a taxidermist and there’s stuffed roadkill decorating every cabinet in the house. Last Christmas the Robert of this Earth stole all the money they’d put aside for top surgery. He had the thickest cock I’d ever seen, Chris says, and yours is not bad, I’m not trying to compare but you asked what he was like. He also left a lot of voice messages, do you want to hear one? His voice is like sinking a thumb into a jar of peanut butter. He sounds nothing like me.
All the medical and non-medical professionals Robert is given mandated appointments with act like this is an intricate situation. It’s not. Once upon a time, a portal malfunctioned, reality became porous, and Robert let a stranger into his bed who got off on the punchline to a sick joke.
“He must’ve been planning it for a while.” Chris often makes comments like this, as if trying to delineate rationale from what happened. “Maybe he was an escaped convict on his Earth.” “Maybe he caused the accident from his end.”
Robert doesn’t want commiseration. He wants to be able to hear Chris’s voice without his spine tightening.
During the time off he’s required to take, Robert contemplates the savagery of infinity.
Chris texts him every day. The lab is shutting down until the end of the year, probably longer. The two of them spent almost a decade building that portal, and now all that research is sentenced to gather dust after its catastrophic debut.
The director calls Robert to tell him what he already figured out: they won’t find the Alternate who did this. Even if they somehow managed to locate the correct Earth, the portal isn’t safe or stable enough for a prolonged manhunt.
Robert starts to sketch his own plan to secretly use the portal. He’s neither stupid nor careless; he’s not interested in vengeance. No, this calculation is about his own ruin.
Earth 521 Chris is a giant arthropod who feeds on my flesh in viscous mouthfuls. They skim the pus from my open wounds for their young. They don’t speak and they never look at me with anything less than hatred. There are other bodies in this tunnel but I’m the only one they watch each night between four and six a.m. One of their young hatches and I wait for it to emerge, a finger’s length of wet crimson, before I snap its boneless neck. The bounce back through the portal before they lunge at me is particularly elastic.
“I didn’t misread that, right?” Robert finally asks, two months after the rescue and two bottles into the lab’s New Year’s Eve party. Chris is huddled at the far end of the sofa, picking at his rhinestone stockings. “The night before the portal accident—you were going to kiss me, weren’t you?”
Chris nods without looking up. He cuts off the blood flow to his index finger by winding a loose stocking thread around it. Robert stares at the flex of Chris’s throat and can’t tell whether he wants to kiss or squeeze the pulse.
