So you stagger home from a long eight hours at work, your ears still ringing with a barrage of demands from bosses and customers alike. You shrug out of your suit jacket and toss it on the sofa. It misses and falls to the floor like a boneless man, but you can't find the energy to pick it up. You walk to the kitchen, open the fridge, grimace at the green fuzz colonizing on the top of the leftover meatloaf, and grab a beer instead. Maybe you're a wine drinker and you pop open a bottle of pinot grigio. Whatever the poison of choice, you need something to soothe your nerves and silence the voices. You need to escape, to fall into another world if only for a little while, a place where the joys and woes of others can make you forget the trials and tribulations of the real world. A place where imagination runs more … liquid.
Maybe you're in a dark place, and want to journey to a world just as dark. A realm where a wife refuses to let go of her husband … even after his death. A place where giant eggs harbor hideous secrets, and a vampire's first awakening speaks of the terror to come. Perhaps the darkness at work is more than enough, and you'd rather flee to worlds undiscovered. You long for lands where mystics court danger through their fantastic ceremonies. You shake your head against your drooping eyelids and dream of a man in a yet-to-come society whose exhaustion dwarfs your own. You imagine jumping into another's body, living that man or woman's life, and smile as you envision the inevitable trouble that would cause. You feel like you've just crawled from a car wreck, and a black part of your mind wonders what that might look like … and you suddenly yearn to find out.
Fear not, dear reader … we have your back. In this issue of Liquid Imagination, we have fiction dealing with all of the above. We have stories to stop your heart and untether your mind. But you know us enough by now to know that we have much more in store, as well. When your flagging eyelids demand the dark, you can close your eyes and drift away listening to our fiction read aloud. We understand that the bed is calling you, and the day's hardships sometimes shorten your attention span to that of a toddler's, so we have stocked this issue full of our usual amazing poetry, weird and whimsical verse set to original guitar compositions.
So thank you for stopping by. We hope you will allow us to smother your mundane cares beneath a blanket of art — art for your eyes, your ears, and your mind.
