Size / / /

Calved, set adrift, sea-girt,

whether (to name each landmass)

dominant Gena or submissive Peg; sultry Page;

mousy Anne, or even surprisingly Egan,

the little boy in this choir of multiples (although he too

is equally damaged and sings off-key);

under a combination of drugs

and years of psychotherapy,

all the lost continents,

having fractured along faultlines

during an all too seismic

childhood,

begin to uproot themselves, to gather strength

for the trip back out of separation,

reversing the diaspora.

First to achieve substantiality, rising to the surface

like Atlantis reborn, is her core personality,

the black mass of the world she was at age eleven,

when everything fractured.

Puzzle-fitted back into the whole

and eventually assuming authority

over the rest, it's she who now asserts

tectonic control over her various selves.

The result is geopristine—

as if the original skull of the Earth has

reintegrated itself,

its verdant bones no longer separated

by blue chasms of guilt

and self-loathing.

("You made me do what I did," says the message

she finds in the bottle, sent to her by black currents

from the prison beyond the headlands. "No, I didn't,"

counters her healed brain now, echoing the gulls.)

Sutured whole,

the fontanels of who-she-was-before-

the-split fuse together seamlessly,

united once more.

Alone again Pangea rules, and is herself.




Robert Borski works for a consortium of elves repairing shoes in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. You can read more of his work in our archives.
Current Issue
16 Mar 2026

The garden is the resting place of your vulnerabilities; there’s a reason you’ve left them here instead of carrying them with you. Typically you enter hardened and hurried, beelining straight for the correct plot and quickly releasing whatever is clutched in your hand without a second thought—today, an attempted weaving of leather and lace, strength and suppleness that your body cannot figure out how to wear, nor your words to narrate.
If you say there are rats, I will believe you, though I don’t hear or see them.
A ruffling of branches as they resettle for the night. We dare not ask why they are here.
Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity 
As part of a collective of African writers who have created an Afrocentric Sauútiverse of five planets, two suns and a spirit moon, a world of science and fantasy, where there is no written language, we play with technology and sound magic to scrutinise the world as we know it, and use speculative fiction as a response to our world. 
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Issue 9 Mar 2026
By: Lio Abendan
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
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2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”
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