Hi readers,
Here we are again. Another issue of quip, another tumultuous year spent keeping our heads above water. To pretend a few brief sentences could summarize the experience of living through this pandemic, this personal and global mayhem, this revelation of just how fragile we all are, would be egregious. Despite what every influencer would have us believe, the last six months have been a *tad* agonizing. And yet, the slivers of happiness—of finally hugging family members after a year apart, of change and accountability and justice, of escape wherever you can find it—those moments have existed, too.
The stories we have for our fourth issue seem to deal with belonging—within a community, within relationships, within one’s own skin. In Sonal Sher’s “Mogu Will Be All Right,” a woman witnesses her neighbor’s love of a cow and begins to feel love for her country and its people. “Gold” by Kylie Westerlind tells the story of men in search of gold, forced to see themselves as the animals they despise. “Only” by Lisa Piazza explores the bitter hollowness of grief and the ways in which we cobble ourselves back together after loss, and “Starlets” by Rachel Stempel follows the search for autonomy within a defining yet destructive friendship. In “Hack” by Toni Artuso, a trans woman grapples with her identity and what it means to embrace her truest self, and in “Slipping the Fly” by Andrés Vaamonde, we watch a relationship between two low-level con artists disintegrate.
We hope you’re going easy on yourself as you figure out where you belong in all of this, even if that looks like eating ice cream in your underwear at your desk/kitchen table or crying as you email your senator for the third time this month, and we hope these stories will help you as they have helped us.
Yours,
Anna Blake & Sarah