Fiddleblack #7 is a unique issue of our digital journal for several reasons. By some count, this issue is an interruption to our quarterly schedule. With Fiddleblack #6 having just seen release last month, we’re releasing more content as a sort of carry-over while we finalize the slightly delayed Fiddleblack Annual #1: Apparitional Experience.

Further, this issue is the first of ours to feature work by Fiddleblack contributing editor Michael Walsh. We congratulate him on his recent chapbook release, Sleepwalks from Dragonfly Press.

Thematically speaking, there is no tie between these entries. Mr. Walsh taps the antipastoral through a dreamtime landscape, and Dom Blanc follows suit, cracking open an anxious Earth. Eric Bosse channels a fine Chuck Palahniuk in “The Master of Submission,” and Ezra Carlsen returns to Fiddleblack, having given us a year to recover from his apocalyptic “The Big One,” for yet another Gen-Y doom-catcher, “End Times: A Before and After.”

Finally, Elias Marsten and Rob Bass bring us the basis for this issue’s in-which-wherein. Marsten’s faithfully depressive “Rushup Edge” delivers us a question of faith. Rob Bass, a transcendent student of Infinite Jest, is completely on point in “A Shower of Commanded Tears,” illustrating Texas, The Onion, persistent pop culture, and perhaps one of the leanest endings in Fiddleblack history.

Happy something.