A wielder of the English language can be a terror. How you interpret that statement, of course, is further dependent on how you might define “terror.” Do you mean “terror” in the way an imperialist, authoritarian, and fascist nation-state brands critics, activists, and freedom fighters as “terrorists?” Or do you say “terror” having experienced the cruel cudgel of that Western narrative yourself, that prescribed story that white supremacy carries out with impunity, so that flesh and blood of your kin and kindred are reduced to nothing else but bone?
A wielder of the English language can be a terror. I say that as an American living comfortably in a populous city where I can live freely, more or less, as a trans person of color. A wielder of English should understand the weight of one’s tongue. I say this knowing that the brutal settler state to which I owe my many lifelong privileges continues to wage wars and fund genocide against Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples across the world, all of whom deserve the dignity and quality of life that Western imperialism has so vociferously denied them. I say this knowing that our movements in-empire have not yet finished our duties of ending the genocides we are complicit in, and this is a stain that I’ll carry with me forever, as a writer, as a human being.
The English language is a continuing existential terror, capable of overwriting the narratives of those the Western world deems insignificant. I have no pithy aphorisms about the power of fiction, but as a wielder of this potentially enormous political power, I think we fiction writers also have the responsibility to wield our terror, if only to speak on the terror that the world has become. It’s no coincidence that as the rich and powerful hurtle us further towards capitalist, imperialist, and ecological destruction, the stories we’ve chosen for ANMLY 42 sit at the intersection of uncertain futures and unresolved pains of the past. In Anna Rose Greenberg’s “His Fingers Dripped Like Wax,” an Icarus-like character, traversing through references to Greek mythos, becomes tormented by his traumatic past: “He was lost in the labyrinth which had never left him.” Memory “has sunk its teeth into his calf like a rabid dog on a playground” and “he cannot break free.” Similarly, in T.N. Peter’s “Tremors,” aptly-named Abel wrestles with his obligations towards family, especially his twin brother Cain, “the man Abel could have been.” The journey home is rife with discomfiting recollections, and he wanders through a city where advertisements fight for attention, where “downtown is a giant skull, broken dreams tattooed on it.”
Transience, and a desperation for meaning in the ruins of late-stage capitalism, is echoed in Lucas T. Robinson’s “A Kind, Caring Person.” Levi dreams of parting ways with bad-influence friend Jackson in search of a better life elsewhere. The town they reside in has been abandoned by its once thriving industry: “It is a mummy of a world no longer,” and “mementos from the factory days” populate a local bar glorifying old times. Grief is resonant everywhere; the effect of global connections through the internet is that we now know better each other’s griefs, many of which we have discovered to be the same grief. Seán McNicholl’s “Blue Lights and Sirens” begins in the aftermath of a death’s discovery. Here, on a farmer’s land, “the clocks went back last week, and it’s taken the winter with it,” and the farmer’s wife asks after a boy who is, by now, long gone. The past lingers and haunts the present, and the present struggles under the past’s cumbersome shadow, “like a hurt bird trying to get itself free.”
Where must we go from here? So much is hazy and undetermined in an age of generative AI, prediction markets, and disappearances of those inconvenient or anathema to the state, all that threaten to undermine reality — that treat truth and reality as toys, products, and commodities for trade. Each passing day seems to invite more cruelty, more suffering, more terror, in service of our oppressors.
The best one can do as a fiction writer is to hold up a mirror to the world so that the world can see itself, clearly, for what it is. I hold deep gratitude to Anna Rose Greenberg, T.N. Peter, Lucas T. Robinson, and Seán McNicholl for doing, in this folio, exactly that.
jonah wu, Fiction Co-Editor
April 2026
Featured in this folio:
ANMLY #42 Fiction Team
Kathryn Henion, Fiction Co-Editor
jonah wu, Fiction Co-Editor
Addie Tsai, Editor-at-Large
Dino de Haas, Assistant Fiction Editor
Shuchi Agrawal, Fiction & Nonfiction Reader
Carson Faust, Fiction Reader
Pia Koh, Fiction Reader
Alexis Ong, Fiction Reader
Ada Onobu, Fiction Reader
T. Bishop Navarro, Fiction & Poetry Reader
G.H. Plaag, Fiction Reader