Here it is: Issue 2, ripe and ready in your hot little hands. At least, we hope your hands are hot, because ours are bloody freezing. We nurtured this issue into being through an exceptionally long and chilly Scottish winter, fuelled solely by triple-shot cappuccinos and large house wines. And holy hell, it was worth it.

We do not have themes for our issues. Issue 2’s contents were selected by no other criteria than plain brilliance. Imagine our joy when we noticed that the stories we’d accepted did appear to have some common themes: families and childhood, domestic settings offset by the magical or bizarre, and creatures scattering their footprints throughout the text. And so our retrospective theme was born: Teething Beasts. We pay tribute to our authors’ uncanny ability to feed into one another through this writing of the strange and the familiar, the tame and the wild; a fantastical, haunting, biting, beautiful zoo of domesticated monsters. We hope you enjoy these Teething Beasts as much as we do.

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