Click the cover for a printable version of Issue 7.
Printing instructions are here.

Take faces printed on paper to the store and a box of black bars and numbers will tell you what you can take home. Swipe a piece of plastic with a black stripe down the back and no one comes after you as long as you sign on the dotted line. The right name on a shirt or a car can spike its value. The wrong name amidst a scandal can flatline a business. Supply and demand play commodities like an accordion and perception is everything (unless you don’t perceive it that way).

Still, personal experience outweighs societal standard. The pictures my daughter drew for me won’t sell in any art museum, but they won’t leave my walls (or at least my refrigerator). There’s a 135-year-old watch in my pocket that won’t be wound by any other hands but mine. Least not till I’m dead anyway. My wife gave me a heart of sand when we first met.

I lost it long ago, but I still look for it, hopeful for its return. You could get the right materials, put together something identical, but it doesn’t have the history so it doesn’t have the value. We put our memories into objects, pulling out the nostalgia when we see them again. The following pieces deal with valuable commodities—large and small, alive and inanimate, the known and the MacGuffin—the objects that only matter because the characters believe they do.

I’m sure you’ll find value here, too.

• Blue Line Run by Michael Paul Gonzalez
• The Djinn Incident by Nicholas Merlin Karpuk
• Bubbles of Immortality by Mark Kilbain Lazer
• Aneurism by Meg Kearney
• Among the Dead by Howie Good
• Obsession by Mary Jo Campbell
• Our Blessed Mary by Nik Korpon
• After Calm, Storm by Alex J. Martin
• The Farm by Michael S. Harper
• Twenty Dollar Bill by Richard Thomas
• Green Shell by K. Curran Mayer
• Scavenging by Axel Taiari
• And She Said... by Devin Strauch

Colin McKay Miller, Issue 7 Editor.

Photography Credits (print version):

• BARBARA BREITENBACH front/back cover, 8, 14.
• CHARLIE AMBLER inner front cover, 11, 16, 20.
• BARIS AZMAN page 3.
• JENNY DOWNING page 6.
• NOJHAN pages 17, 23.
• DANIEL LOBO page 25.
• ADAM GILES inner back cover.
• Layout and design by Jason M. Heim.