What’s in the Hole?

Hello hello! My God it’s been a while. This is Carolyn writing all the way from medical school in Chicago, and boy it’s been a couple of real months since I last drafted anything coherent that wasn’t an abstract, a health policy paper, or a not-so-desperately worded summer research request. It’s good to be back with all you wyrms. And welcome to the December HOLE!

I won’t wish you Merry Christmas just yet- that’s a little further down the line, on the 15th- but I can certainly hope that you’ve all had a lovely fall season now that the wheel is turning steadily to winter. I’m the type to reflect a little more at the end of the year just to see how things have gone— what went well, what didn’t go so hot. And I can say as the end of the year approaches that in addition to the myriad things going on in the world right now that are good, kinda good, and really-not-very-good-at-all, WYRMHOLE has been one of the best things that I’ve jumped into for a very long time. 

Iz and I started the Discord server that would become WYRMHOLE on a summer afternoon in NYC. It wasn’t the HOLE package deal you see now— recs, letters, moomins, and so on— but more of a thoughtful, “sure-would-be-nice” kind of sentiment (as sentimental either of us can be, which honestly varies by the minute.) Sometime later, I messaged Tia because we shared a lot of similar reading tastes on the Clarkesworld Discord server— maybe we could make a book club? Sure, Tia said. But why not add more people? Then we added Tina over a lunch of okonomiyaki, Tina pulled in Sara, I pulled in Arula and Haley. The idea of a litmag/newsletter was born in that very server, as was the WYRMHOLE name, and now we were on a roll. (Or in a hole.)

Looking back now on these few short months, I’ve been so impressed with what we’ve managed to accomplish with YOU, wyrms! It’s been incredible to see all the support we’ve received since we started this little community. WYRMHOLE takes a lot of work to run, given our collection of Actual Real Time Jobs, and you truly are what keeps the HOLE going ever onwards into the void. So without further ado, here’s our announcement for December from all the Editors:

To our WYRMTASTIC Patrons, 

Thank you so much for your support! We have already said this, but we really could not have done this without you.

We have recently had to make some decisions about WYRMHOLE’s future. Our original plan was to open up submissions for original fiction and run these stories for a year using the proceeds from a Kickstarter. However, after discussing what our collective obligations look like in 2025, we felt like we could not commit to the full year of original fiction without making major sacrifices to our sanity. Many of us are in graduate or professional school, or work demanding day jobs. In addition, we’d like to announce that Arula and Sara have had to step down for 2025 because of life obligations.

But! Even though there won’t be a Kickstarter, we think there is a lot of value in keeping WYRMHOLE going as a recommendation newsletter and SFF community. The community we’ve created is incredible, thanks to the likes of all of you! So for now, we are committed to making newsletters on an intermittent schedule through 2025, as per editor availability. To grow our community even more, you can look forward to changes in our Patreon tiers to make the Discord more accessible. Patrons, we’ll also be mailing goodies your way as a HUGE thank-you, and we’ll be planning lots more fun activities for the WYRMHOLE Discord in 2025.

We appreciate all your support in 2024, and we hope you’ll stick with us in 2025!

Love,

The WYRMHOLE Editors

Carolyn Zhao / December 2024 Editor in Chief / Chicago, IL

Stories of the Month

Monsters of the Drunken Shore

By: Nic Anstett; Reprinted from Lightspeed, 2023.

You are sitting on the third-floor balcony facing the beach when you see it breach the water. It rises upward with a snort of steam and sparks of flame, lifting its spiked reptilian head from the waves. It’s silhouetted in moonlight and bisected by the surface line. You know it’s too big to be there. You know because water that close to the coast never drops below fifty feet and this thing, breathing heavily in the ocean air and stretching its toothy jaw, must be all head and no body, but there it is.

 Read more.

Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand

By: Fran Wilde, Reprinted from Uncanny, 2017.

Entrance

There’s a ticket booth on my tongue.

Don’t look in my eyes, don’t plead curiosity, you won’t get anywhere with that. Try it and you’ll see your reflection in my sea-green gaze: your shadow sprinting through the heavy glass doors. You’ll smell a whiff of brine, perhaps something more volatile. You’ll be caught and held, while your likeness departs. You don’t want that.

No one wants to be pinned between an entrance and an exit, unless you’re part of the show.

 Read more.

Recs & Reviews

Carolyn recs…

• Two-Year Man

  Kelly Robson, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s. 2018. 4.8k words.

  I’m going to talk a little bit about EMBRYOS in my Wildcard short, so imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a short story that is very much also about more EMBRYOS and PARENTHOOD and HORRIFIC MORAL DILEMMAS. But if Christmas is more your style, the first paragraph does talk about giving gifts. So there’s that! Anyways, story’s great, read it, question your moral leanings, cry, etc. What more could you want?

Iz recs…

• If a Bird Can Be a Ghost

  Allison Mills, Apex. 2017. 5k words.

  Ok we’re doing nepotism now. By this, I mean my friend and podcast editor Allison wrote this one and I think it fucks, and it was one of the reasons I was interested in talking with her when we started hanging out on the world wide web. This is a story about stealing ghosts :3

Pak recs…

• The Head

  Bora Chung, Samovar. 2019. 4.6k words.

  Reader beware, this is a story only for those with strong constitutions! This translated story boldly takes hold of a visceral metaphor to convey a powerful message of childhood neglect. A grisly, darkly humorous tale that asks a fundamental question: what if you were literally made of shit?

Tia recs…

• The Year Without Sunshine

  Naomi Kritzer, Uncanny. 2023. 10.9k words.

  It’s the apocalypse, but only kind of! This is a compact story with a big heart, weaving together the uncertainty of a near-future environmental disaster with a community coming together amidst it all. Somehow manages to be a comfort read 💜 

  Tina recs…

• How to Eat Your Own Heart

  Gina Chung, Catapult. 2021. 1.4k words.

  A woman cooks and eats her own heart. Love creepy Gothic vibes and cooking? This story is for you.

The Best of December

Cover Art

Good Moomin of the Month

WILDCARD

ANATOMY (an excerpt)

by Carolyn Zhao

!!small content warning for blood, pregnancy, death. small ! but there!!

EMBRYO

The beginning of it all. Not so much the formaldehyde-bonesaw part of anatomy (that will come later and you will hate it and then like it again, play music under hanging lights [you will learn to dance to it, too, in your third-hand scrubs,)] but so much of the egg and the placenta and the causes of death while giving birth will be familiar to you. How familiar?

Well, 

Enough to draw the passage of blood from mother to child, HbA to Hbf, wall to wall over the library white boards and have someone snap a photo and message the Groupme: ok who did this, it’s literally the second week. You don’t answer. But it’s definitely you. This is because you imagine how mothers die. You imagine the way the professor describes it, the vessels of the fetus digging into the mother’s womb in spirals, then the plug of the placenta ripping out during birth and the womb failing to contract (the natural Stop The Bleed! mechanism) and you fail to imagine the smash-cut of after. 

The after is death. Maybe they wheel the mother away. Maybe she bleeds out on the table. You don’t know what death or surgery looks like. When you ask your resident-friend (a good week for her is 60 hours; this will be your future) as you’re both walking on the beach, somewhere upstate, she says that this Exact Thing happened while she was on the wards. They saved the mother, though. “She would’ve died if she’d been somewhere else,” she says.

Somewhere else, as you both do not say, includes: 

the bed, 

the ambulance, 

the second-tier hospitals with no coordinated surgery team, no brisk whisk-away to Operating Room Number X, and

a hospital without the funds to feed a medical school that teaches things like what you are learning now.

Things that you will learn, not in order: 

What allergic reactions look like under a microscope. How jaws move. Why some people started crying after they got shot in the face during the trenches of World War One, but only while they were eating (maybe they cried other times, too, but that is not anatomically interesting.) How to check for a severed tendon at the knee. How, if you fall from the right place and the right time, you will land on the junction between your shoulder and your neck and not be able to lift your arm to get someone’s attention, and how your fingers will close up and curl back like that of a waiter asking for not very much at all, maybe just a little spare change. 

The mechanisms for knowing: you, at your screen, with your flashcards, ten hours a day. 

You will not know everything about the body yet. And it’s difficult. So far so bad. But you pass the unit by clicking on the right kinds of cells that correspond to the right kinds of questions.

The exam for EMBRYO is on your iPad. The exam for THORAX will be on your iPad and a cadaver.

THORAX

To be continued in the Premium issue!

A parting song from the Editors…

LET ME COOK - Connor Price & Nic D

That’s it! That’s all we got! If you liked our stuff a HOLE lot, share us with a friend! As we build up the referral program, sharing will get you exclusive recs, cool merch, more Weird Content, and above all, access to the WYRMHOLE Discord server— with 10x fresh Holesome vibes.

Coming up on the Premium, Patron-only issue: A deeper delve into Carolyn’s horrible anatomy memoirs, behind the scenes on the magazine, and more!

All the warm wishes, wyrms. We’ll see you next month :)