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With the autumn equinox now behind us, it feels like time to look (hopefully?) towards next year. To that end, we have released our next three themes for Litro's 2021 print issues - more on that below. Plus the usual Litro highlights and the results of some idle internetting...     ***NEW LITRO CALL-OUTS ARE OPEN!*** Litro's print themes for 2021 are now open for submissions here. Black Lives Matter (Deadline: January 18, 2021) Loneliness (Deadline: February 11th 2021) Friendship  (Deadline: January 11, 2021) So flex those fingers and get writing. If you don't know where to begin, fret not - sign up for a Litro Masterclass.   #StorySundayUSA Blocked by Reggie Gilliard *** "Her curls fell about the sides of her head as she unwrapped her scarf, coiled like loaded springs after last night’s sleep."   #Arts&Culture Steve McQueen's Lovers Rock to Join the 64th BFI London Film Festival by Litro Online *** LOVERS ROCK is one of five films from Steve McQueen's Small Axe anthology alongside the festival's opening film MANGROVE. #EssaySaturday I Finally Tried Popeyes' Spicy Chicken Sandwich by Charles J. March III *** "I was in a bit of a pickle, because I had originally wanted Chick-fil-A, but time had become so meaningless that I forgot it was Sunday."   Look, Listen and Read     Take yourself on an inspiring artist date and why self-published writers still don't get the recognition they deserve.     Food-porn moments from the big screen and fashion-forward means providing a space for LGBTQ+ identities to flourish.         Copyright © 2020, Litro Media Inc, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: 33 Irving Place, New York, New York 10003, USA .

EDITORIAL POSITIONS Available positions: social media, editorial readers, online editors We are currently seeking editors to join our team on a volunteer basis. We run the editorial team with an all-volunteer staff, and are looking for a few more hands dedicated to giving their time in the pursuit of great literature, thoughtful critique, and giving a platform to otherwise unheard voices. Social Media The social media editor will be responsible for running our Facebook and Twitter accounts, helping create a social strategy, and assisting with our Instagram account. This is a new position that might evolve over time. Multimedia Designer The multimedia designer will create/edit art and digital images for the magazine. Maintain/adapt logos and branded images for marketing and promotional purposes. Assist in the creation of Litro merchandise. Help with social media imaging, and maintaining continuity of our brand. Fiction This section on our site is dedicated to our weekly fiction slots on litro.co.uk and litrousa. The Fiction editor will be responsible for sourcing writers and—through an editorial process—help bring writers stories from draft to publication. How to Apply Send a resume to Eric Akoto– Please include links to any published pieces, as well as appropriate social media handles (e.g., Twitter, Instagram).       This week's #FlashFriday interrogates the darker side of desire...   #FlashFriday   BAD QI by LUCY ZHANG He licks her big toe, glides his tongue across the arch of her foot, softens the cracked and toughened skin of her heel with warm saliva, and then presses his nose to the skin right above her tarsometatarsal joint. The arch of her foot curves with an elegance the rest of her body lacks. Your feet are so beautiful, he tells her, the same thing he said yesterday and the day before. What about my face? she dares to ask. But it’s like she hasn’t spoken; he strokes her foot in silence. So she begins to wonder: what if there’s something wrong with her face? A droopy eyelid putting her left eye in a perpetual squint? A blunt nose shaped like a rubber bouncy ball? She reaches for her phone so she can see her reflection in its dark, glass screen, but he places his large hand over hers and shakes his head. Just look at me, he tells her. But when she does, he is licking her toe again, avoiding eye contact, clamping a hand down on her ankle. She can think of plenty of things more delicious than her toe: kimchi fried egg, chewy balls of glutinous rice flour stuffed with black sesame paste and sugar, an ice cube stuck to her tongue. Mother never let her drink ice water – it would throw her body’s yin and yang off balance. No, she says. Stop. She leaps up, grabs the nearest t-shirt on the nightstand – it’s his t-shirt, the one that reads “I’m Senpai” even though she’s two months older than him – and tugs it over her head. He shrugs and shifts his gaze to his phone while readjusting the covers, don’t stay up too late. Her slippers slide against the hardwood floor as she walks. She has never really given her gait much attention but now she wonders if she’s making her calluses worse. Maybe she can walk less, she thinks as she reaches the bathroom, places her hands under the faucet, splashes water onto her face. When she was still learning how to tie red string into a knot of good fortune, a plea to Buddha for a beginning-less and endless life, she also learned to paint her face white. He will like you if you look like a nü gui. The ghost of a woman who had all the right incisions on her sketched double eyelid, now drained of orbicularis oculi muscle and fat tissue, a woman without a hint of bad Qi or wrinkles or blocked meridians, all rolled away with jade, a woman whose hands and feet were tiny – stubs capping the ends of limbs. The first step to become nü gui: her feet must disappear. She glides back to the bedroom. He is still watching videos on his phone, swiping to a new video before the previous can finish. She sits on the bed beside him. He reaches his hand over to stroke her toes. He jolts, pulls his hand back, slick and warm with red. What have you done? he yells, finally looking up. But when he makes eye contact, he cannot recognize her face.             Copyright © 2020 Litro Magazine, All rights reserved.  Our mailing address is: 33 Irving Place New York, NY 10003     This week's #TuesdayClassic come from Samuel Wright and was originally published in Litro #97: East London. Wright has been shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Competition, he came third in the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize and won the Unbound Press Short Story Prize 2011 and the Writers and Artists Yearbook Prize 2011. This summer it was announced that Wright won the Northern Book Prize for his début novel Fit which will be published in the UK and US in October 2021.   #TuesdayClassic   OLD by SAMUEL WRIGHT   393 – Clapton – Four minutes. Not bad. Billy stepped back to his favoured spot behind the bin. He plunged his hands in his pockets. It was by far the best way of dealing with wearing a blazer, but you had to make sure the blazer bunched forward and was tight around your back, otherwise it stuck out behind and revealed your belly at the front and made you look stupid. Under the shelter the girls were already there. Two from the private school, who looked a bit alike only one of them was probably fit and the other one definitely wasn’t, and one from the Catholic school who always came to the bus stop with her nan. The girl and her nan were the main reason he never stood under the shelter, not even when it was raining. He hated them. Well, not hated, but he couldn’t be near them. The girl was a weirdo. The uniform for that school was rank anyway, but she was a bit fat and she always wore stockings that only went up to her knees and you could see the tops of them where they bit into her fat knees, and it made her legs look like sausages. The nan was the worst, though. She made his skin crawl. She was just like the girl, only old, and sagged, and just disgusting. She walked like she was a zombie, not a proper zombie, but from those rubbish old films where they couldn’t run. Two minutes. He held on to his oyster pass in his pocket. He hoped it was just Ryan on the bus. If that other lot were there, Carl, and Joe, and Reece, he’d have to sit with them, but it was quite nice just sitting with Ryan and talking about homework and stuff. And he hoped the Homerton boys weren’t there. They once spent a whole journey calling him gay, and he had to just ignore it, and pretend it wasn’t happening, because once it happened to Ryan and he said something and they waited until they got off the bus and threw a milkshake at him. He looked at his watch. 7.33. The Stokie boys were normally on the later one. The drunk guy was circling down by the traffic lights. One minute. People started to shuffle around in the shelter. He walked round the back of it so he’d be in front, ready to flag the bus down. He always flagged the bus down. He knew other people did it too, but he hadn’t done it once because he was embarrassed because the fit girl was looking at him, and the bus had just gone past. The bus was approaching. So was the drunk guy. One time, the drunk guy had breathed on him, and it was disgusting, he could smell something rotten inside him. Billy edged nearer the shelter. The drunk guy got closer. Was he going for the bus? Billy held out his hand to flag the bus down. As it slowed, he backed towards where he predicted it would stop. He mostly got it right. But the drunk guy was going for the bus. Billy backed towards it a little quicker than normal, keeping one eye on the drunk guy. The bus eased to a stop and Billy turned just as he felt himself bump into something and he put a hand out and pure terror washed over him because he’d backed into the nan and her face was about an inch from his and his hand had pressed into something soft and she made some kind of noise and he could smell her and he went “Sorry!” and stepped back and he felt the sweat start under his arms and he felt sick because he was sure that was her tit. He’d touched her tit. They trooped on to the bus. His Oyster beeped. He went for the stairs. All he could think of was her tit. The feel of her tit. It was gross, like a deflated balloon. It was soft. Too soft. And her face. He’d been so close to her face that he couldn’t even pretend it hadn’t happened. Her face was so sagged and fat, her tit must be like that too. Her mouth was the worst. It was like it had melted a bit, so that the hole was lower than normal people and instead of seeing two sets of teeth, above and below, you just saw the bottom half of the lower teeth and a horrible grey lumpy bit of gum. It was like she had no strength in her lips to close her mouth, and the bottom one just flapped open, a useless bit of flesh. “Billy!” He blinked. It was Reece. He was sat with Carl and Joe. They each were spread across a double seat and there was one spare on the other side of the aisle. Ryan was sitting four rows beyond them, near the back. Billy sat down. “Nah, there was bare gash. It was sick, bruv, honestly.” Carl was talking to Joe. His face was bright and he was doing that jerky thing, where he looked like he was having an electric shock. Billy only ever saw him on the bus because most of the time in school he was in special needs. “Even that wasteman, what’s his name, that one with glasses, even he was lipsing some year 7.” Billy knew they must be talking about the fireworks in Victoria Park. He’d gone with his Dad, but he knew everyone else went on their own and met up with the Clapton girls. “I heard Liban got off with Johnny Palmer’s sister,” said Joe slowly. He always spoke slowly, as if he was thinking over every word. “Matthew saw him. He said he touched her tits.” Billy saw his opening. “Nah, bruv, don’t even talk about it.” He shook his head solemnly. “What?” “Tits, bruv. Man, that was awful.” “What?” Billy leant in, his face animated. He spoke in a piercing whisper. “Man, I just touched some granny’s tit by mistake in the queue!” “Urhh!” All of them burst out into cackles of laughter. “It was bare rank! And her face! She was proper rank! It was like her face had fallen off!” “Urhh!” Billy felt a thrill of excitement. They were properly laughing. It was great when you said something and they all laughed. There was always a risk, though. Sometimes someone might use it against you, no matter what it was. He’d got torn apart a few weeks back for saying he’d fingered Latitia, when he’d thought it was probably the coolest thing he’d ever done. Carl’s face suddenly fell serious. “Oh, no, I tell you what, though, did you see that thing last night? That monkey thing?” “Yeah!” Reece’s face was a mask of delighted horror. “That was bare disgusting!” “Nah, honestly, I was going to be sick, bruv,” Carl said. “I was going to vomit.” “What monkey thing?” said Billy. “Didn’t you see it?” “What?” “Oprah. It’s in the papers. Some lady got her face ripped off by a monkey.” “Oh my days!” “She got her face ripped off, her whole face, like there was nothing left, and her hands ripped off too.” “Oh my days!” They sat in stunned and appreciative silence for a moment. That was pretty extreme, Billy thought. That was like in Silence of the Lambs. He wished he’d seen it. He’d watched Silence of the Lambs a few months back, and he thought it was the best film he’d ever seen. He remembered the bit where the guy got his face bitten off, and you just saw his teeth without lips. He thought with an odd queasiness about the nan’s face. Joe was gearing up to say something. He looked thoughtful. “But she got, like, thirty million pounds compensation.” Reece was intrigued. “Really?” Joe carried on. “Yeah, she got thirty million pounds. And she was on Oprah.” “Thirty million pounds, just for getting her face ripped off by a monkey?” said Reece. “Yeah, but it’s pretty bad, though,” said Billy. “Yeah, but, like, thirty million pounds!” “Would you do it?” said Carl. Everyone was silent for a moment. Then Joe spelt it out. “What, get your face and hands ripped off by a monkey for thirty million pounds?” Carl nodded. “Yeah.” Joe thought carefully. Billy could see that everyone else was thinking too. He didn’t really want to imagine it. He felt a bit uncomfortable. He looked around. The bus was pretty full now. He saw, with a sudden lurch in his gut, the girl and her nan sat three rows in front. They sat with the same hunch in their shoulders. The nan was in the window seat. She was facing out. He could see her profile. Her eyes sagged just like her mouth and they seemed all of a sudden like the saddest things he had ever seen. “I’d do it,” said Joe. “You could buy a flat screen TV.” Carl jeered at him. “What! That’s bare stupid. You’ve got no eyes, bruv, your whole face is ripped off. You don’t even have no hands to change channels!” They all began jeering too. Joe struggled against the noise to say “I don’t care, I’d do it!” Billy was silent. The noise was sharp and brutal. He looked at Carl’s crazy little face, all twisted and laughing. He felt an odd lightness. His hand rested on the bus seat, and he felt the fabric under it. The sun glinted on the windows of the parked cars they passed, and the bus engine chuntered and roared. He lifted a hand to touch his face, and imagined it old.       OUR MASTERCLASSES START 19TH SEPTEMBER! SIGNUP AND LEARN FROM AWARD WINNING TUTORS!     Copyright © 2020 Litro Magazine, All rights reserved.  Our mailing address is: 33 Irving Place New York, NY 10003 September Online Masterclasses Starting Soon!   Dear Friend, It's officially September, which means that Litro's online masterclasses begin this month! If you don't already know, our new online writing courses provide an opportunity for you to improve your craft, learn new skills, and gain confidence in your writing through direct guidance and feedback from award-winning authors.      Visit litromasterclasses.com to sign up and learn more about our exciting opportunities!   Upcoming September courses: Award-winning Flash Fiction Course ...with Catherine McNamara Writing for Resistance ...with Maria Thomas How to Fit Writing Into Your Life ...with Hayley Webster Nourishing Your Creative Writing From Home ...with Sarah Moore Fitzgerald Short Story Lab ...with Maria Thomas How to Become a Successful Writer ...with Inés G. Labarta How to Break Writer's Block ...with Andrew Blackman How to Successfully Edit Your Writing ...with Gabriel Gbadamosi     Copyright © 2020 *Litro Media Inc, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: 33 Irving Place New York, NY  10003