The photograph on the cover was taken by one of this issue’s featured fiction writers, Carrie Snyder, in Nicaragua. She writes: “I have a very distinct memory of taking that photo. We’d been playing on that beautiful, remote, and virtually empty beach all day and were just gathering our sun-drunk selves together to get some supper—quickly before the sun sank below the horizon and thick black night arrived (and the electricity cut out)—when these cows wandered down to the sand; we never figured out where they’d come from, but it must have been a nearby small farm. The cows came seemingly alone, without owners or herders. Their presence was surreal—tourists and cows, comingling—though perhaps it was something that happened most every day at that beach; things that look surreal to my eye might look perfectly ordinary to the eye of another.” The first of three stunning new short stories by Carrie Snyder begins on page 7.