Heartlines Spec, Issue 8, Summer 2025

Issue 8 features portals, aliens, and metamorphoses. These stories and poems are about growing up, growing apart, and growing together. As much as our characters wish they could stay locked in their favourite moments, life goes on. The same relationships years apart look different, and that's okay—that's the beauty of connection.

Stories
For the Pursuit of the Better by Chey Rivera
An Ear for Magic by Esi Aboagye
It's Charli's Body, You're Just Living In It by Gwendolyn Maia Hicks
And I Will Read to You About Butterflies by P.A. Cornell
Girl Adventure Story by Rose Maxwell
Kissing, Brain Parasites, and a (Mild) Nuclear Explosion by J. Needham
Under the Skin by T.R. Steele
Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine Cranes by Kanishk Tantia

Poetry
Riptide by Rukman Ragas
Liturgy for Boys who Bloomed before the World was Ready by CP Nwankwo
Time Loop by Prasant Atluri
Orbit Decay by Bella Chacha
What the Birds Taught Me by Nico Martinez Nocito

Nonfiction
Outcast and Aloy's Social Re-Integration in the Horizon Series by TJ Rowley
Coup de Recent spec-fic reads by Lulu Vidal