A Note From the Editors: Issue 37

If you walk down one of the popular streets in Abu Dhabi, into an underpass, or through a parking lot downtown, you’re sure to find them: massage cards. The small frame contains an image of a beautiful woman, an invitation, and a neon phone number. The people who drop them walk through the city like ghosts.

While we were eating dinner on Airport Road one night, sipping karak and wolfing down parathas stuffed with egg, we talked about how the arts are able to break taboos. There were a pile of massage cards on our table, which we’d collected while we were walking. What could we do with these cards, and the footnote they provided on an otherwise pristine city? 

We settled on the theme “happy ending” for this issue because we love a good double entendre, but also because we wanted to see how our contributors would respond to the intersection between endings that are fabricated and those that are felt. Much of this issue is dedicated to exploring and disrupting the happy endings we’ve grown accustomed to from childhood. Is there such a thing as a happy ending? How do our early experiences of fiction distort our expectations of adulthood? From where do we source our pleasure and how can we sustain it? 

A happy ending is a kind of paradox; we found the submissions from this issue filled with indignance, pain, loss, and joy. We are all forever experiencing an ending of some kind or other, whether it is as heavy as death, or as light as a Saturday morning spent with a lover. Happiness is temporary, but there is a sustainable joy that comes from regularly engaging with good art and writing. We hope this issue helps ease the burden of any endings you might be experiencing. 

Love always,
Zoe & Vamika

Artwork by Keith Haley Robitaille