February’s issue of Fantasy Magazine contains three original stories of short fantasy and a reprint of Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose.” These fiction highlights, along with their regular columns, reviews, and video postings—as well as the famous “Blog for A Beer” Friday feature—make Fantasy Magazine one of the premier sites on the web and a pleasure to read.

The first story, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “Teaching a Pink Elephant to Ski,” strings together a number of snippets from discussion group posts, emails, and news releases into a silly bit of writing about the dawning emancipation of Elephantine culture. No, really. It’s a humorous look at relationships and prejudice, actually, and is a clever, if a bit tedious at times, device for exploring themes that are often linked in more serious-minded prose. Loenen-Ruiz does a good job sustaining interest by giving the main “poster,” Jon, quite an annoying personality and teases the reader with only his posts and emails (with no responses) to his love interest, Siaska. The piece is short enough to skim, and it does provide a few laugh-out-loud moments. A cute, once-and-done little read.

“Four fools, fleeing an island of the mad.” This line from “The Men Burned All the Boats” by Patricia Russo captures the theme of this surreal story-in-dialog, a conversation that fancifully contemplates the madness of corrupt society and the hopefulness of new beginnings. Set in a pre-industrial island culture, Russo crafts a fable-like tale involving four archetypal characters: sadness, gaiety, ignorance, and hope. My take on the implicit message of this piece is that each character(istic) has its place, but it is only hope that can pull these various personas together to create a completed whole. This is a subtle message, however, and does not monopolize the dialog between the two main characters: “sadness” and “hope.” One challenge though was that I wasn’t sure the rational for the context of this conversation was clearly developed. Nevertheless, the plot’s conflict/resolution adequately played itself out in a way that was both witty and delightful. Overall, good storytelling.

While this is not your typical fantasy (nor easily categorized), it’s nevertheless an intriguing and interesting experiment in narrative fiction. “The Adventures of Petal, the Paperdoll Pirate” by Paul Jessup has a fairy-tale quality to it (as indicated in the title) along with a seemingly allegorical message—until you get to the end and discover why the world of Petal’s adventures is in such disarray. From the opening paragraph, the reader is vaulted into a land that is different than ours, and one that is ultimately “not right” but for reasons other than I suspected. The fun and a-ha ending (which in retrospect should have been predictable) reminded me not to try to read too much into a simple story of whimsy. Jessup does a good job grabbing hold of the reader by fully characterizing a paper doll and giving her a driving purpose that continues even after the story ends. Once you finally know what’s going on, you don’t want the adventures to end, at least I didn’t. With this amusing and slightly lyrical childlike fantasy, Jessup demonstrates once again his skill in writing, in his words, “weird, strange and slippery fiction”—a style for which he is critically acclaimed and appreciated.