The inaugural issue of M E N A C E is full of split and nested selves. A cerebral queen engages in dialogue with her head and heart and other parts. A lonely ecosystem gobbles up different people and hosts their jostling desires. As we made this issue, themes of birth and decay emerged, which reinforce the overarching theme of splitting selves. Decay is a disintegration of the self; birth is a kind of parthenogenesis, a division of mother into offspring. Birth and decay entwine from the first piece, Chloe Adina’s “Roe,” where one half of the speaker’s body carries eggs while the other half ferments, to the last piece, Yena Sharma Purmasir’s “MAIDEN NAMES,” where the mother creates “new life out of old body.” Birth and decay transcend organic matter in Edward Michael Supranowicz’s art, nested Rorschach tests that challenge our notions of form. And decay and fermentation achieve a state of rapture in nat raum’s “libations.” Throughout the issue, split selves howl, cavort, undo, and rebirth their worlds.

M E N A C E is a rebirth, a response to the splitting of the self. People on the margins are often compelled to exile parts of themselves for survival. This existence is a horror. Resisting it requires birthing a “weird” self that ranges from unlikable to  monstrous, a “weird” as great and terrible as Grendel’s mother stealing men to eat. Becoming “weird” to survive and love and thrive amidst horror is fateful in the Old Norse sense of “wyrd”—a fate that is awful and full of awe, a brush with sublimity and doom, as in Ting Huang’s “Those Red Days.” These fateful split selves also haunt the work that inspires our mission at M E N A C E, like the fractured femmes of Black Swan (though when it comes to art about ballet, we prefer Anna Antongiorgi’s “STAGE NOTES”) and the cursed wives of Rebecca, in which the first Mrs. de Winter bares her teeth from beyond the grave at her successor, to scare and seduce her—and the reader.

M E N A C E is also a response to an artificial splitting between “genre” and “the literary.” Compared to literary fiction, which depicts the “real world,” contemporary publishing considers genre fiction to be less sophisticated. (We blame the CIA.) Yet the “real world” which literary fiction prizes elevates an empire of structures that deserve to be undone. The work that dares to challenge these structures and imagine new ones is so often genre, where we find stories that, in the spirit of Toni Morrison, “stood at the edge and claimed it as central.”

That’s why M E N A C E is a home for “the literary weird”—work that blends the literary and genre into new and stunning forms, like this surreal imaginary from Jaina Cipriano. The result is a magazine that we hope will get under your skin and eat up your subconscious—the opposite of brain rot, or a brain rot of its own kind, a zombie fungus that takes over the mind with chilly calm like Ling Ma’s Severance or tender doom like “The Last of Us.”

We offer you an inaugural issue that we hope has the range of Jennifer’s Body—bloody, funny, horny, queer, and terrifying. Enjoy. And remember to work from the margins as if they’re the center. Because they are.

Sophia, Disha, Stacia, and Michaella