When we say this issue digs deep, we mean to the marrow. These stories pluck at the spider silk of lineage and connection. They tease out the tensions between family portraits, reject bitter histories, and practice remembrance in the face of loss. They unearth a terrible and lovely inheritance of the human condition: we are not alone. What echoes do our choices project into the world? What echoes buffet us from the past? This unruly archive reveals, with bone-cutting intimacy, what—for better or for worse—binds us to one another.

Cut your teeth on our Pioneering Writer Feature with Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of the richly subversive and bestselling Mexican Gothic, as well as a never-before-seen excerpt of her upcoming novel Velvet Was the Night. For fiction, check out William Pei Shih’s familial drama “My Son” and Valerie San Filippo’s micro-gothic flash, “Housekeeper.” For poetry, stick close to the transformative pieces of our Community Feature with the Octavia Project and the lovely, devastatingly queer lyrics of Eric Tran. And don’t forget the graphic short story—you’ll find not one, but two gorgeous comics in these pages.

When we say legacy, we mean ancestry, contemporaneity, futurity. We mean our roots are just the beginning. We mean pluck the threads of this issue with us, and see where its ripples lead you.