Good morning, everyone! Happy Friday and best wishes to all of you on this fine 20th of August! And welcome! Welcome to the latest issue of Defenestration, which, if we’ve assembled this thing correctly (and we think we have), contains the sum total of everything you have ever thought was hilarious and condensed it into an easily consumable format. (And coming soon: Defenestration, the suppository!)

I just used more exclamation points in that last paragraph than I’ve used all year. Maybe it’s because I’m super excited about this issue. Or maybe I just got back from the open house at my kids’ school, and I’m super excited about kicking them out of the house five days a week. Or maybe it’s the Slurpee I’ve been drinking while I type this, which I got for myself to celebrate the fact that I’ll get to kick my kids out of the house for five days a week. Or maybe it’s all three, and also I’m a bad father! We’ll never know for sure.

We’ve once again filled an issue with a lot of new faces and a bunch of not so new but still fresh faces. This month you’ll find short stories and poetry about mermaids, mystical portals, and time-traveling socks, plus some familiar celebrities (and even a celebrity mermaid). Dive right in! Maybe that was another mermaid-related comment, or maybe it was just me asking you to stop reading this editorial and start reading the stuff I’ve linked below.

Since it’s now August 20th, and because patterns are reassuring, Defenestration is again open to poetry and short story submissions. This new reading period is for our December 2021 issue. If you’ve got something funny to show us, and that “something” is a short story or a collection of one to five poems, send it our way.

—Andrew Kaye, Editor-in-Chief

Short Stories:
Priyanka Kole, “What’s wrong?”
Jeff Coe, “A Not-So-Very-Special Episode of ‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives'”
J.D. Harlock, “Matching With A Mermaid”
Miriam Jayaratna, “A Day in the Life of a Dinner Plate with Decorative Ambitions”
Arie Kaplan, “Previously on ‘Time Sock: The Sock That Travels Through Time'”
Nathan Leslie, “I Freaking Love You!”
Prarthana JA, “Why Laila D Never Lent Books”
Alex Connolly and Ginny Hogan, “This is Dasani Water”
Maura Yzmore, “Midas Clutch”
Rebecca Fletcher, “Glass Houses”

Poetry:
Tina Barry, “Another Server Calls me ‘Young Lady'”
Kim Horner, “ManToLoveNow63”
Josh Sippie, “Bionic Moses”
Melody Wilson, “How to Argue”
Carla Sarett, “once patriarchy exhausted after centuries”
Chris Bullard, “Why I Am Not A Poet”
Aubrey Steptoe, “Ode to a Magpie”
Neil Fulwood, “Mermaid”
Kara Richter, Two Poems

Downloadable Copy:
Defenestration, August 2021