There is some cool shit happening if you live in Orlando: Annalemma is sponsoring “Hello from Florida: Photographs of the Sunshine State” a photo show curated by none other than our own print designer, Jen O’Malley.

The show will feature all works by Floridian photographers including Annalemma contributors Rose Wind Jerome, Ryan Marshall, Kim Vang and Wheat Wurtzburger.

This is happening Thursday May 20th from 6-10pm at Gallery at Avalon Island (39 South Magnolia Ave. Orlando, FL 32801) as part of the Snap! Orlando Photography Festival. Come on out folks, it’s gonna be tighter than Rush Limbaugh’s girdle.

I know almost nothing about Flatmancrooked’s latest release, We’re Getting On, but the prospect of the Zero Emission Book Project is inspiring. If you live on the west coast you should read up on James Kaelan and go see him when he comes to a city near you. And if you don’t live on the dream coast, head on over to Flatmancrooked and pre-order Jame’s book to send him off right!

Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice officially ships today. Apologies for the delay, shipping software was being a fickle pickle. Click here to order. But first, please observe this primer:

A couple of homo sapiens are walking around in the forest, hunting for some wily beasts to fill the bellies of their women and children. They stumble upon a boar foraging for mushrooms, oblivious. They take aim with their bows and arrows shaped from twigs and tendons and kill it. They hoot and holler around the dead body of the boar. The hooting and hollering subsides and they stand above the boar, silent. They experience the emotion of guilt. Once back at the village, they proclaim to the women and children that they’ve murdered a living creature in order to live another day and that they must offer the creature up to the gods as a token of thanks, lest the gods think the villagers ungrateful and find reason smite them upside the head. And thus, the notion of taking a loss for the greater good, the notion of sacrifice itself, was born.

It’s hard to say that the human race has changed all that much since the concept was created. The last decade began with an act of martyrdom so primitive and barbarous that it couldn’t be mistaken for anything less than an offering of sentient life to an angry god. But the term has also taken on a new definition. Nowadays survival hinges not on the appeasement of deities, but on working an extra 20 hours a week without health insurance. Sacrifice pervades our lives, whether we’re the ones reaping the benefit or remitting the payment. Acts of selflessness and altruism evoke powerful feelings within us. We tend to raise up individuals with purpose beyond achieving personal gain. It’s with these thoughts that we put out the call for stories of sacrifice for our sixth issue.

Artists are a conflicted group when it comes to the theme of sacrifice. On the one hand they’re used to giving up comfort and happiness in the pursuit of a larger ideal. On the flipside, sitting alone in a room working on a story or a painting is one of the most self-indulgent activities one can engage in outside of downright masturbation. Contradictory as artists may seem, they’re experts on the subject.

Two questions kept surfacing in these stories: What are you willing to give up for your loved ones? What are you not willing to give up? We all like to think that we’d give up everything for our spouses, our siblings, our parents. But unless you’re forced to make that decision, you can’t ever really know. The answers to those questions offer quick insight to what a person’s really made of. It’s our hope that through these fictions you might find what your own answers to these questions could be and discover something about what makes you human.

Click here to order your copy.

Introducing the Annalemma postcard collection, featuring words and images from Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice.

Click on over to our print store where you can purchase all five of these handsome art pieces printed on recycled matte stock for $5.00 plus s&h.

Got a college student you haven’t heard from in a couple semesters?

Or perhaps a long distance significant other who swoons with every mention of your name?

Or maybe you’ve got an estranged sibling that lives in remote part of the country.

Or maybe you want to impress guests with all of the international contacts you have by displaying fake correspondences with people you just made up.

Many reasons to buy, no excuse not to.

p.s. the entire set comes free with purchase of Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice, while supplies last!

Washington DC power group and friends of Annalemma, Bluebrain, just unleashed this video on the world. It’s an all-too-common story of what happens when your glass ball tear distributor gets caught in your steamship’s prop and you’re forced to detach your head to fix the problem. Excellent 3D and texture work by director Gabe Askew.

The following is an excerpt from the story Bred in Captivity by Ravi Mangla, appearing in Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice. Image by Xenia Fink.

There were few things Dev loved more than shooting himself in the side of the head. With his index and middle fingers aligned, his nails pressed to his greasy black hair, he would click down with his thumb on some imaginary top-access trigger. He blew his brains out countless times each day: when he was bored in school, while waiting in a long line, during any film without a high-speed car chase or kung-fu fight. He mimed the deed with such ingrained devotion that when he built his volcano for the school science fair, the activation device – affixed to twin propane tanks – fit seamlessly in the crook of his cocked hand, and as the judges made their rounds at tectonic speeds, he leaned idly over his project and scorched himself to a molten pulp.

For months my mother grieved. She wore through shrinks like the boxes of tissues we bought in bulk; their contents crushed and scattered like windblown blossoms from a dying dogwood, littering the carpet and hardwood floors. One psychologist was so forthright as to call her grief “inconsolable” and “beyond repair,” and he said it would be a waste of his time and our money to attempt to treat her. My father keyed the hood of his car.

To be honest, there were times I believed him. She cried all day and all night. In our sleep, we dreamed of mewling cats and beached whales. And then one morning I woke early to the slow gurgling of the coffee maker and found my mother in the kitchen, a cartridge belt wrung around her shoulder like John Rambo, equipped with silver canisters of cleaning products, linen dish rags, and small rolls of bubble wrap.

She waged war on danger. Mannerisms were the first to go, like the nasty habit my sister had of biting her fingernails, on the off chance poison or disease was festering underneath the nail. Little by little, her fear evolved. At her urging we began relieving ourselves in the backyard (numero dos), behind the azaleas, for fear that sewer gators might shimmy their way up the plumbing. She’d just seen a special on the sci-fi channel in which a pack of famished, sun-deprived reptiles wreaked havoc on the diarrhetic and unsuspecting denizens of New York City. That spring, our garden was the envy of all the neighbors.

Years earlier, grouped with the other parents at parties and play dates, she used to tell the story of her tipped uterus, and how she was only given a one in four shot at conception. Dev was a two-fold miracle, for surviving the nine months and for straightening out her uterus, clearing the way for me and, later, Penny. She’d always wanted a big family.

To read the rest of this story, click here to pre-order Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrfice, which ships April 12th 2010.

Ravi Mangla lives in Fairport, NY. His short fiction has appeared or will soon appear in Gargoyle, Storyglossia, Gigantic, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Best of the Web 2010 (Dzanc Books). He is the Associate Series Editor for the annual Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions.

Xenia Fink was born 1979 in Sao Paulo. She grew up in Brazil, Mexico and Germany. After studying Illustration in Halle and Hamburg she finished her Fine Art studies with a Masters Degree at the University of Arts Berlin(UdK) in 2009. She lives and works in Berlin.

The following is an excerpt from the story Fight Songs by Jim Ruland, appearing in Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice. Image by Todd Jordan.

Last week deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department escorted Staci Carson from the agency for violating a restraining order by stalking a lifeguard at the beach, but I’m the only one in the building who knows this. Staci had a secret blog. It isn’t up anymore–her hosting service deleted the file at the request of the authorities–but she archived the content and parked it on her hard drive, which became my hard drive after Staci left and I moved into her office. She documented her infatuation with the lifeguard in a file called “StatusReports2010” and I’ve been reading it nonstop. I’m pretty much in love with Staci Carson now.

I didn’t know Staci Carson very well. She traveled all the time and worked from home a lot. She was reasonably fit, reasonably personable, reasonably attractive. In short, the least likely person to get all fatal attraction over a nineteen-year-old lifeguard barely out of high school. Not that I’m judging her. I believe love is a weed that can spring up anywhere. You can rip it out of the ground, but its root structure, its essence, remains. You can’t make love go away just because you want it to.

The telephone rings and I nearly jump out of my chair. It’s my first call in my new office and the ring tone is super loud.

“Hey, sugar.”

It’s the receptionist, a woman named Gilda who wears wild wigs and headscarves, and may very well be the only person in the agency with a sense of humor, which is a problem since our biggest client is a comedy network.

“You got a call from Jessica.”

“Jessica?” Jessie is the daughter of my on-and-off girlfriend, Rocio. I have no idea why Jessie would be calling me at work.

“I’ll put her through.”

“Wait,” I say, but it’s too late. Gilda’s gone. I use my best I’m-super-busy-this-better-be-good voice: “Tom Lanier.”

“Hi, Tom.”

“Jessie. Is everything all right?”

“Yeah. Well. Sorta.”

“What does ‘sorta’ mean?”

“I got suspended.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing!”

“You got suspended for doing nothing?” I wince as the words tumble out of my mouth. To a fourteen-year-old, sarcasm is pretty much the same thing as being a dick.

“Hold on,” she says and another voice comes over the line. Someone from the school.

“Mr. Vargas?”

“Um, no. This is Jessie’s mother’s significant other.” It’s the first time I’ve ever used this phrase to describe myself and it feels completely asinine, but Jessie’s mother’s boyfriend sounds sleazy. It could be that I’m slightly intimidated: this woman’s got the I’m-super-busy-this-better-be-good voice down cold.

“I see. And your name is?”

“Lanier. Tom Lanier.”

“Mr. Lanier, this is Ms. Ortega, the school disciplinarian at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Your significant other’s daughter has been suspended for a dress code violation. Will you be coming to pick her up or shall I phone her mother?”

“I’ll be right there,” I say. “What’s your address?”

“You can obtain the school’s address and driving directions on our website.”

“You can’t just give it me?”

“No, I can’t just give it to you. Good day, Mr. Lanier.”

I put down the phone and grab my car keys. Love without sacrifice is but a declaration of intentions. That’s from Staci’s blog, posted a week before she was arrested. I don’t what this means, but I can feel the truth of it down to my bones.

To read the rest of this story click here to pre-order Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice, which ships April 12th.

Jim Ruland is the author of the short story collection Big Lonesome and the organizer of the L.A.-based reading series Vermin on the Mount. He lives in San Diego with his wife the visual artist Nuvia Crisol Guerra.

Todd Jordan is a photographer based in New York City. He has had various solo exhibitions of his work and been included in several group shows.  He has self published two books of his work and most recently released “Sleep Talking” with Decathlon Books. Todd is represented in New York by Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art.

The following is an excerpt from the story A Flawless Pick by Ian Bassingthwaighte, appearing in Annlemma Issue Six. Image by Anthony Cudahy.

I gave our boy a photograph of his mother and I the day we met his doctor. In it, we look disheveled, as if we’d recently been laid, been robbed, taken drugs, or regressed into stupidity.  It really is a splendid photograph, from an artistic point view.

His doctor said I should bring the boy a picture of something he might be inclined to remember.  He said it should be original, memorable.  Has he seen before?  Yes, he took it. Would it be an image he might remember?  If there were an image in the world he’d remember, it’d be this one. Might it conjure an emotion?  Yes, yes, yes—of course. Whimsy. It would conjure whimsy. Is that an emotion?

His doctor says the best way to track down a memory is by recalling an emotion and chasing it back to where it came from.  I’d hoped the photo would have brought him here: it was a cold night on a rock beach in Oregon.  Our son, behind the camera, shouted, “Be ugly.”  We laughed and we tried as best as we could to oblige: Laura tussled my hair and I tussled hers, I pulled off my shirt and she took it and wore it over her wind-breaker, and we both made an equally disturbing face, halfway between orgasm and hemorrhoid.   He took the photograph.  It was a Polaroid and so he stood for a moment shaking it, waiting for the image to appear.  When it did, he began to chuckle.  He looked at us and said with a smile, “You guys are disgusting.  If I ever look like that, please just clobber me with a hammer and get it over with.”  He must have been fifteen.

But when I gave the picture to our son, his face was blank.  I wasn’t exactly expecting an immediate recognition, but I was quietly hoping for one.

But hope is a funny contradiction. It has a way of always letting you down.

To read the rest of the story click here to pre-order Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice, which ships April 12th.

Ian Bassingthwaighte lives and writes and drinks and dances and meanders aimlessly in and around Cairo, Egypt. He has become permanently sunburned in his time there. His favorite food is Cheerios and he is afraid of only three things: death, swimming in very deep water, and ostriches.

Anthony Cudahy is a twenty-year-old illustration student in Brooklyn, New York. He is from the South and doesn’t appreciate this winter.

Our intrepid intern has a brother named Andy. He outputs under the name Visual Armory. Out of the kindness of his heart he sent me a little care package.

Why, whatever could it be?

Cards! Beautifully silk-screened inspirational cards!

Andy’s work boasts an attention to detail and a level of heart that shines through and will take him very far as an artist and a person.

I know who I’m sending this one to…

Thanks Andy. Your gifts warm my heart in a season of unending cold. Cyber hi-five.

The following is an excerpt from the story Baron von Richtofen Flies Again by Ryan Call, appearing in Annalemma Issue Six. Image by Jenny Kendler.

The first two deaths, a pair of gerbils on loan from the school, had sent his children into outrageous fits of mourning. They wandered around the house that weekend, eyes bloodshot and noses runny from weeping, and bumped into walls, collapsed facedown on the couch, across chairs, flailed their limbs, refused to eat their dinners, whimpered in bed at night. His wife suggested he try to distract them with some fun activity, like maybe an arts and crafts project? So Gary led them in cutting armbands out of a pair of old, black athletic tube socks he found at the bottom of his underwear drawer, and these the children delighted in wearing to school the following week.

During the parent teacher conference, he offered to purchase a new set of gerbils. Maybe there existed a hardier breed, one better suited to the repeated, but no less affectionate attention of young children in the process of developing the finer action of their motor skills?

I’m afraid the issue is not one of money, but of morale, his children’s teacher said.

The entire first grade, all three homerooms, had apparently taken to wearing some form of black armband, and would he know anything about that?

Perhaps a pair of guinea pigs then, he said.

To continue the story, click here to pre-order Annalemma Issue Six, which ships April 12th, 2010.

Ryan Call‘s stories appear or are forthcoming in Hobart, Caketrain, Mid-American Review, Lo-Ball, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. He and his wife live in Houston.

Jenny Kendler was born in 1980 in New York City. She graduated summa cum laude with a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002, and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. She currently lives and works in Chicago.