Introduction Jim Hicks SPRING FORWARD, FALL BACK. As mnemonics go, one of the best, as equipment for living, not the recipe we need. Though this issue hits the bookstands the day after we spin the clocks ahead, if springing forward is what you’re looking for, you’ve come to the wrong place. Many things must change, given where we’ve been, yet none of that will happen unless we come to terms with what we’ve learned. And it isn’t the lies, the self-dealing, the rancor, or even, at some level, the damage done, the lives ended, the fortunes ruined, the friends and family lost. All of that still burns, how could it not, and nothing will be forgotten, because how could it be? Yet what is truly essential, what must at last be confronted, was delivered to us drop by drop during this interminable succession of isolated days, a truth that 2020 hindsight cannot not reveal. Though elsewhere there will be other versions, in the United States that truth is simple: this country is nothing like what we once believed it to be, nothing of what we too proudly pretended it was. This was a stress test, and we fractured, everywhere. Only by facing it down can we hope to mend anything at all, to earn back some sliver of credibility before ourselves and the world. So that’s what we focus on here. On the essential solitude of Edie Meidav’s delivery girl, and on the old clothes and grandmothers offered by Nina Payne — because stories are, after all, the clay of memory. And on the voice of Anarcha Wescott, resurrected by Joanne Godley, and on the sibling song of Tera Joy Cole — essays that record the clinical cruelty power reserves for bodies not seen as fully human. When it comes to Bible history, frankly, I can’t tell the players without a scorecard, but I do believe that poet Robert Whitehead is on to something when he figures both David and Lilith play for our side. And from across the pond we bring you stories that sound much like the blight next door: the first of Andrea Bajani’s novels to appear in English, in Elizabeth Harris’s meticulous, lyrical translation, unearths predatory neoliberalism through the search of a son for his estranged mother. With Alice Guthrie’s in-your-face rendering of Hisham Bustani’s Arabic, we see, hear, and feel a tale of migrant survival and shame in Fortress Europe. (If it had been possible to issue a patent for exploitation, I’m sure we would’ve, but apparently that invention is older than the world.) The question is — as Linda Dittmar’s story of haunted Israeli forests [End Page 5] and Vyacheslav Kupriyanov’s hymn to Russian amnesia (in English by Dasha C. Nisula) suggest — what of our histories do we even remember, and who is doing the remembering? Or, as the catastrophe fiction of Joanna Luloff suggests, whether soon we will have words to describe it at all. If so, poems like Jamaica Baldwin’s “Naturally” or Uma Menon’s “We Play Charades” will be where our future is found. If there is one thing the revelation time of 2020 has taught us, it’s that those who suffer most lead the way. After all, they see it most clearly: for those who’ve long lived it, none of this was revelation at all. We know who has done most of the dying, we know who is responsible for those deaths, and we also know who liberated the White House. Let us then witness the images of protest and glory brought to our pages by Adrienne Waheed and see these photos as both mark and promise, time served and time future. As we meditate on what has brought us to this pass, we must also see beyond the impasse. In a timeless tale by Víctor Català/Caterina Albert i Paradíse, brought into English by Peter Bush, and in a new story from Amaia Gabantxo, women fight back against abuse, and by opposing end it. There is a way forward, but it will come only through struggle against the...