Jennifer Rachel Baumer's "Stone, and Brass" closes things in the fiction department. It's perhaps the best story here, about a woman working in a modest joint in a quiet town. She's trying to keep out of sight of her abusive husband, and refusing to contact her grown children. But then she learns the true nature of this particular town... The story comes to a nicely pointed truth about the main character, emphasized just spookily enough by the fantastical element.

The other stories include "The Monoxide Age," by Julian Todd, a curious piece of SF set among the few survivors inside a decaying dome on a hostile planet; Kate Riedel's "Trying to Be Kind," about a single mother moving into a new house, with a scary room in the basement; Terry Black's "Cold Fever," about a couple and their strange child, and an accident on the way to the hospital; and Geoffrey H. Godwin's "The Sea of Oblivion," a sad story about a troubled man and his pregnant girlfriend and what might be an encounter with a wizard.

Not One of Us also features a good quantity of poetry, generally a bit better than the run of speculative poetry. It's difficult to say much specific about the poems -- I liked the ones by Sonya Taaffe and Holly Day in particular. Other contributors are Kevin Donihe, Nancy Bennett, David Kopaska-Merkel, K.S. Hardy, Marc Adin, John Grey and Karen R. Porter.

In sum, a decent but not spectacular outing from a magazine that on my brief acquaintance seems one of the nicer small press efforts. Both the poetry and the prose are above average for the field as to line by line quality.