In Between Altered States is a zine dedicated to showcasing excellent flash fiction that tries to bend the mind and think about life in a slightly twisted manner.  This project came about after my good friend Brian closed down Zygote in My Coffee.  It was intended to be a supplement to his website and a play on a section he had devised very early in the Zygote history called Altered States of Consciousness that featured fringe poetry.

At the time, we had decided it needed to be updated and feature flash fiction, but the site closed down before we could manage to get it off the ground.  With Brian’s permission, I set out to create In Between Altered States on my own.  It has been over two years and the stories keep rolling in.

IBAS looks for flash fiction that gets to the point.  It likes work that leaves an open end, that makes you scratch your head, that makes your skin crawl, that makes you want to cry because you aren’t sure you should keep reading because it goes against things you believe in.  This is the fiction that matters.  I encourage my writers to dig deep and to look in those dark places within themselves to ask the tough questions and turn them into bite size fiction.

Each episode is strung together with invisible thread and stories arranged into a nightmare of sorts….something that gets blurry and skips time and pushes you into a new scene.  This is what In Between Altered States is all about.  Enter at your own risk as some of the stories deal with unpleasant topics and have inappropriate word-built images for the weak at heart.  Please note that as an editor I don’t condone the actions within these stories but I do recognize that they exist and wishing that they didn’t doesn’t make them go away.  We speak the truth here no matter how painful.

Enjoy the ride.

Aleathia Drehmer
Editor