A sincerest thank you to Venita Blackburn for being our Guest Selecting Editor. Venita is the author of Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction, and How to Wrestle a Girl: Stories. Her forthcoming novel is Dead in Long Beach, California, which will be published by MCD x FSG Books. Additional accolades include being a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Award for Debut Fiction, finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award, and a recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles Literary Prize in Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Harper's, Story, McSweeney's, The Iowa Review, Electric Literature, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Venita's writing is profound on multiple levels, giving inspiration to approaching both reading and writing in non-traditional ways, breaking standard structures to reveal the power of literature. Truthful. We are so thankful to her for being a part of the Wigleaf Top 50.

To the Wigleaf Top 50 Masthead—thank you so much for your time, thought, and care given to this series. Your love and passion for very short fictions and all that it encompasses is what makes all of this so meaningful, and it couldn't have been done without your dedication to sharing and spreading the art of writing in short form, giving readers an array of stories to feel the emotions of the world. Thank you so much.

Thank you to our Associate Editors Michelle Dove, Alice Maglio, Colleen Rothman, and Sudha Balagopal and thank you to our Readers Anne Weisgerber, Sacha Bissonnette, Casey Hannan, DJ Hills, Sydney S. Kim, Sean Lovelace, Ra'Niqua Lee, Veronica Montes, Ruth Joffre, and LaToya Jordan.

Thank you always and forever to Scott Garson, the editor of Wigleaf, for giving such a space to celebrate the magic of writing.

To feel a word—to cry, to laugh, to shake or nod your head—to look around to see if anyone else is playing spectator to the experience you're inhabiting, this is the luminous glow that connects us to the world and its earth. Finding connections and disconnections—reflections and refractions so that we become closer or more distant, whether we want to escape or to feel lonely or to know that we're not alone—all in a page's length, it's sorcery at its best, an alchemy. So let's string these words together and see where we go and where we go will never end and when it will never end, we will all be standing there, hands on each other's shoulders, wondering if this just happened. A celebration and a wonder, indeed—indeed, a journey to the universe where every star is a story to be read.

Love.

Onward we go.

—shome dasgupta