Earthly Playing Field

Love and revolution in a crumbling world order. Roma has a steady job, a mortgage, and a surrogate family in Queens. But as she moves through her daily routines, the powerful Empire that rules her world bares its teeth elsewhere—crushing freedom movements across the planet, including the Punjabi farmers' uprising where her younger brother struggles on the frontlines. Roma's life is upended when her older brother entrusts her with a strange gift: an ordinary-looking plant that manifests a sophisticated bioengineered technology. The 'cell' opens a portal for an extraterrestrial spirit-body bearing news of a liberated future–and the potential to hack AI warfare—propelling Roma and her family into the core of a rising resistance. As dreams and dialectics converge, Roma meditates on the role of faith—ruminating on mystic poetics and anticolonial legacies while yearning for a bewitching woman whose heart will only ever belong to the revolution.

Radhika Singh is a writer and editor living in Queens, New York. Her fiction speculates on the presence of magic in this world, the connection to spirit and consciousness, and the power of the people to organize for collective liberation. Her novel Weirdly Tuned Antennae, winner of the 2025 Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest, is forthcoming from FC2 Press; an excerpt was featured in the 2024 Genre issue of The Markaz Review. Her comic Leila Khaled & the Struggle for Liberation, created in collaboration with illustrator Samita Chatterjee, appeared in the 2024 Trade/ Trade Off issue of Comixense magazine. For more information visit: rhsingh.work.