Editor’s Note
We are honored to name “ZARAH” by Samantha Lucia as the Best in Issue selection for Issue 01, (unlabeled).
From the first line, “ZARAH” announces itself as a work of rupture and disruption. What begins with a pen resisting the word salt becomes something stranger, older, and more embodied: a descent into language, memory, myth, and reclamation. The piece moves with the urgency of a vision and the precision of a haunting, refusing to let the unnamed woman at the center of an inherited story remain unnamed.
Issue 01, (unlabeled), was built around identities in transition, discovery in motion, and the complicated art of becoming. “ZARAH” lives fully inside that uncertainty. It collapses the distance between ancient and modern, self and other, punishment and preservation, until the act of looking back becomes not a failure, but a necessary form of witness.
Below, readers will find the full text of “ZARAH,” followed by Samantha Lucia’s interview from the issue and an editorial commentary on why this piece stayed with us.
ZARAH by Samantha Lucia
The pen resisted the word salt.
I inhaled and choked. The Hebrew letters reached toward me. Blinded by sunlight. Fire? No. Smoke. Heat. Voices. My voice, or Zarah’s? HIS voice echoed through my mouth, “Don’t look back!”
The countertop gave way to shifting sand. Or was it salt? The word split open, pulling me in.
Salt in my lungs. Crystallizing. Everything solid, gone. Sand where the kitchen — the kitchen where the — no. Breathe. Can’t.
“Just panicking,” I thought. Zarah thought. Who is thinking?
The sand. Open-toe leather sandals. My feet burning. Salt in wounds, wounds from sand? Fire? The coolness of the tile floor soothes the… burning. Falling ash.
My mouth opens. A thousand voices spill out, choking my own.
Modern. Ancient.
My body shaking. Her — my — seizing. Pulled under, through the space between each letter and moment.
Drowning.
Expanding.
Disappearing.
But SHE turned.
Not because she forgot. Because what burned behind her was hers. Her table. Her bread rising. Her daughters’ voices still warm in the walls. Her name in her own mouth before they replaced it with his. Every daughter taught to swallow before she was taught to speak. She wouldn’t leave it unwitnessed. She wouldn’t let him unmake her life and ask her not to look.
I — we. Darkness above and below.
We. I. Grains of salt. Sand, sand. Salt.
He meant it as punishment.
But salt preserves. Salt is what the body can’t live without.
She didn’t die on that road. She became the landscape itself, outlasting every man who told her story as a warning.
We, they. Zarah, voices. Burning, screams.
Oceans, tears. Countless faces. Where? When?
Kitchen cupboards? Caves? Mines?
Blood. Bodies. Bones. My body? All bodies?
Sliding over the bumps and stutters of the ink. The landscape shifts.
Inside the word itself. Reaching for the kitchen counter, or was it Lot’s hand?
Losing grip. Sodom. The Blue Ridge Mountains outside the window.
Stained by darkness. Gasping as it fills my, her, our. A world full of lungs, hearts, blood, water, bodies. So many bodies.
Forward: the ‘a’ towering.
The void. Can’t escape.
She, they. Why is this…
Behind: the ‘s’ rising.
Turning. The ‘s’ crashes over me, her, us. The salt, sand, fire, sunlight, cold, heat, blood, oceans, eternity, the void, the known, and the unspeakable. Claims us.
זָרָה
Saturday morning. Cursive on a notepad at the kitchen table. Coffee, butter, milk, cream cheese, bagels, chocolates, s
The pen resisted at the ‘s’. Shook it, licked the ballpoint tip, tried again. The ‘a’ dragged. Nothing blocking it underneath. The ‘l’ stuttered. The ‘t’ barely formed. ‘Salt.’ The word stared back at me, bumpy and uneven, as if written over gravel. Pen down, arms stretched forward, palms face down to check for tremors. Perfectly still.
Tried to continue. Coffee, butter, milk, cream cheese, bagels, chocolates, salt salt, sugar. “It’s so bumpy,” I whispered. Couldn’t bring myself to add another item until I understood this. Blinking several times, I thought the word was changing into something else. Not exactly morphing. Revealing.
Tore the page from the notepad. Held it with both hands, brought it to the kitchen window, and angled it so the sun could shine through. No luck. Set the paper on the counter and ran my fingers over the bumps. A shockwave through my arm. When I looked down again, shapes within them.
At first, it was chaos. But with each second, it started to come together into what resembled an ancient text, each shape revealing itself until it became an unrecognizable word — זָרָה
Hebrew. The shapes were Hebrew. I didn’t know Hebrew. But my mouth did. “Zarah.” The word flowed as naturally as an exhale.
Not a translation. A name. The woman in the story never had one. Just Lot’s wife. As if she’d been a room in his house. But this was hers. The one thing the fire couldn’t take, and the scripture refused to carry.
That voice. I knew it. Not Lot’s. Older. The voice that burned a city and called it love. The voice behind every pulpit, every closed door, every correction dressed as mercy. Don’t question. Don’t grieve. Walk forward. Don’t turn around.
זָרָה
The refrigerator hummed. Or was it the voices still fading?
Tile. Cold tile under my knees. I fell?
Hands shaking. The pen on the floor. The notepad had slid halfway off the table. The torn-off list under one of my knees. I sat against the cabinet and picked up the sweat-stained paper. Coffee, butter, milk. Words I recognized. Words that didn’t open.
No way to know how long I’d been gone. The sunlight had shifted, and the spilled coffee dripping from the table’s edge ran cold. I looked down at the word. Not through it, but at it. The way you look at something you’ve been told not to.
And inside the word, Zarah looked back too. Not at the burning city, but at me. Steady. Unafraid. A woman no holy book saw fit to name, finally seen by someone willing to turn around.
A Brief Conversation with Samantha Lucia
In ZARAH, Samantha Lucia reimagines a familiar story through language that fractures, expands, and resists containment. We asked her a few questions about naming, voice, and what it means to witness what others would rather leave behind.
Nicky Bennett: This piece feels almost like being pulled into a trance with this blurring of “I,” “we,” and Zarah. What was your way into writing it. Did it start with an image, a word, or something else entirely?
Samantha Lucia: It started with two things arriving at the same time. The image of a pen refusing to write a word, and a woman from Genesis 19, whose story I’d heard my whole life but never from her perspective. It struck me one evening. She’s taught as a cautionary tale, a warning about disobedience. But what it actually describes is a woman whose home is burning, whose life is being erased, who is commanded not to look. I wanted to give her back the moment they took from her. The pen was the way in. A mundane object doing something impossible. Once “salt” became the word it refused to write, everything else followed.
The trance effect wasn’t planned. The first draft was third person, controlled, linear. But it kept breaking. The pronouns bled into each other. Zarah started pushing through. Every time I corrected the text, it resisted. Eventually I realized the piece was doing something truer than what I’d intended. The disorientation on the page is what happened when I stopped controlling the piece and let the possession become the form.
NB: The word “salt” becomes this kind of portal in the piece: physical, linguistic, even spiritual. At what point did you realize the word itself was going to carry that much weight?
SL: I started researching the aftermath. What happens to a pillar of salt? Obviously, she scattered. Whether it was immediately or over centuries, the text doesn’t say. That led me to the Hebrew verb zarah — to scatter, to winnow, to disperse. The feminine form also signifies something strange or foreign. A related root points to arise. So I had a word that held everything done to her and everything she became afterward. Scattered across the landscape, strange to every tradition that told her story, and still rising. That became her name. The word “salt” on the grocery list is the surface. Zarah is what’s underneath. The whole piece is organized around that tension.
NB: You give a name, Zarah, to a figure who’s usually just known as Lot’s wife. What did it mean to you to name her, and to let her story shift in that way?
SL: It meant everything. She’s been defined by her husband for thousands of years. Three Abrahamic traditions tell her story, and not one of them gives her a name. The midrash eventually did, but those were men filling a silence they couldn’t leave alone. Not reclamation. Cataloguing. I wanted to give her something that came from what happened to her, not from what men decided to call her afterward. Zarah. The scattered one. The name isn’t a gift. It’s a recognition. She already was that. I just said it out loud. And once she had a name, the whole story shifted because she wasn’t an object lesson anymore. She was a person. A person who made a choice and paid for it with her body. That’s not a cautionary tale. That’s an injustice.
NB: There’s a line that really stuck with me: the ideas of refusing to “leave it unwitnessed.” Do you see this piece as an act of witnessing, reclaiming, or something else?
SL: It’s all three. Witnessing, reclaiming, and something more personal than either of those words. I spent most of my life inside a religious system that taught me to keep my eyes forward, to trust the structure, to accept what was handed to me and call it grace. The denomination I came from allowed women to take on leadership roles in ministry, which made it harder to see the walls. I was the music director and worship leader. There was nowhere higher to go. But the power was always conditional. Always under a man’s authority. You could lead, but only so far. You could speak, but only what was sanctioned.
When I finally left, the guilt followed me for years. Not guilt for leaving. Guilt for how long I’d participated without recognizing what it was doing to us. I didn’t even know I was queer until after I left. The system was so thorough it kept me from my own identity. That’s what I mean by unwitnessed. Not just what it does to other women. What it did to me.
Zarah turned to face what was being destroyed around her. I had to turn to face what was being destroyed within me. Same defiance. Same cost. The refusal to leave something unwitnessed is the first act of resistance. Before reclaiming, before naming. You have to be willing to look. Even though these are ancient mythologies, they’re not just mythologies. They’ve shaped real doctrine, real policy, real lives. There are women still inside those systems right now. This was my small way of taking back power for all of them. The defiance was never the sin. The demand for silence was.
Critical Commentary: Nicky Bennett, Editor-in-Chief
What makes “ZARAH” so powerful is how quickly it unsettles the ordinary. The story begins with a shopping list: coffee, butter, milk, cream cheese, bagels, chocolates, salt. It is a familiar moment, the kind of thing most people write without thinking. But here, the simple act of writing becomes strange. The pen resists. The word salt does not sit quietly on the page. It pushes back.
That resistance is the first doorway. In “ZARAH,” language is not passive. It does not simply describe what has already happened. It opens. It reveals. It pulls the speaker out of the kitchen and into something much older than herself. The story understands how a single word can carry more than one meaning, more than one history, more than one body. Salt is an item on a grocery list, but it is also wound, punishment, preservation, memory, and survival.
The piece is especially effective because it never gives the reader a clean line between the present and the past. One moment we are at the kitchen counter. The next, we are in sand, smoke, heat, and fire. The narrator’s body becomes the place where these worlds meet. She is choking. Burning. Falling. Reaching for the counter, or maybe for Lot’s hand. The story does not pause to explain the transition because, for the narrator, there is no neat transition. There is only rupture.
That rupture is also reflected in the pronouns. The piece moves through “I,” “we,” “she,” and “they” in a way that feels unstable, but not careless. The instability is the point. The narrator is not simply learning about Zarah. She is being overtaken by her. She is entering a history where one woman’s body becomes linked to countless others, all of them caught inside stories that were told around them, over them, or without them.
One of the most important questions in the piece is also one of the simplest: “My voice, or Zarah’s?” That question opens the heart of the story. Who gets to speak? Whose voice survives? What happens when a woman has been remembered for centuries, but only through her relationship to a man? In scripture, she is Lot’s wife. In this piece, she is Zarah. The act of naming her is not a small revision. It is an act of restoration.
The story’s treatment of Lot’s wife is what stayed with us most. Traditionally, she is often read as a warning: do not look back, do not disobey, do not cling to what God has told you to leave behind. “ZARAH” refuses that easy reading. It asks what else her turning might have meant. What if she turned not because she was weak, but because what burned behind her was hers?
That line changes everything. “Not because she forgot. Because what burned behind her was hers.” Her home was there. Her table. Her bread. Her daughters’ voices. Her life. The piece gives emotional weight to what the old warning flattens. It allows her to grieve. It allows her to witness. It allows her to love what she is being commanded to abandon.
In that sense, “ZARAH” transforms looking back into something brave. The turn is no longer a failure of faith. It becomes a refusal to let destruction happen unseen. It becomes a refusal to let someone else define the meaning of her life. The piece does not treat memory as disobedience. It treats memory as dignity.
The central image of salt also deepens as the story moves. At first, salt is the word that will not be written smoothly. Then it becomes bodily: salt in lungs, salt in wounds, salt as crystallization. Later, the story makes its sharpest turn: “He meant it as punishment. But salt preserves.” That is one of the piece’s clearest and strongest moments. What was supposed to erase Zarah becomes the thing that lets her endure.
This reversal is the emotional logic of the entire piece. Zarah does not disappear on that road. She becomes landscape. She becomes matter. She becomes something that outlasts the men who tried to make her story a lesson about obedience. The punishment fails because the story changes hands. Once she is named, once she is seen, she is no longer only a warning.
Formally, the piece is daring without feeling distant. It fragments because the experience it describes is fragmented. It repeats because trauma, memory, and revelation often return in waves. It shifts between prose, chant, vision, and confession, but it never loses its emotional center. Even at its most disorienting, the piece remains anchored in the body: lungs, hands, knees, blood, breath, tile, heat, tremor.
That physicality matters. “ZARAH” is not only interested in myth as an idea. It is interested in what myth does to bodies, especially the bodies of women who have been turned into symbols. The story brings the symbolic back into the physical. Lot’s wife is not just a figure of speech. She had a body. She had a name. She had a life behind her worth turning toward.
This is also why “ZARAH” felt so connected to Issue 01, (unlabeled). The issue was shaped by questions of identity, naming, transition, uncertainty, and becoming. “ZARAH” carries all of that in a concentrated, electric form. It is about a woman being recovered from a story that reduced her. It is about a speaker becoming porous enough to hear what history tried to silence. It is about the danger and necessity of turning toward what we have been told not to see.
We chose “ZARAH” as Best in Issue because it took a familiar story and made it feel urgent again. It did not simply retell. It reclaimed. It entered the old language, broke it open, and found a woman looking back from inside it. The result is a piece that is strange, embodied, formally alive, and deeply human.
Some stories stay with us because they answer a question. “ZARAH” stayed with us because it asked better ones. Who is allowed to be named? Who is allowed to grieve? Who benefits when looking back is called disobedience? And what might be preserved when someone finally turns around?
Closing Note
Closing Note
We are deeply grateful to Samantha Lucia for trusting Not Quite Right with “ZARAH,” and for allowing us to share it again here as our Best in Issue selection. It is a piece that reminds us why small magazines matter: because sometimes a story arrives that asks to be read slowly, held carefully, and returned to with more attention than a single announcement can give.
We are also grateful to every writer and artist who helped shape Issue 01, (unlabeled). This issue was our beginning, and it became what it is because so many contributors were willing to send us work that was strange, tender, searching, unfinished in the best sense, and alive with becoming.
Congratulations again to Samantha Lucia. May “ZARAH” continue to find the readers who need it, and may we all keep making room for the stories that ask us to turn around.
Readers can explore the full issue of (unlabeled) right on our website.