Welcome to Apex Magazine issue 144.
As I’m writing this, a large part of the United States just experienced the solar eclipse. I don’t live where there was totality, but it was about 90% in my area. My younger child and I sat out on our front porch, passing a pair of eclipse glasses between us. Seeing the moon cover the sun was amazing, and I was struck by how such a simple thing could make the world feel bizarre and surreal. As if this place where I have lived for more than a decade had suddenly become unfamiliar and possibly threatening. This issue is full of stories where characters are faced with this very thing. The familiar shifts into something surreal and dangerous.
We open the issue with “Those Left Behind” by Kanishk Tantia, a story that would have been at home in the anthology Robotic Ambitions, which I co-edited with Jason Sizemore last year. Since completing that anthology, I’ve been a bit burned out on robot stories, feeling as though I’ve read them all and don’t need any more. Tantia has proven me wrong by submitting a story I absolutely adore. This is the story of two Carer robots who no longer have anyone to care for. They have lost their purpose and struggle against their programming as they try to make sense of their new reality. When it comes right down to it, this is a story about finding your true self and doing what is best for you, rather than what is expected of you. It’s a story about realizing that you weren’t as important to someone as they were to you, and dealing with the aftermath of that realization. It’s beautiful and sad and so good.
Monica Joyce Evans takes us to a completely foreign world in “At Night She Dreams of Silverfish.” Ekaterina is a scientist stationed in a pod on a world covered in a viscous ocean teaming with life. Ekaterina applied for this position to get away from everyone and everything, but now that she’s here the realities of constantly being alone are starting to weigh on her. She doesn’t feel right. She’s smelling things she shouldn’t be able to, having impulses she knows are insane, and is beginning to question whether or not she’s truly awake. This story should feel claustrophobic, with the tight fit of the hardsuit and the solitary confinement of the pod, but instead it feels expansive. As if the boundaries of the world and even herself do not matter.
“Down the Dust Hatch” by Derrick Boden definitely feels claustrophobic! This epistolary story takes place in a mining station clamped onto an asteroid far from Earth. One catastrophe after another has the station barely hanging, no new air coming and air tanks in short supply. Rather than doom everyone to a slow suffocating death, Syndicate has a solution—the amenities contract that is renewed daily … or not. If you miss deadlines, aren’t mining enough from the dwindling coal reserves in the asteroid, then your contract isn’t renewed, you’re sent down the dust hatch, and all the oxygen you would have used up can be saved for more productive workers. Easy peasy. As you can imagine, anxiety is running high and making people do desperate things in order to survive.
“The Clown Watches the Clown,” by Sara S. Messenger, is one of those stories that demands you read it more than once. A cyberpunk story fueled by an unnamed narrator who is emotionally, physically, and financially wrecked, Messenger has managed to weave together a story with so many layers that it’s impossible to see them all at once. Is this a tale of unrequited love? Or is it political? Dark sci-fi? Or the story of a person so emotionally damaged that they will do the unthinkable just to feel something? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. After reading this story, make sure you don’t miss Marissa van Uden’s interview with the author. I have read this story three or four times now, and I feel like I’m still discovering new pieces of it and missing so much.
Spencer Nitkey explores the intricacies of marriage and art in “The Art the Owls Can’t Swallow,” a beautifully macabre flash piece. The narrator is obsessed with digging through owl pellets and making art from the bones found inside. Their husband doesn’t understand, and seems desperate to force his spouse to live a more conventional life. Told mainly through descriptions of the narrator’s artwork, this piece is an exploration of being true to ourselves and discarding that which does not serve us.
We close out the original fiction for issue 144 with “The Jukebox Man” by Natalia Theodoridou. This is an achingly beautiful and sad tale of love and loss. A woman picks up a jukebox man at a bar and they fall into a kind of comfortable love that she wasn’t looking for or expecting. Unfortunately, love isn’t always enough, and life has a way of ruining things that are good.
For our flash this issue, we have “Out of Print” by Wen Wen Yang for our LAST DEATH theme, a beautiful and heartbreaking story about colonialism, objectification, and motherhood. “To Rise Again” by Kelsea Yu is a yearning and welcoming piece for our FALLING SKIES theme that will almost make you wish for the sky to fall.
Our reprints are by Jermane Cooper and LP Kindred. Nicole Givens Kurtz and Rebecca E. Treasure bring us their insights in the nonfiction selections. Marissa van Uden sat down with Kanishk Tantia and Sara S. Messenger for our author interviews, and Bradley Powers discusses art with our cover artist Tom Edwards.
We have a couple of bonuses this issue that I really hope you enjoy. There is an excerpt of Cherie Priest’s upcoming Apex novel Cinderwich. Priest has long been one of my favorite authors with the ability to write masterful work in a variety of genres, and Cinderwich promises to be another stellar story! A gothic mystery steeped in Appalachian lore featuring older female characters, this book has everything I love and I cannot wait to get a copy. When Jason Sizemore asked me if I’d be willing to include an excerpt in this issue, of course I said yes. I hope you enjoy it and, if you haven’t yet, consider ordering a copy.
We also have a review of Vajra Chandrasekera’s sophomore novel Rakesfall. Genre publishing really is a small world and Chandrasekera and I had worked together a few times over the last decade or so. I was lucky enough to get to finally meet him in person after his reading at Charm City Spec in Baltimore last fall. I’m thrilled to see the success he is having with his first novel The Saint of Bright Doors, and can’t wait to read his second novel as well. Apex Magazine alien tech lord Leah Ning (yes, apparently that’s Leah’s official Apex Magazine title) jumped at the chance to read and review Rakesfall before its June release and she loved it!
If you enjoy this issue of Apex Magazine, please consider subscribing or becoming a patron. Our subscribers and patrons fund every issue of the magazine and we could not keep putting out new issues without their support.
Yours in reading,
Lesley Conner
Editor-in-Chief
