Apex Magazine 2021

“Root Rot” — Fargo Tbakhi
“Your Own Undoing” — P H Lee
“Love, That Hungry Thing” — Cassandra Khaw
“Mr. Death” — Alix E. Harrow
“The Niddah” — Elana Gomel
“All I Want for Christmas” — Charles Payseur
“Gray Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts” — Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
“Barefoot and Midnight” — Sheree Renée Thomas
“The Amazing Exploding Women of the Early Twentieth Century” — A.C. Wise
“Black Box of the Terraworms” — Barton Aikman
“If Those Ragged Feet Won’t Run” — Annie Neugebauer
“A Love That Burns Hot Enough to Last: Deleted Scenes From a Documentary” — Sam J. Miller
“The Life and Death of Mia Fremont: An Interview with a Killer” — A.K. Hudson
“This Is the Moment, Or One of Them” — Mari Ness
“Throw Rug” — Aurelius Raines II
“Mishpokhe and Ash” — Sydney Rossman-Reich
“All This Darkness” — Jennifer R. Donohue
“DEMON FIGHTER SUCKS” — Katherine Crighton
“Eilam Is Forever” — Beth Dawkins
“Without Wishes to Bind You” — E. Catherine Tobler
“How to be Good” — R. Gatwood
“Osu” — Kingsley Okpii
“Survival, After” — Nicole J. LeBoeuf
“What Sisters Take” — Kelly Sandoval
“Cottonmouth” — Joelle Wellington
“Next to Cleanliness” — Rose Keating
“Discontinuity” — Jared Millet
“Candyland” — Maggie Slater
“Gift for the Cutter Man” — D. Thomas Minton
“Wake Up, I Miss You” — Rachel Swirsky
“Security Breach at Sugar Pine Suites” — Pamela Rentz
“Happy Trails” — Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr.
“Marked by Bears” — Jessie Loyer
“Spirits of the Broken Lands” — Kevin Wabaunsee
“When Evening Arrives” — Tiffany Morris
“An Incident at Hellpoint Prime” — Norris Black
“To Seek Himself Again” — Marie Croke
“This Shattered Vessel, Which Holds Only Grief” — Izzy Wasserstein
“In Haskins” — Carson Winter
“Whose Mortal Taste” — Erin K. Wagner
“Hank in the South Dakota Sun” — Stephanie Kraner
“I Call Upon the Night as Witness” — Zahra Mukhi
“Soil of Our Home, Storm of Our Lives” — Renan Bernardo
“Robin’s Last Song” — Nina Munteanu
“Godmother” — Cheryl S. Ntumy
“The synchronism of touch” — Gabriela Damián Miravete
“Dreamports” — Tlotlo Tsamaase
“Samsāra in a Teacup” — Lavanya Lakshminarayan

"Apex Magazine 2021 as a book is a gripping collection of obscure and compelling short stories. The international cast of authors is equally diverse as their tales. Many of the writers are best-selling and prize-winning."
—San Francisco Book Review

"Apex Magazine 2021 edited by Jason Sizemore and Lesley Conner is a fantastic collection from one of the best literary magazines online today. These stories are beautiful, fun, heartbreaking, entertaining, and worth your time. Highly recommended."
—Eric Primm

Jason Sizemore is the publisher and former editor-in-chief of Apex Magazine. He has been editing for nearly 20 years and in that time has picked up numerous major award-nominations for his work. Currently, he lives in Lexington, KY, where he futilely tries to convince the locals that science fiction is far more fun than thoroughbred racing. Find him online at jason-sizemore.com.

Lesley Conner is the editor-in-chief of Apex Magazine. She lives in Maryland where she leads the local Girl Scout troop, taking them to frequent forays into the eastern wilds. You can follow her online via Twitter @lesleyconner.

From: "Root Rot" by Fargo Tbakhi

By the time I hear that my brother is looking for me, and has somehow scraped together enough credit to get on a commercial flight to New Tel Aviv, and that he's also brought his three-year-old daughter on her first interplanetary trip, my insides are already rotten. Can't get to the doctor without citizen papers, but I know. I can feel it. Lungs, liver, stomach, whatever—they're done for. Most days I wake up, bleed, drink, bleed, and pass out. I am fucked beyond any reasonable doubt.

When the two OSPs are finished beating the shit out of me outside Farah's (only place in the Arab Quarter with a liquor license which means what's happening currently, a beating that is, happens less frequently than if I was drinking somewhere else) one of them checks for warrants. I'm swaying like something in the breeze though the provisional government never fixed the generators so there isn't any breeze this part of the planet. Sometimes I blow in my own face just to remember what wind felt like.

"Hey, you got a brother?"

Word drops into me. Shakes me up bad to hear it and for a second I almost don't process what it means. Then I do and want to die. I spit out some blood and nod.

"Posted a bulletin. Yesterday looks like. Asks if anyone's seen you. Want me to forward your location?"

I try to think, and then try not to think, and for a second I am really still, and then that second is one of the worst things I've felt in years, so I stay quiet and make a gesture like I'm going to hit the OSPs and they start in again and, later, when they've gone and I get feeling back in my body and start to register the pain, I go back inside and then I pray and then I don't look at anybody and then I drink until I pass out.