Apex Magazine: Issue 57

By Sigrid Ellis

Apex Magazine is a monthly science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazine featuring original, mind-bending short fiction from many of the top pros of the field. New issues are released on the first Tuesday of every month.

Table of Contents
Fiction
Antumbra by Lucy A. Snyder
Maria and the Pilgrim by Rich Larson
Home by the Sea by Elisabeth Vonarburg
Poetry
Sleep Lives Inside the Bed by Gillian Daniels
Nonfiction
So How Does It End? by Wen Spencer
Interview with Lucy A. Snyder
Resolute: Notes from the Editor-in-Chief by Sigrid Ellis

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apex Book Company
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370125159

Book preview

APEX MAGAZINE

Issue 57

Edited by Sigrid Ellis

Apex Publications

Published by Smashwords

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial

Resolute: Notes from the Editor in Chief

Sigrid Ellis

Fiction

Antumbra

Lucy A. Snyder

Maria and the Pilgrim

Rich Larson

Home by the Sea

Elisabeth Vonarburg

Nonfiction

So How Does It End?

Wen Spencer

Interview with Lucy A. Snyder

Maggie Slater

Poetry

Sleep Lives Inside the Bed

Gillian Daniels

RESOLUTE: NOTES FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Sigrid Ellis

This Is the End of the World

A few months ago a coworker of mine was complaining about the television series The Walking Dead. In all the stories we have about the end of the world, he said, why can’t we have a story about smart people doing the right thing? Why do all the stories have to be dramatic and center on bad choices? His question was rhetorical, but I could not resist a reply.

My current favorite book about the apocalypse is John Kelly’s non-fiction work, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death. Kelly describes the mid-1300s using the diaries, letters, official documents, and journals of the people living through and dying from the plague. Those people repeatedly asserted that this was the end of the world. Some chose courage and honor and sacrifice in their last days, caring for the sick or defending the unjustly accused. Others murdered and stole, placing their own lives above anyone else, until the Black Death swept them away.

Throughout history, I told my coworker, humans have always made bad decisions at the end of the world. Why should our fiction be any different?

This issue of Apex Magazine takes a look at our humanity after the world ends. Lucy Snyder’s Antumbra is, frankly, one of the most disturbing stories I’ve had the pleasure to read. The complicatedly poor decisions made by its characters center on sex, family, and legacy — historically sound reasons for terrible choices. Just ask any royal family.

Rich Larson’s Maria and the Pilgrim is also concerned with family in the post-apocalyptic future. Both of these stories feature sisters, scientists, and the salvation of the world. Yet each story works so differently, I felt compelled to give them to you together.

Our essay this month is from Wen Spencer. She provides a meditation on a variety of apocalypse, from fictions past and science present. The world, she tells us, ends in ignorance and flood.

New poetry editor Elise Matthesen brings us a new work from Gillian Daniels, Sleep Lives Inside the Bed. Water brings trouble in this poem, water and sleep entwined. And our reprint, Home By the Sea, from Élisabeth Vonarburg, continues the theme.

Our cover art, Social Hunt, is by Karla Ortiz. Maggie Slater interviews Lucy Snyder about Antumbra and her work in general. Windy Bowlsby provides us with the month’s podcast, Rich Larson’s Maria and the Pilgrim.

This month in Apex, the world ends. It isn’t the first time. Current historical estimates believe that a third of the population of Europe died as a result of the Black Death. European civilization fundamentally changed as a result, change as disturbing to the people who lived through it as the changes in the stories herein.

The world is always ending. This time won’t be the last.

ANTUMBRA

Lucy A. Snyder

I woke in the afternoon gloom to the sound of my twenty-year-old stepsister Lily dragging something heavy and wet up the back patio steps through the kitchen door. The smell of blood and brine smothered me the moment I sat up.

I swore to myself and called down to her, What did you do?

You’ll see, she sing-songed.

Pleasant mother pheasant plucker. I lay back on the sweat-stained sheets for a moment to gather my focus. Four hours of sleep wasn’t enough to keep my head from spinning, but it was all I could seem to get these days. The cells in my body kept waiting for the moon to move, despite all my meditating to try to tell them that the big rock blotting the sun wasn’t going anywhere.

I kept having nightmares from everything I saw in the months after the Coronado Event. In the worst dream, I was sitting in my bedroom when an earthquake hit. The walls would crack, revealing not drywall and wood but rotten meat, and cold blood would pour in, flooding everything. The red tide would sweep me off my bed and press me up against the ceiling. My stuffed toys turned into real animal carcasses floating by my head. I’d be struggling to breathe in the two inches of air between the gore and the plaster when I felt something grab my ankle. And then I’d wake up.

I was a high school senior when it all happened. Back then I was so focused on prom and graduation and other such bullshit that I didn’t notice the first reports on CNN that an astronomer named Gabriel Coronado had spotted a large, dark object hurtling toward the earth at barely sublight speeds. But the science geeks at my school started talking about it, so the rest of us finally paid attention. Some of the religious kids said it was going to be the end of the world. But everyone else figured it would be like one of those big-budget movies where they send a heroic team of astronauts up with good old American nukes to blow the comet/asteroid/spaceship to smithereens before it reaches the Earth.

I think NASA and the Pentagon tried to pull some kind of mission together. Or at least that’s what they told the media to try to calm people down. Their astrophysicists told them the big black object out there was going to pass by, so they probably figured they just had to keep people from looting and committing mass suicide.

And it did miss us by half a million miles. But it was so huge and moving so fast it