Apex Magazine Issue 133: Apex Magazine, #133

By Jason Sizemore

Strange. Beautiful. Shocking. Surreal.

 

APEX MAGAZINE is a digital dark science fiction and fantasy genre zine that features award-winning short fiction, essays, and interviews. Established in 2009, our fiction has won several Hugo and Nebula Awards.

 

Issue 133 contains the following short stories, essays, reviews, and interviews.

 

EDITORIAL
Musings from Maryland by Lesley Conner

 

ORIGINAL SHORT FICTION
On the Sunlit Side of Venus by Benjamin Parzybok
The Day When the Last War Is Over by Sergey Gerasimov
The Skinless Man Counts to Five by Paul Jessup
Nothing That Bleeds by Leah Ning
Kings and Popes and Saints by Jon Hansen
Ten Steps for Effective Mold Removal by Derrick Boden

 

CLASSIC FICTION
Brief Life Story of Lila by Danny Cherry, Jr.
Something New for the Silent by Zig Zag Claybourne

 

HOLIDAY HORRORS FLASH
Stringy by Carlie St. George
Triangle Eyes by Chris Clemens
Feast or Famine Rulebook by Anna Madden

 

NONFICTION
Come On, Younglings, We're Not Totally Screwed by Brandon Crilly
Getting Unstuck by Martha Wells
Words for Thought: Short Fiction Review by AC Wise

 

INTERVIEWS
Interview with Author Derrick Boden by Marissa van Uden
Interview with Author Sergey Gerasimov by Marissa van Uden
Interview with Cover Artists Angelica Alzona, Alyssa Winans, and Pamela Zhang by Bradley Powers

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apex Publications
• Release date: Sep 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215122488

Jason Sizemore

Jason Sizemore is a writer and editor who lives in Lexington, KY. He owns Apex Publications, an SF, fantasy, and horror small press, and has twice been nominated for the Hugo Award for his editing work on Apex Magazine. Stay current with his latest news and ramblings via his Twitter feed handle @apexjason.

Book preview

Apex Magazine

APEX MAGAZINE

ISSUE 133

BENJAMIN PARZYBOK SERGEY GERASIMOV PAUL JESSUP LEAH NING JON HANSEN DERRICK BODEN DANNY CHERRY JR. ZIG ZAG CLAYBOURNE BRANDON CRILLY MARTHA WELLS

Edited by

JASON SIZEMORE

Edited by

LESLEY CONNER

APEX MAGAZINE

CONTENTS

FROM THE EDITOR

Musings from Maryland

ORIGINAL FICTION

On the Sunlit Side of Venus

Benjamin Parzybok

The Day When the Last War Is Over

Sergey Gerasimov

The Skinless Man Counts to Five

Paul Jessup

Nothing That Bleeds

Leah Ning

Kings and Popes and Saints

Jon Hansen

Ten Steps for Effective Mold Removal

Derrick Boden

CLASSIC FICTION

Brief Life Story of Lila

Danny Cherry, Jr.

Something New for the Silent

Zig Zag Claybourne

HOLIDAY HORRORS TOP 3

Stringy

Carlie St. George

Triangle Eyes

Chris Clemens

Feast or Famine Rulebook

Anna Madden

NONFICTION

Come On, Younglings, We’re Not Totally Screwed

Brandon Crilly

Getting Unstuck

Martha Wells

REVIEWS

Words for Thought: Short Fiction Review

AC Wise

INTERVIEWS

Interview with Author Sergey Gerasimov

Marissa van Uden

Interview with Author Derrick Boden

Marissa van Uden

Interview with Artists Angelica Alzona, Alyssa Winans, and Pamela Zhang

Bradley Powers

MISCELLANEOUS

Subscriptions

Patreon

The Apex Magazine Team

Copyright

Stay Connected

FROM THE EDITOR

Lesley Conner

MUSINGS FROM MARYLAND

1000 WORDS

Welcome to issue 133!

September is probably my favorite month. It brings with it a return to normalcy after a chaotic summer. My work schedule becomes more stable, the kids are back in school, Girl Scout meetings pick back up, and after months of trips and visiting family, Oz and I once again have hours alone at home. Summer is fun, but by September I am craving routine and productivity. It also happens to be my birthday month, so that’s bonus fun points for September!

This issue, Apex Magazine brings you a series of bizarre and melancholy stories. I didn’t set out to build an issue that would leave you mumbling WTF as you cry into sodden tissues, but sometimes a tone pulls together that is just too good and you have to run with it. Grab a box of Kleenex and strap in for an emotional ride. It may be a bit intense at times, but trust me, it is so worth it.

We start the issue with On the Sunlit Side of Venus by Benjamin Parzybok. In this story, we meet Leesh, a scientist stationed on a space station on the sunlit side of Venus. Earth has gone quiet and there is no way for Leesh to know what happened. No way for her to ever go home. Overall, she’s alright. She has crops growing, plenty of food stores, oxygen, and water, and the ship’s AI to talk to, but she is utterly alone. This story explores loneliness and the need for human connection in a way that is beautiful and heartbreaking.

Sergey Gerasimov is a Ukrainian author currently living through the war with Russia and it’s easy to see how that experience has influenced his writing.  His story, The Day When the Last War Is Over, is a surreal tale about a world where war has led to the destruction of all living things and one skeletal girl is hoping to make one last connection.

Paul Jessup returns to Apex Magazine with his generation ship story, The Skinless Man Counts to Five. This story chronicles bizarre occurrences where bodies are turning up mutilated and speaking a number repeatedly. The first corpse found is saying Five and as more bodies turn up they count down. Why are they counting down, and to what? That’s what the cops are desperate to find out.

If you follow Apex Magazine on Twitter, then you have surely seen us retweet Leah Ning. With each new issue, Leah live-tweets her reading of Apex and it has quickly become a highlight for the magazine staff. Leah gets what makes an Apex story and she seems to delight in the strange and dark stories we publish. Well, this month, Leah is IN Apex Magazine. Nothing That Bleeds is a fantastic second POV story that deftly swirls time loops, heartbreak, and those feelings of responsibility and guilt when someone you care about is hurting. Definitely an Apex story!

I think as we get older we all fear there will come a time when the people closest to us—our children, friends, physicians—will begin to question whether or not we can care for ourselves. They worry that the strong person they’ve known for years is no longer capable of making decisions about their own welfare and we worry that they are going to take away our freedom to live as we please. Kings and Popes and Saints, by Jon Hansen, does a wonderful job depicting this fear. Patricia knows that her daughter and son-in-law do not feel she is capable of taking care of herself, that they won’t believe her if she tells them there is something malicious in her backyard, but she knows that there is. Luckily, her friends, the popes and kings and saints, have her back. This is a delightful story about ageism and conspiracies with a questionable narrator that will leave you racing back to the beginning when you finish so you can try to untangle what is real and what is not.

To round out the original fiction in issue 133, we have Ten Steps for Effective Mold Removal, by Derrick Boden. Told through a series of product reviews, this story tells the tale of a mold epidemic, lockdown, and one woman who is slowly questioning her reality. It feels very foreign and strange, but also all too familiar. This is a very unsettling, heartbreaking read.

The mood of intensely sad and surreal stories continues with this month’s classic fiction. We have two wonderful pieces: Brief Life Story of Lila by Danny Cherry Jr. and Something New for the Silent by Zig Zag Claybourne. Both pieces perfectly compliment our original fiction and I am so happy to be able to share them with you.

Our articles are by Brandon Crilly and Martha Wells. Associate editor Marissa van Uden interviewed Sergey Gerasimov and Derrick Boden about their stories, and Bradley Powers spoke with artists Alyssa Winans, Angelica Alzona, and Pamela Zhang about collaborating on our cover art.

Finally, to help us kick off the spooky season right, we have the Holiday Horror winners from last year. Enjoy these bite-size stories from Carlie St. George, Anna Madden, and Chris Clemens. I hope they help to get you in the mood for Halloween!

As I’m writing this, the Apex Magazine 2023 Kickstarter has a week left to go, so I don’t know how it turns out, but I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who supported the campaign. I know that you have heard Jason and me say it before, but we couldn’t make Apex happen without the support of our readers. You pay the authors, artists, and editors who work on each and every issue. For this, we are eternally grateful. Thank you.

As I close and allow you to go and read this short collection of sad, bizarre stories, sing it with me: It’s my birthday and I’ll cry if I want to.

Happy reading!

ORIGINAL FICTION

Iori Kusano

ON THE SUNLIT SIDE OF VENUS

7,100 WORDS

BENJAMIN PARZYBOK

Content Warnings ¹

"T hirty-one, she whispered. Thirteeeeee one-un-un-un-un. Doris?"

Yes, Leesh?

It’s my birthday.

Happy birthday, Leesh.

She laid in bed and stared at the bottom of the bunk above her, riddled as it was with sticker and tape residue, which was stubborn as piss. The human race could contrive to send her to Venus, but it had not been clever enough to figure out how to remove sticker residue.

Would you like me to make coffee?

Yes, please. She rolled to sit at the edge of the bunk. Actually, no. Can you do hot chocolate with a little coffee and a marshmallow on top? My father used to make it for me that way.

Would you like to speak with the counselor?

No, she sighed. I think we’re past that now. Are we past that now?

It’s up to you, Leesh. I am here for you any time you need it.

She took the coffee-hot chocolate mix, grinned at the misshapen white marshmallow lump that Doris had fabricated for her coffee, and came to a stand next to the forward window to look out upon the expanse of Venusian clouds that roiled pleasingly in front of the blimp lab, aglow with the sunset that would deepen over the next few weeks.

She used to stand here with Jorn, her husband. What was it now … six … seven months ago? He’d made it all of three weeks after Earth went silent, the poor emotional, beautiful wreck of a man, weeping nonstop for days.

It was a process of knowing oneself, of finding oneself, Doris had told her. Counselor Doris, not hot chocolate maker Doris. She, Leesh, astronaut and astrobiologist, had not known that while her husband spiraled ever deeper into depression—a depression that they’d both begun together—that at some point, she’d find the ground floor of her own. That there were no deeper levels, no basements of basements, tunnels, and sewers underneath. Her husband’s loss had been bottomless.

A Venusian day is 240 Earth days long, so she kept to her Earth schedule. Routine is a kind of crutch, and she leaned on it all she could.

She knew it was absurd to ask a ship what its daily agenda was, but she asked Doris every day regardless.

Oh, Doris hmm’d, maintenance routines, course corrections. I’m going to sift through the weather data for anomalies and update our projections, and I’ll analyze the data our ground probes sent.

Usually, you say … Leesh started. Usually you radio Earth?

That also. I apologize for leaving it out. I did not want to trouble you with it.

That’s kind. But I like to know anyway, you know.

If I ever make contact, I will tell you first, Doris said.

Very funny.

Doris made her interpretation of a chuckle; she favored a downward-sliding, complex tone over any human-like sound, which Leesh assumed was a private joke of her own deriving. How does an AI laugh? It beeples.

A yellow glow pervaded the room, and the view disappeared into a haze as the ship began to bounce and sway. They’d entered a turbulent cloud, a big spire that rose miles above them.

Standard pressure anomaly, Doris said calmly, but a good idea to sit down for the next five minutes.

With Jorn, it’d been a separating process. He saw no reason to live. And she—heartbroken, yes, stunned and devastated at the implications, also found vast reassurances and micro joys in the routine of her days, tending the plants, running the tests, maintaining the blimp, observing Venus.

He’d proposed they suicide together. For if there is no human race left … or if the Earth had been so horrifically changed … why live at all?

And so, when she found the note from him and saw the missing suit, it’d been no surprise.

It was a thirty-mile fall to the surface. She thought of him often.

The crew quarters were roomy and attached to them were the multitude of compartments used for food generation. Both the plants and they—or just her, now—were part of the experiment, after all. There were separate rooms in the blimp’s cabin for the kitchen, bathroom, rec room, and lab. But most of her work could be done from the crew quarters.

And the last thing I’ll do, if you like, Doris said belatedly, is sing you happy birthday.

Aw, really? You are such a darling.

Any voice you’d prefer in particular?

Just yours, she said quickly. If Doris sang her happy birthday in her dead husband’s voice, she did not know how she’d react. She had her floor, sure, but no need to prod it for weakness.

The rendition was classic. She wondered if perhaps it might be the last sung happy birthday in the history of her species.

After the turbulence passed, she went about her chores. She took her vitals and recorded them. She made a pass through the entirety of the ship, checking gauges and doing a visual inspection to back up Doris’s instrumentation. She pulled each large drawer of plants out one at a time and inspected the bounty of the things whose origins were of Earth. Tomatoes were ready for harvest. Greens were overflowing. There would be corn and berries and artichokes soon, red beans and quinoa. As always, she felt a wealth upon their inspection.

We should do some canning, she said.

Shall I heat water?

No—no, I feel lazy. She sighed and leaned on the edge of her desk, wondering what she wanted to do next. She scanned the windows, broiling yellow below, purple skies and bold orange-white Sun above. Then, as she knew she would, she headed back toward her bunk. I’m just going to have a little alone time, she said.

I’ll man the ship, Doris said, and despite having made the joke a hundred times, loosed her soft doppler-toned chuckle.

Leesh drew her curtain and laid down, staring at the sticker residue above her. Then she pulled on her VR goggles. Blind, she fumbled her hand along the shelf next to her bunk until she found her tool, which just last week she’d 3d printed a revised version of—it was expert-level now. Were there any other women left in the solar system she’d be looking at a serious market opportunity? She set the VR to play a familiar fantasy: an unknown, average man, not her husband, not anyone she knew, not anything fancy, just a suggestion, and the erotic build was slow and pleasurable.

Afterward, she lay in bed and felt sorry for herself. It was her birthday. The first birthday since the Earth went dark.

She could feel the floor just there, the presence of it, a barrier keeping her from slipping through to the other side.

After a while, she pulled back her curtain and stood up. She clenched her fists and made a resolve to