Apex Magazine Issue 141: Apex Magazine, #141

By Lesley Conner

Strange. Surreal. Shocking. Beautiful.

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.

We publish every other month.

Issue 141 contains the following short stories, essays, reviews, and interviews.

 

EDITORIAL
Musings from Maryland by Lesley Conner

 

ORIGINAL SHORT FICTION
Hole World by J.S. Breukelaar
Nightglow Pizza by A.M. Lomuscio
Homewrecker by E. Catherine Tobler
All the Good You Did Not Do by Jolie Toomajan
Papas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Slug Monsters by Erica Satifka
Twenty Pieces of Documentation Presented to the Emergency Committee on the Study and Understanding of the M3D1154 Contagion by Damien Angelica Walters

 

FLASH FICTION
Wet, Dry, Bitter by Leah Ning
Woman Embracing Woman, on Loan From Private Collection by Liv Strom

 

CLASSIC FICTION
Bettina by R.J. Joseph
Birds by Zin E. Rocklyn

 

NONFICTION
Dog is in the Details by Sarah Pinsker
Between the Dreaming and the Dead by Leanna Renee Hieber
Words for Thought: Short Fiction Review by AC Wise

 

INTERVIEWS
Interview with Author J.S. Breukelaar by Marissa van Uden
Interview with Author Jolie Toomajan by Marissa van Uden
Interview with Cover Artist Peter Mohrbacher by Bradley Powers

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apex Book Company
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223382249

Book preview

Apex Magazine

APEX MAGAZINE

ISSUE 141

J.S. BREUKELAAR A.M. LOMUSCIO E. CATHERINE TOBLER JOLIE TOOMAJAN ERICA SATIFKA DAMIEN ANGELICA WALTERS LEAH NING LIV STROM R.J. JOSEPH ZIN E. ROCKLYN SARAH PINSKER LEANNA RENEE HIEBER A.C. WISE

Edited by

LESLEY CONNER

CONTENTS

Editorial

Musings from Maryland

Lesley Conner

Original Fiction

Hole World

J.S. Breukelaar

Nightglow Pizza

A.M. Lomuscio

Homewrecker

E. Catherine Tobler

All the Good You Did Not Do

Jolie Toomajan

Papas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Slug Monsters

Erica Satifka

Twenty Pieces of Documentation Presented to the Emergency Committee on the Study and Understanding of the M3D1154 Contagion

Damien Angelica Walters

Flash Fiction

Wet, Dry, Bitter

Leah Ning

Woman Embracing Woman, on Loan From Private Collection

Liv Strom

Classic Fiction

Bettina

R.J. Joseph

Birds

Zin E. Rocklyn

Nonfiction

Dog is in the Details

Sarah Pinsker

Between the Dreaming and the Dead

Leanna Renee Hieber

Reviews

Words for Thought: Short Fiction Review

A.C. Wise

Interviews

Interview with Author J.S. Breukelaar

Marissa van Uden

Interview with Author Jolie Toomajan

Marissa van Uden

Interview with Artist Peter Mohrbacher

Bradley Powers

Miscellaneous

Subscriptions

Patreon

The Apex Magazine Team

Copyright

Stay Connected

EDITORIAL

MUSINGS FROM MARYLAND

1,000 WORDS

LESLEY CONNER

Welcome to issue 141. As 2023 winds down, we all should be slowing a bit, settling in for a cozy holiday season, reflecting on the year that is nearly passed and planning for the new year to come, but if you’re like me, slowing and settling are not on your to-do list, and you’re racing to the end, completing and tackling as many tasks as possible before the year comes to a close.

This issue is full of stories that refuse to settle. They are loud and weird and dare to take you to places you didn’t know existed, let alone that you wanted to go.

J.S. Breukelaar opens the issue with a fantastic story titled Hole World. The story takes place after the world as we know it ends. The human race is under new management, and any humans that have survived this long have been assigned jobs to keep the new managers fed and happy. Between Performance Reviews, tentacle shackles, and comparisons to 1984, this story is weird and wonderful from beginning to end.

There’s something really special about being an author’s first publication. Apex gets to be part of this monumental step forward in their career. And when the story is as fresh and original as Nightglow Pizza by A.M. Lomuscio, I just know it’s a career that won’t be stopping anytime soon. This story explores the lengths one entrepreneur will go to ensure the success of her bakery. Exploring uninhabited worlds to find new ingredients? Check. Testing those ingredients on herself? Check. Continuing to sell said baked goods even when some weird side-effects pop up? Check! What could go wrong?

Take a home renovation show, an isolated house with a mysterious past, and the 2020 Covid lockdown and you have a good idea of what Homewrecker by E. Catherine Tobler is about. This is one of those stories that left me squealing with delight. It is just so good. Told through transcripts of a home renovation show called Homewrecker this story is a slow slide into the weird and unexplained. The way it builds tension is exquisite. Tobler is a masterful storyteller and that really shines through in this piece.

In All the Good You Did Not Do, Jolie Toomajan delves into what would happen if the zombie apocalypse almost happened but is stopped. What happens if one person doesn’t hesitate, takes the shot, ends the end of the world before it can begin? As someone who loves zombie fiction, this is a fascinating concept, but Toomajan takes it further. This story grapples with what happens when you’re an instant celebrity, when everyone is taking what you did and twisting the story to fit their own needs, when you become a commodity that has an expiration date. There are many layers within this story and so many questions raised that should make us all step back and think about how we see and treat people suddenly thrown into the limelight.

Papas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Slug Monsters by Erica Satifka is a fantastic sci fi story that deals with generational shifts in thinking, embracing who you feel you truly are, and the struggles of raising a teenager. Satifka takes what on the surface seems to be a ridiculous idea—a teenager choosing to present themselves as a six-foot tall, bright yellow slug with barely visible eyes or arms—and gives us a story about a father who loves his daughter unconditionally but doesn’t understand her or the choices that she makes. He is clinging to Earth and its ideals even though he and his wife left that planet twenty years before. His daughter and her generation are adapting to the inhospitable world they were born on. This shift between generations is one that feels very alien, but at the same time so relatable. Excellent story by a wonderful author!

Twenty Pieces of Documentation Presented to the Emergency Committee on the Study and Understanding of the M3D1154 Contagion by Damien Angelica Walters is a wonderful story told through text messages, security video footage, clips from morning shows, and more. The story slowly unfolds as Walters reveals what is going on through these brief clips. The result is a story that makes me want to cheer and aching for more.

The flash this issue is full of potent emotions. Wet, Dry, Bitter by Leah Ning, for the theme of THE AFTERMATH, explores shame, guilt, and the things we do to rid ourselves of them. Just as powerful, but in sharp contrast to Ning's story, and written for the OPTOPHOBIA theme, Liv Strom brings us a bittersweet love story in Woman Embracing Woman, On Loan from Private Collection.

Our classic fiction this issue is by R.J. Joseph and Zin E. Rocklyn. Nonfiction is by Sarah Pinsker and Leanna Renee Hieber. Marissa van Uden sat down with J.S. Breukelaar and Jolie Toomajan to delve deeper into their stories, writing processes, and more in our author interviews. Bradley Powers chatted with cover artist Peter Mohrbacher. Finally, we are happy to announce that A.C. Wise’s short fiction review column Words for Thought has returned to the pages of Apex Magazine.

As I’m finishing up this editorial, we are at the beginning of the Kickstarter for The Map of Lost Places, a horror anthology that I’m editing with Sheree Renée Thomas. We have a stellar lineup of solicited authors including Brian Keene, Victor LaValle, Samit Basu, Celeste Rita Baker, and Ai Jiang, and are planning to hold an open submissions period during the month of December. The anthology will explore spooky locations where bizarre things happen. If you would like to help make this anthology a reality, head over to Kickstarter and become a backer: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/apexpublications/the-map-of-lost-places-a-horror-anthology.

Until next time,

Lesley Conner

Editor-in-Chief

ORIGINAL FICTION

HOLE WORLD

8,000 WORDS

J.S. BREUKELAAR

Content warnings ¹

The Whole Foods where Justin works is a block from the beach, close enough to smell it. Apart from the rusting cars in the parking lot and the blood-spattered branches on the Eucalypts, the store looks much the same as it always did. Justin can do his job as he always had, mostly, except for the barbed manacle around his ankle. This extends from a hole in the floor near the 100% Organic Zone to the loading bay out the back, then past the Allegro Handcrafted Coffee Station—out the front entrance and left to a whisky bar next door called Moustache.

Moustache is owned by the same corporation that owns Whole Foods. It is where Justin is allowed to go on Tuesday and Friday nights, as a reward for his excellent performance. He is the only customer at the bar now, which gets lonely, but on the upside, their playlist is pretty good. Plus, he has his pick of any single malt from over four hundred. He’s had plenty of time, since the beginning of the end of the world, to count them. So far, since the end of the end, a little over six months ago when the last three customers in the store were vaporized into a cloud of gore, he has sampled fifty different whiskies from all over the planet. He’d have to say his favorite so far was a close shave between an eighteen-year-old Yamasaki and a forty-eight-year-old Brora. Justin once tried to go past the whisky bar to the barbershop next door (also owned by the same conglomerate), but the suckers on the inside of the manacle sunk their teeth into his ankle just at the threshold, so he didn’t try that again.

The ‘W’ has fallen off the sign across the front of the store, so now it says "hole Foods’ with the signature apple leaf (or peach) fluttering from the o. They could even be angel wings, Justin supposes. Not that he believes in angels anymore.

The corporate playlist, Upbeat Alternatives, pipes 24/7 throughout the store when the grid’s up. Justin has his choice of organic pumpkin chips and his favorite brand of blue corn salsa. But his appetite isn’t what it was, despite the fact that his chores take more effort because of having to drag the shackle around, wrapped python-like at his ankle. He doesn’t like to think of the hole in the ground where it comes from. At night he falls asleep with the noise-cancelling headphones on that had been a gift from his sister Tania. He sleeps on a cot in the storeroom, which had doubled as an office once. At 9 pm, the door to the storeroom locks from the outside, the tentacle fitting snugly into the six-inch hole cut from the corner of the bottom rail, where rats or termites might once have gnawed if they knew how to draw a perfect circle.

Justin still wears his black uniform apron with his name tag. He carefully washes the blood off it after inventory, which is what the managers called it on the list of regulations they left for him six months ago, along with the thing around his ankle. He sits hunched in his underwear while his uniform goes around in the drier like a lunatic ghost. Sometimes he just hangs it on a nail and it’s always dry by morning. It is hot when it doesn’t rain, and it is always a dry heat.

He remembers the scattered appearance of all those refrigerated containers at the edge of woods and neighborhoods around the world. Communications were still operating then. Broadcast news stations, social media, bloggers, and podcasters all had a different explanation. They were all wrong.

Electricity is sporadic but mostly still runs in the fridges and freezers because that is where the meat is kept. He tries not to think about which crimson cube is Tania.

The delivery comes in every Monday in a refrigerated truck driven by a faceless employee, someone probably kept on, like Justin, because they were good at their job. Or maybe just because they were at the right place at the right time. Justin’s sister always said that being at the right place at the right time is an art in itself. But Justin isn’t so sure. He wasn’t the real meat guy. On the day the world ended, Justin, who worked in Home Shop mainly, was scheduled for a performance review that would possibly lead to a small promotion. But the meat guy went home with Covid, so Justin got called over to fill in. That’s where he was when the holes opened up where no holes had been before, wearing the meat guy’s apron and pushing a steel dolly stacked with animal welfare certified organic beef. No art in that. Just pure dumb luck.

Where were you, Tania? Picking up lattes for the production team? Recording a demo for some new band? Where were you when I saw, too late, your five missed calls?

Justin does not look at the truck driver. There is an amateur wobble to the way they reverse the truck. And they always brake as far from the bay as possible, as if afraid of reversing into it. This means that Justin has to stretch awkwardly into the open steel doors, which is hard on his back.

He wonders how many of them are left. And if any escaped.

On this Monday, Justin knows right away that it’s a different driver. Steadying himself against the dolly, he watches the expert three-point turn, the tentacle dancing out of the way. The reversing signal all but occluding a punk metal mix thudding from the speakers. The last driver did not have a playlist, and Justin wonders if this is a reward for acing a Performance Review. Slitting his eyes into the ashy light, he can just make out the neat opening cut into the lower edge of the driver door panel, the tentacle emerging from it and snaking off into the distance. But how Justin knows it’s a different driver is the way they handle the rig. Smooth as silk, like his sister handled her Miata. The tentacle lashing the air, they back it in right to the edge of the bay, so that Justin does not have to lean in or drag his own shackle further than necessary.

Justin’s hair is beginning to thin, despite the organic Argan oil that he rubs into it once a week. He wonders about toxins in the air released with all the exploding body parts. Maybe he’s breathing in too much iron. Or bacteria from stomach and bowels left to rot in the dry heat or run in the torrential rains. He recalls the open and unfixed eyes of the last eviscerated customer. Thinking about it makes him lick his cracked lips, opening up a blister just to taste the blood on his tongue.

One day, Justin imagines telling his rescuers, these things came out of holes in the earth and started killing people. It was mass panic. The faces were a blur. The air misted with a fine red spray. People took refuge here, in my store. He