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    Apex Magazine: Issue 30
    Apex Magazine: Issue 30
    Apex Magazine: Issue 30
    Ebook127 pages1 hour

    Apex Magazine: Issue 30

    By Lynne M. Thomas

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    About this ebook

    Apex Magazine is a monthly science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazine featuring original, mind-bending short fiction.

    Table of Contents
    Fiction:
    “The Leavings of the Wolf” by Elizabeth Bear
    “The Bread We Eat in Dreams” by Catherynne M. Valente
    “This Creeping Thing” by Robert Shearman

    Poetry:
    “Lion Heart” by Tim Pratt
    “Wight” by Bryan Thao Worra
    “Swallowing the Moon” by Bryan Thao Worra

    Nonfiction:
    “Blood on Vellum: Notes from the (New) Apex Magazine Editor" by Lynne M. Thomas
    “The Australian Dark Weird” by Tansy Rayner Roberts
    “Editorial: Good-bye” by Catherynne M. Valente

    Interviews by Stephanie Jacob:
    “Interview with Elizabeth Bear”
    “Interview with Cover Artist Scott Murphy”
    “Interview with Lynne M. Thomas, Apex Magazine Editor-in-Chief”

    Cover art by Scott Murphy

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherApex Book Company
    Release dateMay 10, 2012
    ISBN9781476104065
    Apex Magazine: Issue 30

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      Book preview

      Apex Magazine - Lynne M. Thomas

      Blood on Vellum: Notes from the (New) Apex Magazine Editor

      By Lynne M. Thomas

      It’s an honor to follow Catherynne M. Valente as the editor of Apex Magazine. She did a fantastic job. Under her editorial hand and Jason Sizemore’s publishing leadership, the magazine has grown and thrived, showcasing brilliant pieces from diverse authors, and garnering critical acclaim.

      To save you the time of frantically Googling me, I thought I’d tell you a bit about myself.

      I’m a curator of rare books and special collections. My day job involves working with historical popular culture materials ranging from dime novels to contemporary science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature (including the literary papers of over 50 SF/F/H writers).

      I’m a writer and editor, known primarily for my nonfiction work, such as co-editing the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords (2010) and its two follow-ups, Whedonistas> (2011) and Chicks Dig Comics (2012). Academic articles and critical essays about SF/F media, the zombie apocalypse, and libraries are also part of my repertoire.

      I’m an SF/F fan and reader who reads widely within the genre, as well as the current chair of the 2012 James Tiptree, Jr. Award Jury. I routinely attend conventions throughout the Midwest.

      Now that we’ve gotten the pleasantries out of the way…

      My version of Apex will be comparable to Cat’s. (This would be why she was glad to have me follow her). We possess similar taste.

      Apex will continue to shove at the edges of the genre until they bleed. I will be publishing transgressive, visceral stories and poems that show us the best and worst of who we are, rendered with style and precision. Expect work outside of your comfort zone: thoughtful, experimental, emotional, and brave. Here you will find stories and poems that show us a heart, sliced out carefully, still beating in the writer’s hands, for all the world to see.

      I believe that we are in the Rainbow Age of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, as Elizabeth Bear puts it. Apex will publish stories and poems by all kinds of writers. We will do our damnedest to showcase the brilliance that comes from the diversity of this field.

      Issue 30 (November) features new stories by Elizabeth Bear and Catherynne Valente, poems from Tim Pratt and Bryan Thao Worra, a reprint story from Robert Shearman, and an essay from Tansy Rayner Roberts.

      This is where I begin. Let’s see how far Apex can go.

      Lynne M. Thomas, Editor

      Apex Magazine

      The Leavings of the Wolf

      By Elizabeth Bear

      Dagmar was doomed to run.

      Feet in stiff, new trail shoes flexing, hitting. The sharp ache of each stride in knees no longer accustomed to the pressure. Her body, too heavy on the downhills, femur jarring into hip socket, each hop down like a blow against her soles. Against her soul.

      Dagmar was doomed to run until her curse was lifted.

      Oh, she thought of it as a curse, but it was just a wedding ring. She could have solved the problem with a pair of tin snips. Applied to the ring, not the finger, though there were days—

      Days, maybe even weeks, when she could have fielded enough self-loathing to resort to the latter. But no, she would not ruin that ring. It had a history: the half-carat transition-cut diamond was a transplant from her grandmother’s engagement ring, reset in a filigree band carved by a jeweler-friend who was as dead as Dagmar’s marriage.

      She wouldn’t wear it again herself, if—when, she told herself patiently—when she could ever get it off. But she thought of saving it for a daughter she still might one day have—thirty wasn’t so old. Anyway, it was a piece of history. A piece of art.

      It was futile—and fascist—to destroy history out of hand, just because it had unpleasant associations. But the ring wouldn’t come off her finger intact until the forty pounds she’d put on over the course of her divorce came off, too.

      So, in the mornings before the Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday section of her undergrad animal behavior class, she climbed out of her Toyota, rocking her feet in her stiff new minimalist running shoes—how the technology had changed, in the last ten years or so—and was made all the more aware of her current array of bulges and bumps by the tightness of the sports bra and the way the shorts rode up when she stretched beside the car.

      The university where Dagmar worked lay on a headland above the ocean, where cool breezes crossed it in every season. They dried the sweat on her face, the salt water soaking her T-shirt as she ran.

      Painfully at first, in intervals more walking than jogging, shuffling to minimize the impact on her ankles and knees. She trotted slow circles around the library. But within a week, that wasn’t enough. She extended her range through campus. Her shoes broke in, the stiff soles developing flex. She learned—relearned—to push off from her toes.

      She invested in better running socks—cushiony wool, twenty bucks a pair.

      She’s a runner and a student; he’s a poet and a singer. Each of them sees in the other something they’re missing in themselves.

      She sees his confidence, his creativity. He sees her studiousness, her devotion.

      The story ends as it always does. They fall in love.

      Of course there are signs that all is not right. Portents.

      But isn’t that always how it goes?

      Her birds found her before the end of the first week. Black wings, dagged edges trailing, whirled overhead as she thudded along sloped paths.

      The crows were encouragement. She liked being the weird woman who ran early in the morning, beneath a vortex of black wings.

      She had been to Stockholm, to Malmö where her grandfather had been born. She’d met her Swedish cousins and eaten lingonberries outside of an Ikea. She knew enough of the myths of her ancestors to find the idea of Thought and Memory accompanying her ritual expurgation of the self-inflicted sin of marrying the wrong man...

      ...entertaining.

      Or maybe she’d married the right man. She still often thought so.

      But he had married the wrong woman.

      And anyway, the birds were hers. Or she was theirs.

      And always had been.

      Your damned crows, he calls them.

      As in: You care about your damned crows more than me. As in: Why don’t you go-talk to your damned crows, if you don’t want to talk to me.

      Her crows, the ones she’d taught to identify her, the ones that ate from her hand as part of her research, clearly had no difficulties recognizing her outside the normal arc of feeding station hours.

      They had taught other birds to recognize her, too, because the murder was more than ten birds strong, and only three or four at a time ever had the ankle bands that told Dagmar which of her crows was which. Crows could tell humans apart by facial features and hair color, and could communicate that information to other crows. Humans had no such innate ability when it came to crows.

      Dagmar had noticed that she could fool herself into thinking she could tell them apart, but inevitably she’d think she was dealing with one bird and find it was actually another one entirely once she got a look at the legbands.

      The other humans had no problem identifying her, either. She was the heavyset blonde woman who ran every morning, now, thudding along—jiggling, stone-footed—under a cloak of crows.

      Things she has not said in return: My damned crows actually pretend to listen.

      Dagmar grew stronger. Her wind improved. Her calves bulged with muscle—but her finger still bulged slightly on either side of the ring. The weight stayed on her.

      Sometimes, from running, her hands swelled, and the finger with the wedding ring on it would grow taut and red as a sausage. Bee-stung. She’d ice and elevate it until the swelling passed.

      She tried soap, olive oil. Heating it under running water to make the metal expand.

      It availed her not.

      There are the nights like gifts, when everything’s the way it was. When they play rummy with the TV on, and he shows her his new poetry. When he kisses her neck behind the ear, and smoothes her hair down.

      She felt as if she were failing her feminist politics, worrying about her body size. She told herself she wasn’t losing weight: she was gaining health.

      She dieted, desultorily. Surely the running should be enough.

      It wasn’t. The ring—stayed on.

      Cut the ring off, her sister says.

      But there have been too many defeats. Cutting it off is one more, one more failure in the litany of failures caught up in the most important thing she was ever supposed to do with her life.

      That damned ring. Its weight on her hand. The way it digs in when she makes a fist.

      She will beat it.

      It is only metal, and she is flesh and will.

      Perhaps it is her destiny to run.

      One day—it was a Tuesday, so she had more time before her section—she followed the crows instead of letting the

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