until the moon will cast its blindness off
until the sun is petrified
and love becomes as useless as the sun.
3.
You say I am unfaithful. Reconstruct
three feathers in my purse into a firebird lover.
He comes, you say, into my bedroom when you sleep
face mashed on keyboard keys. He comes
you say, as evening burns its entrance
upon the fireplace logs,
and thrusts his flaming tongue between my teeth.
You say
I’ve taken Sun for lover when the limpid heat
slides off the rooftops, runs a sweaty line
between my breasts.
He wraps his golden arms, you say
ray by voluptious ray around my waist
when you’re at work in air-conditioned rooms.
4.
I have examined
my body, limb by limb - this shameful house
with its dilapidated roof. I will admit
I was the hoarder of your love -
the broken cups,
used teabags, empty toothpaste tubes and cans of soda
I never tossed, not even rotten fruit
your hand had touched,
not even dirty socks.
I hoarded clippings where your name appeared
twinned with some famous last name. I’ll admit
I stole your photograph, and covered all my ceilings
with it a thousand times. And when the roof
leaked, your repeated face
became a crowd
blue with viridian paint,
disfigured by the passage of the water
obese with fungus. Do not worry, love,
I never let the neighbors in.
You brought
moth-eaten dolls
and plastic unicorns with sagging noses
to keep me company
if you should leave. I will admit, I gained
a hundred pounds
and have no wish to lose them. No, I am not mad;
inside my body, I am shining
5.
Come, fire-
desirable to firebirds, fire
it comes, it comes,
to take, to purify
to make my home again inside this garbage heap of dreams
stuffed to the seams
with you
I have been free
AUTHOR BIO
Rose Lemberg was born on the outskirts of the former Hapsburg empire. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and now works as a professor of Nostalgic and Marginal Studies somewhere in the Midwest. Her office is a cavern without windows. When nobody's watching, the walls glint with diamonds or perhaps tears, and fiddlers dance inside the books. Rose’s short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Fantasy Magazine, and her poetry in Goblin Fruit, Jabberwocky, Mythic Delirium, and Abyss and Apex, among other venues. She edits Stone Telling, a new magazine of boundary-crossing poetry.
Anything So Utterly Destroyed
By Elizabeth McClellan
What would have been my right hand—
delicate fingers discolored a bit,
a ghost of a ring, a seam at the wrist—
belonged to Miss Clark, believed drowned
in Cumberland lakes, her father to never recover.
He buried an empty coffin, sent her infant hair
for a mourning locket: a jet deaths-head, not dead but asleep carved
(a scrollwork lie) around the skull motif.
It gleams dully, part of an uncatalogued collection
willed to Matterdale Church
years ago and forgotten.
Sarah Clark drowned, true—
and the resurrectionists cheered their good fortune.
A healthy profit—
that right hand, her liver, the still-flexible joints of her knees,
the virgin center between her thighs alone
worth a gold guinea.
Victor took only pieces of the small-framed, the slight—
bits of bird-boned girls compared in life to sparrows.
He would not build a second giant to terrorize the race of men.
I never had Sarah's face—heavy with
Ulswater, fed upon by turtles and swimming things, deemed unfit
for scientific use. Numbered pages, labeled samples,
but no flesh both nibbled and rotten,
however often he scrawled “filth” and “dread”
jaggedly in rigid margins. Lily lost her left hand, both feet,
a graceful neck. Hannah, unlucky girl, will rise someday
to meet her Maker with no head. He chose her
for the port wine stain that spilled from eye to chin, a flaw
made by nature, harmless to his results.
Pity the syndic’s son, growing morbid in his seaside charnel house.
Sea-salt cleanses, but cannot remove the stink
of furtive purchases from men who reek of gin,
churchyard loam and profiteering, flecks of skin
caught carelessly as soap-slivers under nails,
dead girls’ names
hawked like penny dreadfuls.
The resurrectionists reach conclusions,
mutter darkly about perversion and nature spurned, and bring
a new corpse every night. Their pockets jingle with wedding rings,
black brooches inlaid with amber, coins that lately adorned
the eyes of classicists suspicious of the life everlasting.
Virgin, high-breasted—he knew a bride’s cast, even
this Eve who never met the serpent, Cain-marked before I drew breath.
What would have been my body
jerked under current, Sarah’s fingers spasming, rhythmic,
grasping at life again, Lily’s lovely neck stiffening, arching.
Hannah’s mouth pulled slack as a frog’s. I remember he wept.
I remember not one body, but ten, or twelve, superimposed.
Phantom limbs, partly revived, dream of phantom wholes.
The souls toss and turn, seeking to occupy the same space
on the slab, while outside the waves clamor for the return
of Matilda’s breasts, Letitia’s thigh bones, Sarah’s knees.
Victor wept at the sound, and fled, always leaving me half-made.
So Adam found me—too tall for the hovel door, squatting and peering:
at my naked, dismembered specimen. If he found me disgusting,
unworthy, a grotesquerie, he did not say.
I could not turn my head to read his face.
Lust mingled with despair has its own stink: sweet like
formaldehyde, bitter and sharp as urine. Victor, more Pygmalion
than Prometheus now, shuddered when the sea-breeze
stiffened my nipples,
even as he jotted his observation of this curious effect.
The rondure of my belly, stolen from a deaf-mute
never baptized, was the horizon silhouetting an army of devils yet unborn.
One cannot trust the female of the species to keep compacts made
by the male, to leave civilization at peace, to accept exile in a country
of endless light, a cave of verdant greenery, a bed of leaves
and diet of berries. I would have been happy with an Eden
carved out in another land, too remote to further trouble
Victor’s dreams. I think I would have been happy.
The stone beach ran with congealed blood, infused with salt water,
the screams indistinguishable, pack-howls hurled at the moon.
I had no voice to cry out, even before he dashed poor Hannah’s head,
ripped from Lily’s neck, against a rock until it ceased to breathe.
Sarah’s nails clung to algae, found no purchase, sank. The other hand?
Crushed under Victor’s boot like a scuttl
ing crab as it scrabbled to flee.
What safety it sought no one can know. The same coins that bought
our body purchased driftwood, lamp oil, and inattention;
the promontory blazed bright, then stank of spoiled pork for weeks.
A child brought its mother a shell the next season,
a curiously polished, smooth thing, plucked from Thorso harbor.
Thus the smallest toe of our left foot gathers dust still,
among a collection of beads and stones, in a china bowl
kept in the curio handed down from great-grandmother.
This is the interchange of kindness, the wages of commerce with monsters:
a shiny bone, blackened meat, nothing left
to rise again.
AUTHOR BIO
Elizabeth McClellan is a second-year student and law review member at the University of Memphis’ Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. When not pondering the implications of legal personhood for artificial intelligences, the failure of state statutes to provide adequate due process in pre-judgment attachment, or the arcane mysteries contained within the Bluebook, she writes strange poetry, weird fiction, and the occasional arch letter to the editor of her hometown newspaper. To learn what rights and duties should accrue to a conscious computer, where to see the monster girls dance the Tarantella, or how the nymphs of Law tend groves of treaties and treatises to ensure the fullest flourishing of their forests despite the depredations of the lumbering Hornbook, visit lizbet.org.
ARTIST BIO
Mitenkov Maxim is a Belarusian digital artist who is been self taught and constantly exploring new areas styles and techniques. Since 2006 he has specialized in the fields of photo manipulation, but has broadened his skills into other areas such as matte painting and digital painting. He is available for freelance commissions for CD-booklets, book-covers and posters. He maintains a website at vimark.deviantart.com.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Short Story Guidelines:
1) Mail submissions to [email protected].
2) Maximum word length a firm 7,500 words.
3) Payment is .05 per word. Paid within 30 days of publication.
4) Please submit either a Microsoft Word Doc or RTF file.
5) Use standard manuscript formatting as outlined by William Shunn. Essentially–double space, 12 pt. Courier or Times New Roman, 1″ borders.
6) We accept reprint submissions. However, your story must have been sold to a highly respected semi-professional (think Interzone, Weird Tales, and so forth) or professional publication (F&SF, Analog, and so on). Payment is a flat $10. Mark your story as a reprint in the subject heading of your email. Word limit for reprints is 10,000.
Poetry Guidelines:
1) Send no more than five poems at a time. No simultaneous submissions with other publishers.
2) Payment is $0.25 per line or $5 per poem, whichever is greater, paid within 30 days of publication.
3) Format your submission professionally (Writers Digest format). Single-space within stanzas.
4) Poems formatted flush left are preferred over those requiring special formatting (concrete poems, poems with staggered indentation, etc.). We’re looking for creativity of expression rather than of page layout.
5) Mail submissions to [email protected].
Rights and Rules:
1) No simultaneous submissions.
2) Average response time is 20-30 days. Please do not query until after 60 days have passed.
3) We buy first world rights, exclusive for three months, nine months of non-exclusive e-rights after those three months, and non-exclusive anthology rights for three years.
4) Stories are required to contain a dark speculative fiction element.
What are we looking for here at Apex Magazine?
We do not want hackneyed, clichéd plots or neat, tidy stories that take no risks. We do not want Idea Stories without character development or prose style, nor do we want derivative fantasy with Tolkien’s serial numbers filed off.
What we want is sheer, unvarnished awesomeness. We want the stories it scared you to write. We want stories full of marrow and passion, stories that are twisted, strange, and beautiful. We want science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mash-ups of all three—the dark, weird stuff down at the bottom of your little literary heart. This magazine is not a publication credit, it is a place to put your secret places and dreams on display. Just so long as they have a dark speculative fiction element—we aren’t here for the quotidian.
Keep in mind that the search for awesome stories is as difficult as writing them. If you are rejected, don’t get angry—instead, become more awesome. Write something better, and better, until we have to accept you, because we have been laid low by your tale. It really is that simple.
Table of Contents
Still Life (A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale)
The Girl Who Had Six Fingers
Citizen Komarova Finds Love
Love’s Ecology
Anything So Utterly Destroyed
Submission Guidelines
Title Page
Front Matter
Apex Magazine Issue 17 Page 5