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    Apex Magazine Issue 19
    Apex Magazine Issue 19
    Apex Magazine Issue 19
    Ebook69 pages1 hour

    Apex Magazine Issue 19

    By Catherynne M. Valente

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Apex Magazine is an online digital zine of genre short fiction.

    FICTION
    "Radishes" by Nick Wolven
    "Pale, and from a Sea-Wave Rising" by C.S.E. Cooney
    "At the Core" by Erzebet YellowBoy

    POETRY
    "Flourless Devil's Food" by Shweta Narayan
    "Cancelled Flight" by W.C. Roberts

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherApex Book Company
    Release dateDec 4, 2010
    ISBN9781452377339
    Apex Magazine Issue 19
    Author

    Catherynne M. Valente

    Catherynne M. Valente is an acclaimed New York Times bestselling creator of over forty works of fantasy and science fiction, including the Fairyland novels and The Glass Town Game. She has been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards, and has won the Otherwise (formerly Tiptree), Hugo, and Andre Norton award. She lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her partner, young son, and a shockingly large cat with most excellent tufts.

    Read more from Catherynne M. Valente

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      Book preview

      Apex Magazine Issue 19 - Catherynne M. Valente

      APEX MAGAZINE

      Issue 19

      December, 2010

      COPYRIGHTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Radishes Copyright 2010 by Nick Wolven

      Pale, and from a Sea-Wave Rising Copyright 2010 by C.S.E. Cooney

      At the Core Copyright 2006 by Erzebet YellowBoy

      Flourless Devil’s Food Copyright 2010 by Shweta Narayan

      Cancelled Flight Copyright 2010 by W.C. Roberts

      Publisher—Jason Sizemore

      Fiction Editor—Catherynne M. Valente

      Senior Editor—Gill Ainsworth

      Submission Editors—Zakarya Anwar, Ferrett Steinmetz, Martel Sardina, Chris Einhaus, Mari Adkins, George Galuschak, Deanna Knippling, Laura Long, Sarah Olson, Tommy Delk, Lillian Cohen-Moore, Patrick Tomlinson, Katherine Khorey

      Cover designed by Justin Stewart

      Cover art Vertemnu by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

      ISSN: 2157-1406

      Copyright 2010 Apex Publications

      Apex Publications

      PO Box 24323

      Lexington, KY 40524

      Please visit us at http://www.apexbookcompany.com

      Published by Apex Publications

      Table of Contents

      Short Fiction

      —§—

      Radishes

      by Nick Wolven

      Pale, and from a Sea-Wave Rising

      by C.S.E. Cooney

      At the Core

      by Erzebet YellowBoy

      Poetry

      —§—

      Flourless Devil’s Food

      by Shweta Narayan

      Cancelled Flight

      by W.C. Roberts

      Radishes

      by Nick Wolven

      Weeds rise from the roof. We live beneath an accidental garden. It got worse with the summer rains. The shingles grew moldy, and yellow stalks rooted and sucked at the tar, turning black as they drank it like little oil wells. Then the mushrooms sprouted, and then the bushes, woody stalks that make me think of mountain laurel. Our ceilings bulged and split around the roots; tendrils poked through our bungalow’s rotting walls. In the backyard, green gourds proliferated. Purple vines constricted and killed the orange tree.

      And then the radishes came.

      I call them radishes because of the color. But they’re smaller, sharper—-meaner, somehow. Melody noticed them the last time she went to the hospital for bread: bright nubs clustering around the front door. She tried to pick one, but it was rooted fast, and the thing began to stink when squeezed.

      She shrugged it off.

      It’s evening, now, and we sit down to talk strategy. The bread ration is smaller than ever, the last of the potato plants has died, and our peanut contact has dried up. Literally. He was an old mummy of a man, more rawhide than person, with twenty inches of plastic intestines and a transplanted lung. Some drifter switched his water for brine, and he didn’t think anything of it until the convulsions hit. I can still remember the last time I saw him, puffing and shaking as he handed over the Shop-Time bag of nuts. We figured he had the DTs. Turns out he had gotten his taste buds yanked out at the local hospital, after the cafeteria closed. Couldn’t stand the taste of home-grown food.

      I understand that attitude. The dinner Melody sets on the table looks like something from a mad scientist’s laboratory, and I suppose that may be precisely what it is. The bread is a dense, spongy substance that you can squeeze into a ball and bounce off the walls. Our last potato looks like a giant turd, and the stuff we’re calling corn makes me think of skin diseases. Fat, pale kernels like blisters full of mucus, big as an eyeball and tough to chew. It may be good for making fuel, but it sure isn’t something you’d want at a picnic. No matter how hungry I get, it makes me gag.

      Let’s see, Melody says. She sets the latest government binder on the table with a thump. Melody’s always been a practical type. She still keeps up with the binders, running down the lists of foods approved by the Colonial Department of Agriculture, checking off the ones that grow locally with strokes of her felt-tip pen. It’s painful to see her heaving blocks of pages over the metal rings with her trembling fingers, searching with straining eyes for plants we can identify. Nearly everything in our town is either poisonous, untested, or an unidentified species, new and uncataloged.

      We’re a week behind on our donations to the commune, which means we’re pretty much SOL for meat, this week. She licks her finger and turns a page in the binder. Not necessarily a bad thing, really, considering the chickens they brought in last time. But it means we’ll have to search for alternative sources. I wish we hadn’t lost our peanut guy!

      I remember the chickens: white balls of fat with necks like wet tube socks. What about soybeans? Are there any of those left?

      Soybeans, soybeans.... The pages flutter from her thumb. Not around here. All our local oilseeds are from the Hay Baby brand; that seems to have pretty much taken over this continent. Internal bleeding, itchy eyes, anal leakage, mild hallucinogenic effect.... We’re probably better off looking for haricots.

      Continent. Hay Baby brand. It's painful to be reminded where we are: on a remote world's one, small habitable land mass, with all our resident biomass provided by big agribusiness gene doctors. The colony founders told us that government scientists would be incapable of building and managing a human-friendly ecosystem, that only the free market could build a biosphere in a natural way. I'm sure

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