Short Fiction

APEX MAGAZINE

Strange. Surreal. Shocking. Beautiful.

APEX MAGAZINE

Strange. Surreal. Shocking. Beautiful.

Genre short fiction from Apex Magazine

ByCharles Payseur

a poster for a holiday horror fiction winner.

All I Want for Christmas

The winner of our 2020 Holiday Horrors Flash Fiction contest!

ByFargo Tbakhi

a poster with a woman holding a glowing ball.

Root Rot

Getting to the other side of the Arab Quarter means going through the New Tel Aviv settlement civic center but I really don’t have a choice if I want to get some cash and keep drinking.

ByBeth Dawkins

Small Hopes and Dreams

There are two kinds of people; those who go over the wall, and those who stay behind. No one who goes over the wall is heard from again.

ByMaurice Broaddus

the cover of the book the legacy of alexandria.

The gun-toting boys waved through a truck laden with supplies. Kerchiefs covered the faces of those who bothered to protect themselves at all. In a testament to their rugged image of manhood, most went without masks.

ByLaShawn W. Wanak

a magazine cover with a picture of a desert.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good

Rosetta knelt to look at the stump in the corner of her client’s bedroom. It had the likeness of a ten-year-old boy, four feet tall, dressed in an oversized shirt and suspenders, and its features were flawless, from the newsboy’s cap cocked on its tight curls, to its pupil-less eyes fringed with long eyelashes.

ByWole Talabi

a magazine cover with a picture of a man in the desert.

When We Dream We Are Our God

Today, in a small, quiet room near the centre of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, I went into the cold darkness of sleep and when I returned to the warm light of consciousness, I had become a god.

ByTobias S. Buckell

N-Coin

You’ve heard of Bitcoin? You know what cryptocurrency is?

ByVeronica Brush

a magazine cover with a woman in a black dress.

Face

You have to understand, I woke up one day, and if I’d had any sort of life before that day, I didn’t remember it.

BySteven Barnes

a magazine cover with a picture of a mountain.

Fugue State

“Shit,” Charlotte Berry whispered as the fog of sleep began to clear. She heard Arthur fumbling in the bathroom cabinet and saw his reflection in the mirror, salt-and-pepper hair and a small bald spot as he hunched over, a medicine bottle close to his face. She wanted to pretend he only needed reading glasses. But it was far worse than that.