This month’s fiction emphasizes the tensions inherent in contradiction: dark and light, speech and silence, good and evil, earth and sky. Richard Bowes sketches a wedding between contemporary minions of Heaven and Hell in order to save humanity in this timestream.
Read MoreBlood on Vellum: Notes from the Apex Editor-in-ChiefThe Fool of God, on a mission from Heaven, moved up the Timestream passing through portals from one world to the next. In the second century of the Caliphate of Mercy, a period others call the eighth century AD, he emerged from a portal in Alexandria, smiled the slack off-center smile that looked a bit half-witted and batted the breeze with the crew as he sailed across the Mediterranean on a fast markab to a portal in Marseille that would carry him hundreds of years further Upstream.
Read MoreA Member of the Wedding of Heaven and HellIn the village of Sandel they tell a tale of how a raven once flew into the village to give a woman seven fine children. Of how these children grew tall and strong if perhaps a bit unwise and untrustworthy, and of how the woman brought a knife to their throats in the hopes of bringing the raven back.
Read MoreCopper, Iron, Blood and LoveCaptain Lehr’s face had been ravaged by decades under the coruscating emanations of this forgotten world’s overbright sun. The angry star, a rare purple giant, dominated the daysky with visible prominences that sleeted hard radiation through every human bone and cell that walked beneath its glare.
Read MoreLehr, RexHere’s a cool thing about speculative-fiction readers: we’ve always been interested in exploring all the possible variations of human existence. From Samuel R. Delany to Ursula K. Le Guin to Caitlín R. Kiernan to Geoff Ryman, we’ve covered some serious ground in our examinations of gender and sexuality.
Read MoreReaching into the QUILTBAG: The Evolving World of Queer Speculative FictionOne does not simply walk into Portland, OR (or anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, for that matter!) without hearing the name of Jay Lake whispered and chanted in the inner courts of the myriad writing communities there, and rightly so.
Read MoreInterview with Jay LakeI didn’t recognize Eddie at first. He got on the train at Division, sat down opposite me, and every time I glanced up from my book he was staring at me. He wore a trench coat over a bluish gray polo shirt and khakis. Sweat stood out on his brow.
Read MoreBear in Contradicting LandscapeThe needle buzzes, setting up a whine in my back teeth. Under her careful hand, a spatter of stars—midnight blue—arc from the curve of my hip-bone to the soft flesh of my inner thigh. Sarah moves my penis aside, dispassionate, getting exactly the right angle to complete the sweep of her constellation.
Read MoreMy Body, Her Canvas“Señora?” The man standing at my screen door is travel stained. Migrant, up from Mexico. The dogs haven’t heard him come up, but now they erupt in a frenzy of barking to make up for their oversight. I am sitting at the kitchen table, painting a doll, waiting for the timer to tell me to get doll parts curing in the oven in the work shed.
Read MoreUseless Things