Reprint

We're redesigning our site. Read about the upcoming changes here.

ByElizabeth Bear

a white mask with the words apex magazine on it.

Sonny Liston Takes the Fall

It was Christmas eve, 1970, and Sonny Liston was about the furthest thing you could imagine from a handsome man.

ByNir Yaniv

Undercity

That day, the complacent city received three warnings. No one bothered to take notice. The city listened only to itself.

ByGeoff Ryman

I dreamed this in Sihanoukville, a town of new casinos, narrow beaches, hot bushes with flowers that look like daffodils, and even now, after nine years of peace, stark ruined walls with gates that go nowhere. In the dream, I get myself a wife. She’s beautiful, blonde, careworn.

ByNnedi Okorafor

The Chaos Magician’s Mega Chemistry Set

Ulu lay on her chubby belly playing with her new chemistry set. The living room was her favorite place in the house with its cool wooden floor and many ebony lions, masks and warriors her father liked to collect.

ByJay Lake

Lehr, Rex

Captain 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.

ByMaureen McHugh

Useless Things

“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.

ByGregory Frost

The Prowl

Sure, I know what you want to hear about. You want to hear about the Civil War. I’ve already been interviewed, and that’s all anybody wants recollected. Yes, I know, I do look too young to have seen it.

BySarah Monette

The Yellow Dressing Gown

Of all the curators at the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum, I liked Michael Overton the least. He was a loud, bustling, back-slapping man, red-faced and brash and quite, quite stupid.

ByRobert Shearman

This Creeping Thing

For Susan, love was just something that crept up on her. There was no such thing as falling in love, falling simply wasn’t part of the process; the most Susan could manage would be an odd stumble every now and then.