short fiction

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ByT.J. Weyler

a teddy bear sitting on top of a wooden chair.

The Neighborly Thing to Do

Bear liked the house even if I still felt bad about having to move. Almost everybody besides me felt good about moving.

ByChesya Burke

a painting of a woman with a flower in her hair.

CUE: Me running for my life. The zombies didn’t really chase you, as much as they loomed menacingly. There was something in their demeanor that signaled they were the zombies—that they were changed and not like the rest of us.

ByShira Lipkin

a white mask with the words apex magazine on it.

Valentines

The waiter’s name is Valentine. He has long, slim fingers, and he writes down my order instead of pretending to commit it to memory. I like that, his pen on the paper bringing forth one simple thing about me. My lunch. Just a tiny fragment of information.

ByAnaea Lay

Your Cities

I was thinking of you. It was late and the lights in the bar were set low, creating the cozy, private feeling that you always found so depressing in those sorts of places. They’re my sort of place now, but there was nothing private about the mass of people pressing on me as we stared in awe at the big television screens.

ByKathryn Weaver

The Doves of Hartleigh Garden

A girl of thirteen once owned Hartleigh Garden. Her four years as proprietor witnessed wars of silverfish and centipedes beneath her ballroom floor, mold that dripped down the wallpaper like strings of pearls, rats in the cellar among shattered wine-bottles and decaying wood.

ByWill Ludwigsen

In Search Of

The universe began 13.7 billion years ago as a singularity of infinite density and temperature. It will expand and fragment until the fragments become singularities of their own and repeat the process. The grand unified theory is a lot closer to “it’s turtles all the way down” than scientists guess.

ByJeremy R. Butler

Recipe Collecting in the Asteroid Belt

There’s a scene in a black-and-white where a cowboy rides a nuclear bomb dropping from the sky. It’s from back in the 1900s. I forget the name, but it’s in the archive if you look.

ByAnnalee Newitz

Twilight of the Eco-Terrorist

I was seventeen, and Lawrence had eyes like chips of black glass. We’d parked behind the donut shop, between two trash bins that blocked my car’s windows.

ByJennifer Pelland

Ghosts of New York

Poets and sages like to say that there is clarity in certain death. That a calm resignation settles over the nearly deceased, and they embrace the inevitability of the end of life with dignity and grace.