She was a pretty little thing, lithe, dark. She swung her hair just so, without a care in the world, not a hint of tension to betray the danger of the situation, a young girl taking the metro at night, alone.
Short Fiction: Light Like Knives Dragged Across the Skin
When Saw slapped down his last card we knew that things were going to change.
Short Fiction: A Handful of Pearls
Yan closed his eyes. The air pulsed against his skin, making his head throb. Steady, he told himself. It was the heat, the tent’s closeness, the excitement of landing. That was all. Nothing to worry about.
Short Fiction: Twelve-A
Though their bodies were naked, their minds empty, the fearful, half-mad faces that followed Marie from behind the bars were humanity’s hope.
Short Fiction: Flash of Light
“Daddy has a bad headache, okay? The army doctors told Mommy it’s because he’s been away from his family for so long.” He felt Michelle nod in his arms. “Mommy wants us to play ‘hide and go seek’ until he’s not mad anymore.”
Interview - Jeremy Shipp
Jeremy discusses his well-received first novel Vacation.
Interview - Sara King
Apex editor Jodi Lee discusses the finer points of living in the remote lands of Alaska with Ms. King.
Interview - David Wong
An interrogation of the author of the hilarious novel John Dies at the End.
Short Fiction: The Dead Man and the Berserk
Two men hit Bazard after 1:00 a.m. that the mood and the music don’t touch. They’re not here for either. They are stoics in a cult of hedonists, still buoys in an angry sea.
Short Fiction: Post Apocalypse
The letter came on Tuesday marked “Post Apocalypse.”
Short Fiction: Under the Dryer
I tried to warn them, but the humans wouldn’t listen and the cats just taunted me.
Not Flesh Nor Feathers - Chapter 1
The Tennessee River has swollen again, and nothing stops it.
Short Fiction: Potholes
The potholes they’d filled yesterday had returned, blemishing the shiny black surface of the new asphalt. Djinowski stared into the largest of them. It was a real axle-breaker, in the middle of the lane — made the road pretty much unusable. The bottom was covered by water.
Short Fiction: The Garden Shed Pact
The spider and I have a pact.
Short Fiction: Blue Lights
Gunter cried at the wondrous sight. In the blue moonlight, he could see the rush of the water and the clouds of mist. Across the river on the other bank, he saw a young boy, full of hopes and dreams, jumping up and down pointing at the Falls. A woman, the boy’s mother, smiled and hugged her son. Gunter did not try to hide. He knew them and they knew him.
Short Fiction: Horizontal Rain
Maxwell Sanders pressed the phone closer to his ear as if that would somehow bring comprehension. “Did you say trolls?”
Short Fiction: The Tow
Carlton quickly tipped it into the funnel, and Lex watched in horror as the brown liquid descended down the hose toward his mouth. Only now he could see that it wasn’t liquid at all, but a mass of small, gelatinous worms that coiled around each other and slithered down the hose as one. He could feel the hose vibrating in his throat as they passed down into his esophagus. His stomach fought back with painful spasms, but it couldn’t hold the creatures back as they squirmed into his belly.
Short Fiction: Chocolate Ex-Lax Cake and the Sucker Man
By the time dinner rolled around Daddy was good and hungry, and nothing but a meteor crashing into our house and roasting us alive would have kept him from eating a huge slab of that tainted cake.
Short Fiction: Spin Cycle
“Gram, what are you doing?” There was blood on the floor, blood edging the circular opening of the front-loading washer. Denny snatched the bag from her frail hand and she gave out a little cry. He glanced at her, then reached into the bag, his fingers connecting with something warm and wet. He pulled out a squirrel carcass. Its body was split up the center from pelvis to neck.
Short Fiction: Red Barchetta
The salty air felt cooler than usual and Gypsy was acting wilder than he’d ever seen her. She kicked off her high-heeled sandals and stood up in the seat as the Barchetta zoomed down the first straightaway. The savage wind tore at her thin, tie-dyed t-shirt, outlining her small, perky breasts.
Short Fiction: Suffer
“Messy. The messier the better. I want her to suffer, and suffer for a long time.”
Short Fiction: The Day Lufberry Won It All
The rest of the men exchanged smirks, interpreting his behavior as hesitation to take on the kid. Money appeared and changed hands. Lufberry surveyed the scene. He’d hustled some of these men in the past. No doubt they were eager to see him get his ass handed to him.
Short Fiction: Curling Tendrils of Love
In Simon Hatworth’s basement, the vines grew strong. They stretched off his work counter, pressing themselves outward, sneaking down table legs and off into damp crevices at a crawl’s pace. Most of the time he’d carry on with his work ignoring their movements, but every now and then he’d stand back and marvel at their liveliness, their will to travel, their reason for being.
Short Fiction: Wild Things
The Wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye…
Short Fiction: Crosses
But then there’s that one question in the middle of the form: Life Status: Non-dead / Dead(one time) / Dead(more than one time) [please specify number of times dead].
I hate that question. I hate having to check the Dead(more than one time) box.
Wings to the Kingdom - Chapter 1
The first time it happened—the first time anyone admits to it, anyway—was at a Decoration Day picnic being held at the battlefield at Chickamauga, Georgia. Several dozen doddering representatives of the Sons of Confederate Veterans had come together on a fine June afternoon for chicken-salad sandwiches and punch. Some sat in metal folding chairs, with their wives at their elbows, while others shuffled around the buffet table in search of the correct sliced cheese or condiment.
Short Fiction: Seven Wives
I was traveling to St Ives, met a man with seven wives.
Each wife had seven sacks, each sack held seven rats, each rat had seven pups.
Pups, rats, sacks, and wives; how many were traveling to St Ives?
Short Fiction: Skin
Pain. A sheet of razors and barbed wire across his chest, an iron maiden mask closed on his face, sixty volts of electricity running through the fluids in his veins. Ground glass in his trachea when he tried to breath. Behind his eyelids, jagged lime and lemon shapes slicing at the jelly of his eyeballs.
Short Fiction: Only Springtime When She’s Gone
Portia had changed out of her Spartan business ensemble and donned a soft green evening gown that frothed chiffon at her wrists and décolleté. It brought out the color of her eyes. Poised against the backdrop of his marble and gold dining room, she was the most exquisite thing he had ever seen.
Short Fiction: The Heavens Fall
Johnny knew him. Mosh Frazier. Mosh of the wild hair. Mosh of the tattoos, skulls and fire. Mosh of the wide leather belt and the evil temper. Mosh was Johnny’s friend. At least that’s what Johnny thought.
Johnny had always been a little slow about people.
Short Fiction: Clone Barbecue
‘You are cordially invited to eat me.’ Well, this is certainly an evocative invitation, Carl.” Charlene tipped her glittering invite into the crystal bowl just inside the door, and it vanished in a puff of smoke.
Short Fiction: Next Stop, Babylon
She watched as the bus crested the hill and cut a silver blur across the burnt landscape. Her name was Tamara, and she had survived when the rest of her family had passed into eternity or oblivion, whichever came after death. Her husband, Terrance, had died in the fields, toiling to bring forth fuel from the red earth. Her mother and father had died in one of the subway attacks—a bomb or a terrorist or a derailing—she could no longer remember which. Her brother disappeared with the wind, and her sister died last winter, giving birth.
Short Fiction: Absence of Divinity
Hell, wrote the mad man in his lonely tower, is the absence of God’s love not brimstone and sulphur and nightmarish visions. The pains of Hell are metaphorical as well as metaphysical. The tortures, the torments, imagined as perpetual flaying of skin and the application of saltpetre to the wounds, are nothing beside the emptiness where once there was God.
Short Fiction: Recursion
He sees you and pauses, “This is all your fault, Mom.” He touches a red button and the outer hatch opens.
You collapse on the deck as your son is sucked out into space.
Short Fiction: Men of Renown
Finally, Timon threw the shovel up and out of the pit. He’d buried the son of a bitch deeper than he’d remembered, so the digging had taken longer than he’d planned. First, six inches of the seashells people used instead of gravel in the Panhandle. Then sand and dirt and dirt and sand and here he was, fifteen feet down and the sun already getting high. So much for grave robbing by dead of night.
Short Fiction: The Man Who Murdered Himself
Once he had been proud of his deformities; now he despised them. The malformed right hand that the most expensive surgeries could not repair, the ever-so-slight limp when he walked because bone surgery left one leg slightly shorter than the other, the fleshy, purplish bag of flesh on his left side that the doctors had not yet removed-these were the devils that tormented him night after night. Sometimes the tumors on his nerves pinched so tightly that he could not walk, but it was not the pain that kept him from sleeping on hot summer evenings. It was the specter he saw in the mirror.
Short Fiction: Reindeer Games
You see, it all started in R&D - because let’s face it, the Elves, they’re not just in it for the toys and cookies.
Short Fiction: The Jerusalem Theatre
It was Moshe who found the tablet. They were working in the hole, the three of them, army shirts discarded for short-sleeved tops. They had been working for hours, knowing that tomorrow they could be fighting again, could be dead or wounded in a country that wasn’t theirs, and happy for a chance to be free in the open air.
Short Fiction: Trees of Bone
The man laughed and Katulo inhaled the stench of beer. “You don’t know Old Father? Yesterday some of those Tutsi animals were making trouble. Those boys there beat them down good. Made them run like the cowards they are.”
Short Fiction: Shih-Yuan: The Wish is Granted
Prare eyed the brightly papered room curiously with his four eyes waving on the ends of four tentacles that were not used for nourishment. His head resembled that of a Gorgon only there were eyes and ventilation holes at the ends of his tentacles rather than hissing snakeheads. One of his eyes literally landed on Tarex’s shoulder with a soft sort of plunk.
Short Fiction: The Pain, Heartbreak and Redemption of Owen Frost
The old man stood silhouetted in the doorway, a guttering torch in his left hand. He could easily have been some brimstone and treacle prophet stepped miraculously from the pages of the Old Testament to strike the fear of God into him. His unruly white beard and rough-spun clothes blessed him with an air of ragged wildness. Shadows crawled across his face, making it impossible to read his mood.
Short Fiction: The Other Mr. Nedzi
Dan Nedzi gazed stupidly into the machine like he was looking into eternity itself. “This is gonna work, right? I mean, I don’t want my brains fried.”
Short Fiction: Breathe
Riding the SwiftTube, enroute to MainHosp for Respiratory Conversion Surgery, Marko Denna almost stepped into a Non-Breather, a FullPerson, compartment by mistake. He noticed the holoplate by the door - sexless human profile, lips pursed to exhale a noxious looking cloud, red bar slashed diagonally through the image - just in time. Not quickly enough, however, to prevent his breath condensing on the glass.
Short Fiction: The Prosperina Affair, Part 5 (The Orpheus Project)
There are two ways to talk to the dead. Today he is seeking the other way.
Short Fiction: Tommy Faces the Grim Truth
Tommy sat in front of his computer.
“This sucks,” he said. That seemed to be all he ever said nowadays.
His pet monkey sat on the couch near by, drinking a beer and ignoring the drivel that was always coming out of Tommy’s mouth. He’d thought of warning Tommy about the demon, but he’d decided that Tommy’d find out on his own soon enough. Every time the monkey tried to tell him anything, Tommy just yelled for him to “Shut up, you goddamn monkey!!” so now he just stayed quiet.Short Fiction: Meetings
Steve shook his head, but watched the boy from the corner of his eyes. By the time he left the store, he decided that something strange and yet oddly familiar surrounded the teen.
Short Fiction: The Thing in the Refrigerator That Could Stop Time
But no time for distractions as time distilled around him. In the thickening moment, Dick reached the threshold to the living room and figured that if the thing in the refrigerator had learned how to open the door, then he was in some serious shit, because, he thought, the freezer hadn’t worked since June.
Short Fiction: The Tantalus Effect, Part 4 (The Orpheus Project)
And then a hooker with an oral genomorph–a proper clean one, her pimp attested, not a dirty street job–nodded and mumbled through the modified labial folds of her ruined mouth that Yes, this is the right place: this is where you can find the Old Mother.
Short Fiction: The Artemis Ascendancy, Part 3 (Orpheus Project)
Part three of five of The Orpheus Project serialization
Short Fiction: Camera Eye
And the slum exploded in color. Mottled red shards burst outwards from a spot on its far edge–a shattering pane of dyed light. A deep vermilion mist began flooding the area, and a pure, triumphant note washed over Qinn’s face and to his ears. Goosebumps riddled his skin, and the slum kid’s shouts of amazement made him laugh aloud.
Short Fiction: At a Distance
He stood transfixed by revulsion and the sheer incongruity of a citizen lying dead in public. Fifteen years at the Chicago Police Academy hadn’t prepared him for the abject inhumanity of murder.
Short Fiction: The Janus Affair, Part 2 (Orpheus Project)
A bleak island on the edge of the Arctic Circle. A twenty-year-old frozen corpse, seven mutilated men and women, and the ship’s doctor self-crucified upside down on a makeshift cross.
Short Fiction: Vodka Through a Straw
You think nothing ever happens in this provincial town? Not true, my friend, those in the know can tell you a thing or two. Problem is that all this talking really taxes our larynxes. We need to lubricate them frequently to keep them going.
Short Fiction: The Alien Apprentice
The oldest witch in the world liked to sit on her front porch glider every afternoon to read the paper and do the crossword puzzle. Sometimes she found the headlines depressing, but today the main item was about a UFO sighting.
Short Fiction: Cruel Dimensions
Thomas Edinborough slid into the pod naked that day, with hardly a clue of what may happen. There were thousands of ideas, of what time travel would be like, lots of speculation, and more theories than were worth sharing. So that day Thomas Edinborough, though he had been ‘trained,’ slid into the pod with hardly a clue of what was waiting for him.
Short Fiction: The Orpheus Project, Part 1
John Grimm turns from the window looking out from his office halfway up the Physiology block. ‘Fuck I hate students,’ he growls. He drops his cigarette butt into a mug with a splash of coffee left in the bottom. With a hiss, the butt joins the bloated corpses of half a dozen of its fellows. Grimm moves from the cluttered desk by the window towards the door leading to his laboratory. He is naked except for a pair of boots. He clutches a packet of Marlboros in one hand and a silver lighter in the other.
Short Fiction: When the Party’s Over
Monica Lynch was the most controversial talk show host on the air. She left everyone else in the dust. Jenny Jones, Dr. Phil, even Geraldo had nothing on her. Her guests and fans were heralded as the “Lynch Mob”, and even acted like it. Monica had made more people cry than Barbara Walters, created more fights than Jerry Springer, and the viewing audience couldn’t wait to see what she would do next.
Short Fiction: A Matter of Perspective
As Steen continued to shuffle and avoid her eyes, Anen wondered how much the infertile males contributed to society. They couldn’t make the same sacrifice as either the fertile and the infertile sisters. Even the fertile males provided their sperm. And now Karl’s psychopathic side had shown its ugly nature. Wasn’t the gene pool better off - regardless of how small it had become - without his tainted seed?
Short Fiction: Abe and Arnie
Abe Vigoda’s head was growing out of Arnie’s forehead. Strangely enough, it wasn’t shock that Arnie felt. It was more a feeling of distant inevitability. You see, for as long as Arnie could remember Abe Vigoda was his old standby.
Short Fiction: The Radio Garden
Gabriel vaguely recalled a life before this one, but it became more distant with each passing day. Six months ago he had ventured to the Hotlands, sneaking across Pennsylvania’s shared border with New York. He was too busy with his work now to dwell on ancient memories.
Short Fiction: Insurrection
The guerrilla war sputtered when they tracked down our leaders and shot them up with happy juice.
Short Fiction: My Children
We headed up the stairs and went in to my children’s room. ‘Oh my god,’ one officer said. Another officer started to vomit as if he just had eaten some bad food. The other officers just stared upon my children in what looked like utter horror.
Short Fiction: How to Kill a God
Oceans of tall grass yielded to the desperate strides of the ruler of Olympus and king of the Gods, Zeus. His skin glistened and heaved as he lunged down the base of the mountain into a grouping of elm trees. His tightly cropped beard and thinning silver hair were soaked with sweat and his eyes darted around the forest for predators. His lungs burned; his chiseled face was flushed purple, and bore a small, fresh scab running just below his left eye. He had been running without rest for over a week, and he still felt himself no further from the relentless assassin.
Short Fiction: Bugs
Once I watched this geezer spend all day trying to shake bugs from his hair. It didn’t do him no good though. You can’t just shake these things out. They’d be no good loose in your hair so’s you could get rid of ‘em with a good scratch and a shake. Oh, he probably thought it worked, but I know different.