Apex #146, September/October 2024
“Kizimbani” by Eugen Bacon and Clare E. Rhoden
“And Someone Has to Do It” by Koji A Dae
“A Tapestry of Dreams” by Victor Forna
“What Good Daughters Do” by Tia Tashiro
“The Price of Moss” by Akis Linardos
“The Eight Things You’ll Never Be Now That You’re Slowly Turning Into a Giant Spider Creature” by Alex Sobel
“A Very Short History of the Discovery and Origin of Homo Sapiens Microplasticus in Three Parts” by Joshua Ginsberg
“Remembered Salt” by E. Catherine Tobler (reprint, not reviewed)
“Halogen Sky” by Wendy N. Wagner (reprint, not reviewed)
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
Many of the stories in this issue deal with relationships between parents and children, as well as those between spouses and lovers.
“Kizimbani” by Eugen Bacon and Clare E. Rhoden takes the form of a series of letters from a woman to her lover. The woman finds herself alone in a seemingly deserted village after an accident destroys her spacecraft. Many strange and disturbing things happen.
The last sentence of the above synopsis sums up my reaction to this story. Despite the futuristic trappings, this is a surreal horror story. There is no explanation for the bizarre events that occur. If there is a point to this work other than to create a sense of weirdness, it escapes me.
In “And Someone Has to Do It” by Koji A Dae, a mother prepares for a holiday feast for her family by ingesting supplements. Flashbacks describe how she witnessed her mother do the same thing.
The impact of this story depends entirely on the revelation as to the exact nature of the feast. Astute readers are likely to predict a conclusion that may be intended to be shocking. The work can be read as an allegory for the sacrifices women often make for their husbands and children. Even so, it is basically a tale of body horror.
The narrator of “A Tapestry of Dreams” by Victor Forma is the sickly adult child of a mother who eases her pain through dream magic, and a father who deserted the family years ago, but who returns to find a root that might be able to cure his daughter. The climax involves the narrator’s fate, and a choice she must make.
The narrator’s decision, which I have deliberately described only in vague terms, is the most impressive part of this story. A realistic narrative style makes the fantasy content, which increases as the story continues, seem very believable. Notably, the man who left his wife for another woman is not treated as an absolute villain, but as a complex character who genuinely cares for his daughter and even his estranged spouse.
In “What Good Daughters Do” by Tia Tashiro, a woman’s mother suffers from an illness that essentially turns her into a flesh-eating zombie. She tries to train her mother, whose mind is fading, into consuming meat instead of attacking live animals and people.
The story begins with the mother killing a bus driver and consuming part of his body, in the tradition of zombie movies such as Night of the Living Dead and its many imitations. In addition to horror, with a touch of dark comedy, the work offers poignance in the form of a metaphor for dealing with aging parents with deteriorating minds. The daughter’s method of dealing with her mother’s situation seems overly calm, given the grotesque nature of her disease.
In “The Price of Moss” by Akis Linardos, a man attempts to join a community of people who have bioengineered their bodies in ways that make them similar to plants, in an attempt to deal with environmental degradation. He discovers what happens to the members of the community as they age, forcing him to make a vital decision.
The main plot outlined above alternates with the man’s memory of leaving his mother to care for her elderly father. The story compares the community’s method of dealing with the aged and the way in which the outside world treats them. The author clearly has an important point to make, but the implausibility of some of the story’s speculative content (and the fact that one member of the community is named Mr. Happy, a heavy-handed bit of irony) weakens the theme.
“The Eight Things You’ll Never Be Now That You’re Slowly Turning Into a Giant Spider Creature” by Alex Sobel is the first of two very short stories with very long titles, each one inspired by a one-word prompt. Unsurprisingly, the prompt for this one was spider.
The title describes the plot, as a woman witnesses her husband’s transformation. There is not much to this tiny work other than the premise, although it might be read as an allegory for the breakup of a marriage.
The prompt for “A Very Short History of the Discovery and Origin of Homo Sapiens Microplasticus in Three Parts” by Joshua Ginsberg was glitter. In the far future, scientists discover a human fossil containing a large amount of microplastic. A flashback to our own time reveals the reason.
The middle section of this tripartite tale pretty much just repeats the first part. The only difference is that the first is a scientific report, and the second is an excerpt from a memoir. The third section reduces the serious problem of the presence of microplastics in human tissue into a dark joke.
Victoria Silverwolf has seen Night of the Living Dead.