Apex Magazine Issue 61

APEX MAGAZINE

ISSUE 61, JUNE 2014

EDITED BY SIGRID ELLIS

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

Editorial

Resolute: Notes from the Editor–in–Chief

Sigrid Ellis

Fiction

Cape to Cairo

Eden Robins

Soul of Soup Bones

Crystal Lynn Hilbert

The Salt Path

Marissa Lingen

The Faery Handbag

Kelly Link

Nonfiction

Apex Interview with Eden Robins

Andrea Johnson

Black Communities of the 30th Century: Racial Assimilation and Ahistoricity in Superhero Comics

Osvaldo Oyola

Apex Interview with Tory Hoke

Loraine Sammy

Poetry

Afterwards

Alice Dryden

Brighid

Mary Soon Lee

Harry of Five Points

John M. Ford

Excerpt

Sineater

Elizabeth Massie

Resolute: Notes from the Editor–in–Chief

A reviewer recently pointed out that these little introductory essays of mine are a bit strained as to theme. That I seem to stretch a point to unite all the disparate elements in an issue under one guiding umbrella, to completely mix my metaphors.

Well, this issue? Doesn’t really have a theme. There you have it.

If there is any uniting principle to the June issue, it’s that I personally really, really like all of these works. I adore our cover, Bleef, from Tory Hoke. I reached out to Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Making Light for John M. Ford’s poem, Harry of Five Points. I asked Kelly Link if we could reprint The Faery Handbag because I have been an admirer of her work for a decade. I requested Osvaldo Oyola to write Black Communities of the 30th Century: Racial Assimilation and Ahistoricity in Superhero Comics because the inherited racism in genre fiction is a thing I struggle with and hope to combat.

The fiction this month is entirely new to me. I hope you will agree that it’s a delightfully weird mix. Marissa Lingen’s The Salt Path adroitly uses SF/F tropes of war and conflict to talk about the reality of war, and conflict, and the lives touched by those things. Soul of Soup Bones, by Crystal Lynn Hilbert, is one of the most charming stories of cooking and necromancy I have ever read. And Eden Robins’ Cape to Cairo is a lonely, quiet story of Africa and time travel and being an outsider in one’s own life.

In addition to Mike Ford’s poem, our poetry editor Elise Matthesen brings you two poems of transformation. Afterwards, by Alice Dryden, challenges our point of view. Brighid, by Mary Soon Lee, asks questions of identity.

We have a new interviewer at Apex Magazine this month, Andrea Johnson. She talks to Eden Robins about Africa and travel, and how to write a time travel story without getting lost in the mechanics of the thing. In addition, Loraine Sammy interviews our cover artist, Tory Hoke.

I love everything in this issue. I hope you do, as well.

Sigrid Ellis

Editor–in–Chief

Cape to Cairo

Eden Robins

Of all the things Alice is good at, she is the best at leaving. Jobs, lovers, apartments, things when they get difficult. There is not enough time in life, she thinks, for living and for trying to fix things that can’t be fixed.

Now she is in Arusha, in Tanzania, in the shadows of Kilimanjaro and Meru, and she is conflicted. Arusha is the middle of her travels, and going past the middle means getting closer to the end.

The young batik salesmen swarm around her, feinting and charging with their batiks like matadors.

Hello sister, they say. Good price.

They’ve followed her across Old Moshi Road, dodging the wild traffic that screeches around the rotary. Here come the men with mass-produced bracelets that say JAMBO in beads.  Nobody says jambo except the tourists who buy these bracelets.

Hello sister, they say. "Utapendeza," they say, even though she won’t understand. A man trots over with a bag of raspberries for sale. There is no word for raspberry in Swahili, so the man just holds them out and nods at her.

They are standing in front of the sad little clock tower, and cars whiz past her around the rotary. There’s no clock on the clock tower anymore. But there is a sign.

This spot, it says, is exactly half way between the CAPE & CAIRO.

Alice bumps her backpack higher on her back and tightens the shoulder straps. A pair of shoes buckled to the side of her pack smacks a batik salesman in the arm, and she worries for a second that he’s trying to take them.

Excuse me, she mutters. The moment is over. There’s nothing to immortalize here, and if she gets her camera out, there will be an even bigger commotion. Alice squeezes past everyone and starts walking down Sokoine Road toward the bus yard. The salesmen watch her go. Arusha is crowded this time of year with Europeans who like to wear shorts and Americans who have been forced to see, suddenly, the bigness of the world.

Alice walks past whitewashed buildings, change bureaus, shoe shiners, a patisserie, and a river bed where people wash their bicycles, their animals, themselves. She has a bus ticket for Dar es Salaam and then she will buy a boat ticket to Zanzibar. And so on.

Back when they thought they owned it, the British perceived the African continent as stretching from south to north. They decided it needed a road — Cape to Cairo. But Alice is going the opposite direction — Cairo to Cape. It’s a big continent that she thought would last forever, or at least change her by the time she got to the other end. But here she is. Halfway through and exactly the same.

§

Dar es Salaam is menacing. It is large and chaotic and crowded. Alice hopes Zanzibar isn’t like this. She can’t figure out where anything is, and she hates it from the moment she steps off the bus. She starts sweating immediately and the close air smells like rotten vegetables and rank bodies.

Hello sister, a cab driver motions to her. You looking for the boat? Good price.

Alice shakes her head. She uses the inset map in her guidebook to find the port and the guidebook’s suggestions to find a good boat company that won’t rip her off. A sign on the ticket seller’s wooden shack tells her the trip is 15$US, which is more than the guidebook said it would be, but the book is a few years old so she doesn’t dispute it.

The boat skips along the Indian Ocean, smacking down on the surface of the water and then bouncing up again. Alice doesn’t usually get seasick. But the boat trip is longer than the two hours she had planned on, and she spends the last leg of the trip clutching her backpack on the deck and willing the island to inch closer. As the water slap-slaps against the hull, she molds an image in her mind of Zanzibar. It will be ornate buildings and spooky alleys, women covered up to their eyeballs and beaches like soft skin.

It is all of these things. It is exactly as she imagined, and she is not disappointed. This, Alice thinks, is a good sign.

She wanders the tight, confusing streets of Stone Town, turning the same corners and ending up in new places. She finds a leper selling handmade pillows. She finds a man turning sugar cane into juice. She sees an American woman in very short shorts haggling over a JAMBO bracelet in a loud voice. Suddenly Alice’s enjoyment feels flimsy; something dark creeps up behind her heart. This life is repetitive, the craving for newness an unquenchable addiction. She gets a beer and a sunset and feels better after.

§

The mullah lets everyone know what time it is. The concrete walls of Alice’s tiny hotel room are sky blue and glossy. She writes in her journal about how everything is new and tries not to feel like a fraud.  She tentatively mentions feeling different. She doesn’t look back at her old journal entries, all of which start the same way. She clacks the pen between her teeth.

I think I’m going to leave tomorrow, she writes. This seems romantic.

Then, in very small letters at the bottom of the page, she writes:

I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation with someone.

Zanzibar isn’t technically on her way to Cape Town, but it wasn’t on the way to Portugal or Oman either. That didn’t stop the Portuguese and Omanis from snatching up things and people in Zanzibar and bringing them home.  

§

Alice learns about the Time Bungee on the train ride to Mbeya. She overheard a conversation between a German boy, two French girls, and a Japanese boy who had brought his own soup bowl. They sat next to Alice in the dining car and