Apex Magazine: Issue 25
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About this ebook
Apex Magazine is a monthly science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazine featuring original, mind-bending short fiction from many of the top pros of the field.
This issue features the following content:
Short Fiction:
"Your Cities" - Anaea Lay
"The Doves of Hartleigh Garden" - Kathryn Weaver (first professional sale!)
"Valentines" - Shira Lipkin
"CUE: Change" - Chesya Burke
Poetry:
"Clockwork Chickens" - Seanan McGuire
Apex Magazine is edited by award-winning author and editor Catherynne M. Valente.
Catherynne M. Valente
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards, as well as the Prix Imaginales. Valente has also been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human. Find out more on her website and on Twitter!
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Apex Magazine - Catherynne M. Valente
APEX MAGAZINE
Issue 25
June, 2011
Copyright 2011 Apex Publications
Smashwords Edition
COPYRIGHTS & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Your Cities
Copyright 2011 by Anaea Lay
The Doves of Hartleigh Garden
Copyright 2011 by Kathryn Weaver
Clockwork Chickens
Copyright 2011 by Seanan McGuire
Valentines
Copyright 2009 by Shira Lipkin
CUE: Change
Copyright 2011 by Chesya Burke
Publisher—Jason Sizemore
Fiction Editor—Catherynne M. Valente
Senior Editor—Gill Ainsworth
Submission Editors—Zakarya Anwar, Ferrett Steinmetz, Martel Sardina, Chris Einhaus, Mari Adkins, George Galuschak, Deanna Knippling, Sarah Olson, Lillian Cohen-Moore, Patrick Tomlinson, Katherine Khorey
Proofreader—Olga Zelenova
Cover Artist—Melissa Gay
Cover designed by Justin Stewart
ISSN: 2157-1406
Apex Publications
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524
Please visit us at http://www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online
To subscribe visit http://www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online/subscribe/
Submission Guidelines are listed at the end of the issue.
Table of Contents
Your Cities
Anaea Lay
The Doves of Hartleigh Garden
Kathryn Weaver
Clockwork Chickens
Seanan McGuire
Valentines
Shira Lipkin
Cue: Change
Chesya Burke
Submission Guidelines
Your Cities
Anaea Lay
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.
The bridges are gone, collapsed at the same moment.
The reporter gasped. There's no sign of an explosion. Authorities won't answer questions about what happened.
They were showing the same footage again. And again. The Brooklyn bridge crunched at the middle as if giant hands pressed either end together, then collapsing, crashing into the water below, taking who knows how many people down with it. The Holland tunnel was uprooted and submerged. New York was completely cut off from its suburbs on Long Island and in New Jersey. It had to be a bizarre natural disaster or a brilliantly executed terrorist plot or...something.
It's like the city just shrugged,
somebody whispered. He spoke to the television, but it sent shivers through everybody who heard him.
That's when I thought of you.
Chicago was next, a year later. It was one of those foggy days when the air is so thick and close that the buildings disappear inside of it. On that day the ground rumbled and the air was filled with the sounds of steel sliding over glass, of concrete creaking over rebar. The city shook with the sounds of building after building around the city prostrating itself to the Sears Tower. They bowed before it, the King of the skyscrapers, and suddenly everybody knew.
They didn't have footage of it to play over and over like they did with New York, but they had experts. Whether they knew anything or not, the experts talked. The one I remembered most sounded a little like you. There are precedents of course. Atlantis is the obvious one, but I think the tower of Babel probably references a real event that's been garbled over time.
The experts speculated about what made the cities wake up, about how the ritual obeisance could have been coordinated, about anything and everything but the one obvious question, the one you'd never answer for me: If they're waking up, what does that mean for us?
You're still gone, vanished with New Orleans, but I know you're out there. They're still creeping toward consciousness, so you must be.
New Orleans was the first city to wake up, but it took them years to figure that out. It was so much smaller than the others, its skyline so much less impressive. But you'd always said that buildings were the side effects of cities, that their souls didn't need skyscrapers to grow and dream and whisper their passions to you. New Orleans had an old soul, pieces of Paris and Marseilles glued together with fragments of Barcelona and bits of Africa, thrown into the world and forced to find its own place. So you chose it as the first.
The weathermen started talking about Hurricane Catherine changing course, and still you went. She grew bigger and angrier while I begged you to stay, but you couldn't be stopped. They nicknamed her Katrina II, but you laughed at me as you climbed into your car and set off.
I've tried to picture it ever since, you strolling into a city anybody with any sense had long since fled. You whistled; I'm sure you whistled. But then what? Did you crawl into the city's bed and stroke its shoulder, nibbling on its ear and whispering tidings of morning, the way you would for me? Did you wrap your arms around it and speak of love and sex and waffles, coaxing it past the foggy stages of fresh wakening and into the warmth of your voice? Did you even think of me as you made love to the city, mother, midwife and lover all in one? I picture it, but I don't want to know.
Whatever you did, it wasn't enough. Or it was too much. New Orleans woke in the middle of the worst cyclonic storm on the Atlantic since they've kept records. It trembled and shook, as if convulsed with shrieks of, Not again!
and threw itself into the ocean, taking you and every other poor soul trapped there with it. Katrina II, Hurricane's Revenge.
The waking must